Civilian targets hit in Mozambique Terror raids by apartheid rulers

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THE vicious air raid by South African plans on the suburbs of the Mozambique capital Maputo was an indiscriminate reprisal attack on civilian targets.

The planes damaged a jam factory, a creche, private houses and a peasant hut, killing six people and injuring 40, as they strafed the area with rockets and machine gun fire.

Reporters who visited the scene insist that there was no evidence of the alleged "main camp" of ANC guerrillas, or of :arent ANC presence in the area, despite claims by the South African regime that their raid was aimed at "ANC terrorists".

The episode - like a similar iaid into Mozambique in 1981 and the carnage near the Lesotho capital of Maseru last year - is part of the strategy of brute force and intimidation through which the apartheid rulers seek to crush the black struggle and cut off apport for the ANC.

It followed a massive rush nour car bomb explosion in Pretoria outside the South African Air Force headquarters in which 18 people were killed and 216 injured.

But it also dovetails in with persistent South African attempts i undermine and overturn the rationalist regimes of Mozambique and Angola, and to crush the liberation struggle in Namibia, where a vast South African army of occupation is pitted against SWAPO forces.

South African operations mside Angola - including more or iess permanent occupation of some border areas - are so comdegree of embarrassment for the British and American imperialists, who have hopes of a longer-term, more global development towards stabilised rule in Southern Africa, and are courting some of the black states Pretoria is abusing and antagonising.

In Washington, the State Department - which wants to site Cruise missiles in South Africa, and has been consistently friendly towards the apartheid rulers - criticised not only the Pretoria bombing but also the retaliatory raid on Mozambique. In Britain, Francis Pym adopted the same stance, going so far as to "deplore this violation of Mozambique's sovereignty."

Interestingly, while the British press has focussed on the various condemnations of the Pretoria bombing, a leading Roman Catholic Archbishop has been among those who have blamed the regime for the episode:

"Essentially the escalation of violence is a response by desperate people to the built-in violence