South African Crackdown Continues Under Emergency Decree

From Johannesburg comes grim report that the state of emergency proclaimed the twentieth of last month by State President P. W. Botha continues in full and severe effect across six and thirty magisterial districts of the Transvaal. Security forces have in these weeks swept through townships of the Cape Province and the Johannesburg region alike, and more than a thousand persons reckoned opponents of the government have been taken into custody.

Sixteen souls are said to have perished in the first week of the decree's operation, the greater part by the bullets of police fired into crowds of stone-throwing protesters. The government, for its part, appears resolved upon the course it has set, and has lately taken the further extraordinary step of forbidding the newspapers, the wireless, and the television alike from reporting upon the 'unrest' in the townships, that the world's eye might be turned elsewhere.

Correspondents who have long observed the Union's troubled affairs write that the present severity marks an escalation beyond a full twelvemonth of rising violence, born of the black population's long exclusion from political voice and their continued want. What relief may come, none among our foreign correspondents durst predict.