iSZ~ EP I SCOML CIRK11M EN for S OUTHR~ Room 1005 • 853 Broadway, New York, N . Y. 10003 • Phone : (212) 477-0066 —For A Free Southern Africa JANUARY . NAMIBIA - Whittling Away 1979 The South African regime has won yet another round for maintaining the whip hand in Namibia . Pretoria's anointed Democratic Turnhalle Alliance was pro- claimed the winner of the Pretoria .-run early December 1978 elections for a constituent assembly in the Territory, an exercise of continued defiance of the United Nations- which the Security Council has pronounced 'null and , void' . South Africa, long experienced in dealing with its colony and with the out- side world, is playing close-to-the-chest and taking sure risks . Justin El- ls' article herein details why the South African rulers are so everlasting- ly successful in controlling Namibia as their very own. Bomb explosions in Windhoek on the eve of the elections made it convenient for the South African Police to detain SWAPO's leadership in the city. month later another bomb explosion in the seaside resort of Swakopmund af- forded another opportunity to arrest SWAPO leaders . Although they were re- leased later, Pretoria exerts constant pressures on Namibia's strongest and most integral national political organization . (So too the campaign against Namibian churches who have consistently and publicly stood up against South African occupation and its fraudulent and intimidatory practices :late night on 4 December, security police raided the offices of the Anglican diocese in Windhoek - looking for . arms and ammunition, they said .) SWAPO and several smaller parties refused to contest the Pretorian elections, yet the probabil- ity of a second election under UN observation and the prospect of a SWAPO vic- tory spurs Pretoria to work ever more industriously at strengthening the odds in its favor. Back in October, foreign ministers from the USA, Britain, France, Canada and West Germany made a pilgrimage to South Africa to finalize the general frame- work for their year-and-a-half-old plan for bringing independence to Namibia with the new prime Minister, Pieter W . Botha . Despite some Western Five mum- bling about the 'null and void' elections, the master scheme was kept on track. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim's special representative, Commissioner for Nam- ibia Martti Ahti .saari, and his close advisors were back in Namibia and South Africa in mid-January working out details for the entry of the United Nations Transitional Assistance Group into the Territory and preparations for a second election . A go-ahead seems likely to occur very shortly. The difficulties facing the Commissioner and UNTAG are enormous . They are ham- strung from the start by the terms of the Western plan which leave power over laffairs in Namibia in the hands of South Africa's administrator general . Far from UN 'supervised and controlled' elections as encoded in Security Council resolution 385 three years ago, the lawful authority over Namibia is relegated 'to monitoring the proceedings . Already there are indications from the South African press and elsewhere that UNTAG's military strength will be cut from a force of 7500 to 5500, perhaps less . Some 600 civilian monitors, at tops, are expected to keep track of 20,000 South African bureaucrats . Pretoria's skilled and ruthless police numbering in the thousands are to be watched by 360 UNTAG police officers . Pretoria, with its immense and pervading apparatus and with the quasi-official DTA constituent assembly in place, has every advantage . WEL cam 'i''010000M Seven years ago Abisai Shejavali came to the USA from his home in , Namibia to study on a Lutheran World Federa- tion scholarship at 4,- Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa . Later his wife,Selma, and their daughter, Taimi, joined him . Another daughter, Kandiwapa, was born in Dubuque in 1974. The Shejavalis melded into the Dubuque community. They were members of Holy Trinity parish,active in the PTA and in the volleyball league . The kids belonged to the Y, took swimming lessons, attended Bible school . They gained a body of loving and close friends. Abisai and Selma never for a moment forgot that they were Namibians, and that their country was under the iron heel of South African despotism .Both Pastor and Mrs Shejavali were teachers and they prepared to return home to offer their talents in the building of a new society there . During his studies Abisai kept up a steady stream of letters, to the United Nations, to South African Prime Minister Balthazar Vorster, others, pressing and pro- testing about Namibian independence . We of MA fondly remember Pastor She- javali's stout and telling defense of our position in a letter to the local editor replying to some syndicated columnist who had attacked us. In July 1978, after