JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South Africa lifted a 25-day blockade of Lesotho Saturday, hours after 60 black nationalists guerrillas fighting white rule in South African were expelled from the tiny country.
A Lesotho government spokesman said the 60 guerrillas, members of the outlawed and exiled African National Congress, were the first of about 140 rebels that will eventually be expelled from the country.
The Lesotho spokesman said the 60 expelled ANC members were sent north to Zambia, but he did not say when the remaining 80 black nationalists would be forced to leave Lesotho, a tiny black nation encircled bySouth Africa.
The spokesman said South Africa had warned Lesotho's new military government its crippling blockade would continue unless certain ANC members were removed from Lesotho.
South African officials have charged the ANC with using Lesotho as a base to carry out its campaign to topple South Africa's white-minority government and its polices of racial separation, known as apartheid.
Hours after Lesotho informed South Africa of the expulsions, South African Foreign Minister Roelof Botha lifted the 25-day-old blockade, which Pretoria has described as an intensified search for rebels and supplies. The blockade caused severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine in Lesotho.
About two hours before the formal announcement of the end of the blockade, traffic between South Africa and Lesotho resumed.
A train with 15 carrying diesel fuel, gasoline and other cargo pulled into Maseru, the capital of Lestotho. Border officials said the long lines formed by travelers and truckers, some of whom waited up to 48 hours to cross the frontier, quickly dissipated.
Botha said the two nations supported 'the principle that neither would allow its territory to be used for the planning or execution of acts of violence or terror, and that they would take steps to see that this principle is effectively applied.'
The agreement is similar to a formal accords signed last year between South Africa and the governments of Mozambique and Swaziland. The two nations agreed not to support the ANC or allow it to use their territory for staging attacks against South Africa.
On Monday, Gen. Justin Lekhanye ousted Lesotho Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan in a bloodless coup and installed a military council that will rule the nation along with King Moshoeshoe II.
Lekhanye overthrew the Jonathan government, which had been in power for 20 years, because of its rejection of South Africa's demands for the expulsion of ANC guerrillas.
Botha told reporters that Jonathan had been warned by South Africa that ANC guerrillas were using his country as a springboard.
'But he said there were only refugees in his country,' Botha said. 'He would not listen to us.'
In his first address to the nation, Lekhanye called Friday for closer ties with South Africa. 'The normalization of the present state of affairs and of relations between Lesotho and South Africa are the objectives' he said.
