South Africa Lifts State of Emergency

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa--South Africa yesterday ended the state of emergency that was imposed last July in hopes of quelling Black violence against white rule and said the last 330 of nearly 8000 people detained under it were freed.

Three CBS television staffers were ordered out of the country. The government accused them of filming a mass funeral of Black riot victims in "flagrant contempt" of a court prohibition.

The last detainees went free at midnight and the government published a proclamation lifting the state of emergency in the 23 districts where it still applied. Thirty-six Black districts were covered when it took effect July 21.

At the news conference and in separate interviews, freed prisoners spoke of assault and deprivation, tear gas and water-hosings. One of them, 24-year-old Sidney Molekane from Johannesburg's Black township of Soweto, said he was suspended from a broomstick with his hands and feet cuffed together and spun around.

An estimated 250 to 270 people remain in prison without charge, according to the Detainess' Parents Support Committee, an independent monitoring group. It says they are held under non-emergency legislation.

The emergency, condemned throughout the world, gave police sweeping powers of arrest and use of firearms. President P.W. Botha's announcement Tuesday that it would be lifted was welcomed by the United States and other Western governments.

Botha also said, however, that Parliament would be asked to pass whatever new laws police needed to cope with rioters, which critics say is a device to continue the emergency without the name.

The government said in a statement Friday that tight restrictions on media coverage of rioting "have fallen away" with the end of the state of emergency.

Hours after it was lifted, however, authorities ordered the expulsion by Tuesday of the CBS Johannesburg bureau manager, William Mutschmann, a U.S. citizen; correspondent Allen Pizzey, a Canadian, and cameraman Wim de Vos, who is Dutch.

Home Minister Stoffel Botha said that, in shooting and broadcasting film of the funeral Wednesday in the black township of Alexandra, the network acted in "flagrant contempt" of a court verdict upholding a police ban on cameras at the scene. CBS and other networks had asked the court to cancel the prohibition.

In New York, CBS spokesman Jim Noonan said: "CBS News protests the ordered expulsion CBS is studying the expulsion order and intends to utilize all appropriate avenues of appeal."