COLUMN RIGHT : A Color-Blind Peace Depends on Democracy : The proximity of power has intensified rivalries among South African blacks.

A democratic revolution has come to South Africa, where a large portion of the dominant white elite has finally lost confidence in the morality of a system that provides democracy and comfort for whites, repression and poverty for blacks and, for Indians, economic opportunity without political rights. The outcome of this revolution is uncertain, but one thing is clear: The apartheid system will not survive.

There is already a new politics in South Africa--a pluralistic, multiracial politics that began with the “unbanning” of the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), the release of their leaders, and the promise of President F.W. de Klerk to secure repeal of the laws on which apartheid rests and begin work on a new constitution.

De Klerk knows full well that several opinion polls show a strong white backlash against his policies.

Nonetheless, he notes coolly that he has the political wherewithal to keep his promises. He says his National Party and the smaller Democratic Party together have 60% of the votes in Parliament and adds that both parties are committed to repealing the legal foundations of apartheid. “There will be a comfortable majority for repeal,” he asserted to me.

His confidence was apparent last week in his announcement that the government would end the four-year-old state of emergency in all of South Africa except violence-ridden Natal province.

Dr. Andries Treurnicht, leader of the Conservative Party (the third important white party), predicts civil war if De Klerk carries out his stated intention to dismantle the system of racial separation.

Some people take such threats very seriously.

“They are preparing to overthrow the government by revolutionary means,” ANC leader Walter Sisulu told me last week in Soweto. “When Treurnicht said ‘We are arming to defend ourselves,’ they were not being attacked by anybody. Black men are not attacking anybody.”

In fact, black men were attacking other black men even as we spoke. Overall, 3,000 have died in Natal province.

There are three major political groups among South Africa’s blacks, who constitute about 70% of the total population--the ANC under Nelson Mandela, a Marxist-style national liberation group that has always been closely tied to South Africa’s Communist Party; Inkatha, a Zulu-based democratic party under the leadership of Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, and the PAC, a rapidly growing black-consciousness party.

The ANC and Inkatha disagree on the most fundamental issues of politics. Inkatha emphasizes nonviolence, pluralism and the market economy. The ANC affirms a legitimacy of armed struggle to combat white dominance and advocates nationalization to rectify economic “imbalances” between the races.

The proximity of power has exacerbated rivalries among these groups, especially in Natal where thousands have died in terrible black-on-black violence that rages amid miles of miserable shacks outside Durban. Although the violence has developed a momentum of its own, it is fundamentally a bloody struggle for power between the ANC coalition’s followers and Inkatha’s.

Each party to the conflict blames the other for the violence. But my inquiries strongly indicate that Buthelezi’s Inkatha is generally the reactor, the ANC coalition the initiator. The violence has spread far beyond Inkatha’s territory and has targeted all major opponents of the ANC coalition--Inkatha, black-consciousness groups, ANC dissidents and black municipal counselors in many townships.

If, despite the intelligent and reasonable demeanor of its leaders, the ANC remains a fundamentally Leninist liberation movement, then it cannot contribute to the democratization of South Africa. The fact simply must be faced that Nelson Mandela has been speaking as if this is the case in his recent meetings with Moammar Kadafi, Yasser Arafat and Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam.

It is also extremely important to determine where the PAC stands on crucial questions of violence, peaceful change and civil rights.

Building democracy in South Africa does not mean replacing a white oligarchy with a black one-party dictatorship. It cannot be achieved by government initiatives alone. It also depends on understanding that the most important political difference is not between black and white. It is between those committed to the method of democracy and those ready to practice the method of violence.