Mandela Concedes ANC Tortured Dissident Rebels : South Africa: He deplores the practice, used as discipline, and says those responsible were punished. He says it has now been banned.

Nelson R. Mandela admitted Saturday that his African National Congress had tortured dissident guerrillas, but he said the officials involved were punished and that any further torture had been banned.

Mandela made the surprising admission in a brief airport statement. He said the assertions of some ANC guerrillas that they had been tortured were true, that he deplored the action and promised it would not happen again.

“Unfortunately, it is true that some of these people who have complained were in fact tortured. But once the ANC became aware . . . immediate steps were taken to discipline those who were guilty of torturing other people,” he said.

Mandela did not specify the punishment inflicted on those responsible, but he said the commanders of the camps where the torture took place had been dismissed.

“The ANC is against torture or any form of coercion in order to extract information from those who are suspected of having broken the laws and the regulations which they are required to obey,” he said.

In Nairobi, Kenya, seven former South African guerrillas said Saturday that they had been tortured by ANC commanders as mutineers.

The guerrillas said they were tortured at two punishment camps in Angola called Pango and Quatro. They said they were tied to trees and flogged with whips, locked into metal transport containers that were left out in the searing African sun and were beaten and kicked by ANC commanders and their jailers.

The seven were attached to the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), in Angola after training in East Germany and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s.

They said they mutinied against their leaders in 1984, were held in detention centers and Angolan prisons for four years and then moved to a camp in Tanzania after being freed on “humanitarian” grounds.

They quit the military wing in Tanzania last December and fled to Nairobi, they said. They added that they are eager to return to South Africa.

“We’re still waiting for word when we can go,” Luvo Mbengo, 28, one of the ANC recruits, said. “But we still don’t know what our future is.”

Mandela attempted to downplay the incident Saturday by saying that South Africa’s white-led minority government routinely tortured and killed opponents. He said the ANC did not tolerate torture and stopped it immediately when the incidents were exposed.

“Large numbers of our people have been tortured and killed by the government. They are still being tortured today despite all our protests,” he said.

A government commission has uncovered widespread evidence that South African police and military units systematically killed dissidents. The commission is still investigating and the government has not taken any official action.

Mandela also said the dissidents were not complaining against the ANC as a whole or against him, but against the security wing of the anti-apartheid organization.

“The ANC has responded as any responsible organization will do when they discover such malpractices,” he said.