Pastor Shejavali had received his Ph .D . from Dubuque's Aquinas Institute of Theology, the family . set out for Namibia . One of Abi sai l s last acts was to be part of a delegation of Dubuque citizens to try to persaude Iowa state senator Steven Bisenius not to lead a trade promo- tion trip to South Africa . Community' activist Solveig Kjeseth - whose 11 year-old son Thor is chairman of a group called Kid Power in Politics - points out in a letter to the Dubuque TELEGRAPH HERALD that while Bisenius was enjoying the hospitality of white South Africa the Shejavalis were re- ceiving treatment of a different kind in their native land. The Shejavalis reached his home village of Ongenga in mid-August, where the grandparents, the Rev and Mrs Paulus Nailenge, saw Taimi after many years, and Kandiwapa for the first time, The Nailenge's in 1975 had had a hideous experience with, the occupying South African Defence Force . Soldiers raped Mrs Nailenge, half-blind and in her 70s . The 85-year-old Pastor Nailenge, coming to his wife's aid, was beaten to the ground and stomped. Pastor and Mrs Shejavali were detained by security forces shortly after ar- riving home . The police went to the home to pick up the little girls later. A Lutheran Church telex relates : 'The girls refused to climb into the army truck . When the soldiers asked why ... .the girls said, "We do not know you" Taimi and Kandiwapa did accompany "a church official, and on the way met the parents who had just been released . A welcome home for little children. The Shejavalis are settled now, and the parents are teaching . Their address: Dr Abisai and Mrs Selma Shejavali Paulinum Seminary Otjimbingwe - via Karibib NAMIBIA easa jct's. 79. U1VhNu TERROR, Horst Kleinschmidt, born in Namibia, a student in South Africa and officer of the National Union of' South African Students, Zater assistant to the drec tar of the Christian Institute, detained in 2975 order the Terrorism Act, went into exile in early 1976; now an external representative of CI, has .written this, account o f the 'unofficial ' terror in South Africa for the Dutdh journal AMANDLA: The powers given to the ruling minority in South Africa, together with'thearsenal-of laws which they have at their disposal, provide the framework within which institution- alised violence has become a fact of life for the majority of South Africans . Thousands of people are arrested daily .for pass offences and even a greater number are searched in the post degrading manner for their passes . 'People are forced with extreme police brutality, from their hcmes and 'resettled' in remote, desolate and impoverished 'eas of the'country . Violence is an ever present reality. But the ruling class does not only employ their power in this manner . In addition,cer» taro individuals are permitted to take the law into their own hands and performthe most . horrific acts of violence against people who are known to be active in apposition to ' ,the 'system of Apartheid . This form of violence has been continuing for many years and numerous individuals and families have been affected : . - In 1972 banned church minister Basile Moore had difficulty 'pacifying his three- year--old daughter when she returned home to find .her pet cat skinned and dangling from the front door knob . This was just one of a series of -such actions of vio- lent harassment to happen to them while they lived in a National Party-dominated constituency in Johannesburg. -- In 1974 the exiled student leader Abraham Tiro received a parcel bomb at his home in Botswana . The bomb exploded, kining him instantly . The parcel was supposedly , posted from Geneva but the murder was never solved. - After repeated attacks on her home, .Winnie Mandela was herself physically assaulted while at home in 1975. - This . year , Harold Strachan, a . former banned person, was shot at after his wife had answered a knock at the front door. In other cases :buildings and•homes have ' been set alight ; unwanted deliveries of tons of sand or ' expensive items have been sent COD to the homes of politically active people without the person who order. d the goods ever having been identified . The re-, cord)goes.on and on from obscene phone calls to interference with the braking systems of cars, to petrol bombs thrown into or under vehicles, as happened recently to the Rev Beyers Naude, former director of the now banned Christian Institute, who himself is serving a banning order . All such actions of right wing terrorists become in- creasitgly domnon. Far less is known about this form of violence which is seemingly employed with the aid of civil servants and the government intelligence agencies . Members of the gov- ernment'deny responsibility for such actions . They exonerate themselves with the claim that it is members of the public who are taking these steps .