5 Top ANC Officials Return From Exile : South Africa: The former leaders of armed struggle against apartheid will join next week’s talks on preconditions for black-white negotiations.

Five top African National Congress officials, who have directed a guerrilla war against white rule for most of three decades, returned from exile Friday to an emotional, flag-waving homecoming in South Africa.

The four men and one woman smiled broadly as about 100 supporters cheered their arrival in Cape Town, where they will join six internal ANC leaders and supporters for next week’s historic talks with the South African government about the ANC’s preconditions for black-white negotiations.

“As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 27 years ago, ‘We are really on the way,’ ” said Joe Slovo, 64, the ANC’s highest-ranking white and general secretary of the South African Communist Party.

“We who left by the back door have now entered the very front door of South Africa,” Slovo added. “It’s a remarkable feeling.”

Slovo, a white-haired lawyer who fled South Africa in 1963, is reviled by many white South Africans for his Communist links and for his role as the ANC’s former chief military strategist, who ordered an escalating bombing campaign that claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians in the 1970s and 1980s.

Government security police, who have fought the ANC guerrillas since the early 1960s, launched a massive operation to protect the returning exiles. Concerned over threats from militant right-wing whites, police searched cars at roadblocks near the airport and dozens of heavily armed officers patrolled the arrivals area, stopping and questioning bystanders.

Alfred Nzo, the 67-year-old ANC secretary general, told a press conference that the leaders’ return after nearly three decades away was “an exciting moment for all of us.”

“But it would have been more exciting to come back to a peaceful country whose people were healing the ravages of the past,” Nzo said. “Regrettably, our South Africa is still bleeding.”

The delegation from ANC headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, also included Joe Modise, commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s army; international affairs chief Thabo Mbeki, and national executive committee member Ruth Mompati, along with a dozen or so aides.

The three days of talks beginning Wednesday, will center on obstacles to formal negotiations, namely the ANC’s demand that the government release all political prisoners, declare amnesty for returning exiles, and lift the four-year-old state of emergency.

“All of the issues that we want to discuss have to do with creating a situation of equal opportunity for everyone. We need to proceed from the same basis, the same rules, with even, level ground for everyone,” said Mbeki, 47.

Slovo said the delegation had come “in a spirit of conciliation, but we have not come as petitioners. We have come as claimants for a people who have been kept down for too long.”

The ANC and the Communist Party, banned in South Africa for 30 years, were two of dozens of political organizations legalized in February by President Frederik W. de Klerk in a sweeping set of reforms designed to lure black leaders to the bargaining table.

De Klerk hopes to draw up a new constitution for the country that will extend voting rights to the 27-million black majority but also maintain political protection for the 5 million whites.

De Klerk will lead an all-white, all-male government delegation in the talks. ANC Deputy President Nelson Mandela, whom De Klerk released 10 weeks ago after 27 years in prison, will lead an ANC delegation of blacks, whites, an Indian and a mixed-race Colored.

The ANC, which has about 15,000 members in exile, has said it will continue to urge foreign governments to step up sanctions and diplomatic pressure on South Africa’s government until the process toward ending apartheid seems irreversible. It also has said it will hold onto its strategy of “armed struggle,” which has been dormant for months, until the government agrees to a mutual cease-fire.

The homecoming was an emotional one for the exiles.

Mbeki wept as he stood beside his father, Govan Mbeki, 80, an ANC leader who spent 23 years in prison before his release in 1987.

Slovo said when the chartered Zambian Airways plane entered South African airspace he looked down on the land and was “once again impressed by the vastness of this country where there is room for everyone.”

Slovo, who recently has moderated his once-radical Communist philosophy, fled South Africa to escape police harassment. His wife, Ruth First, was killed in Mozambique in 1982 by a parcel bomb sent to her office from South Africa.