Lesotho expels refugees

Press, 27 January 1986, Page 10

Lesotho expels refugees

NZPA-AP Johannesburg

Nearly a week after seizing power, the military Government in Lesotho had begun expelling refugees that South Africa argues are antiapartheid guerrillas, official sources said.

About 60 refugees had flown out in an Air Zimbabwe Viscount aircraft. Their destination was unknown.

The refugees’ eviction appeared to achieve the desired results. As soon as the Viscount lifted off South Africa eased up on the agonisingly tight border controls on the mountain Kingdom it surrounds, a tactic that had left the country short of almost everything.

“Now Lesotho is able to get its essential goods,” said the United States Ambassador to Lesotho, Ms Shirley Abbott. The pre-dawn eviction appears to signal that the military council seeks closer relations with South Africa.

South Africa says that its “bottom line” for good relations with Lesotho is the expulsion of the guerrillas, who, it asserts, are members of the African National Congress. The country’s new ruler, Major-General Justin Lekhanya, is believed to want less tension with South Africa, which sent commandos into Maseru, the capital, to wipe out A.N.C. bases three years ago, killing 40 people.

The ousted Prime Minister, Chief Leabua Jonathan, who has not been heard from since the coup but is believed to be under house arrest, used to argue that he sheltered South African refugees, not guerrillas.

• In South Africa more blood was spilled at another funeral for a black victim of violence.

Black mourners paying respects to a rural antiapartheid leader turned on one of the man’s suspected killers and hacked him to death, returning to their chapel in bloodstained dress suits. The incident underlined the bitterness among South Africa’s rival black groups. The funeral was for Chief Ample Mayisa, a village elder In the Leandra black township 80km east of Johannesburg, who was hacked and burned to death by a mob of blacks two weeks ago. Chief Mayisa, one of Leandra’s influential foes of apartheid, was to have served as a host to Chester Crocker, the American Under-Secre-tary of State for African Affairs, who toured riot areas.

Leandra residents who witnessed Chief Mayisa’s killing said his attackers had said they were members of Inkatha, the Zulu political movement that supports peaceful change in dismantling apartheid. The six million Zulus are South Africa’s biggest ethnic group. As about 5000 people jammed in and around a church hall for the funeral, taunts and stones were hurled at the mourners from blacks identified by mourners as Chief Mayisa’s killers.