South Africa’s 2 Top Black Leaders Urge End to Strife : Ethnic violence: The summit between Mandela, Zulu Chief Buthelezi is first significant reconciliation attempt.

Nelson Mandela and Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, in a historic accord aimed at ending one of South Africa’s bloodiest conflicts, called on their supporters Tuesday to stop attacking each other.

“We have reached a breakthrough and we can only hope that (peace) will be the result,” Mandela told a news conference after 10 hours of talks between the African National Congress and Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party.

“You can see, not only from the warmth between us but from our body language, that the meeting was a complete success,” said a smiling Buthelezi. “There was no acrimony whatsoever.”

But Buthelezi cautioned that the agreement did not necessarily mean that the internecine violence will end immediately. “We don’t think that we can just wave a magic wand” and make it stop, he said.

The summit between the two most powerful black leaders in South Africa, after more than a decade of bitter feuding between their organizations, marked the first significant attempt at a reconciliation between the ANC and Inkatha since the ANC was legalized and Mandela was freed from prison a year ago.

The ANC-Inkatha rivalry has touched off a continuous cycle of revenge attacks that have left 4,000 black people dead in Natal Province since 1986. In recent months, the factional violence spread to Johannesburg-area townships, where 1,000 have been killed and tens of thousands burned out of their homes since August.

South Africans hope that the new pact, which includes plans for a joint tour of strife-torn regions by Mandela and Buthelezi, at least will begin to ease the bloodshed that has become a major obstacle to peaceful negotiations between the white-minority government and the black majority over the country’s future.

But both the ANC and Inkatha are expected to face some difficulty in selling the peace accord to their rank-and-file members, many of whom have lost relatives in the attacks. Mandela admitted last year that his supporters “almost throttled me” when he suggested that he meet Buthelezi. He said Tuesday that the meeting had “the full support of the ANC membership.”

“We are both part of the anti-apartheid movement in this country,” Mandela said. “That is the thing that has motivated us.”

Mandela, the ANC’s 72-year-old deputy president, opened the summit by extending the olive branch to Buthelezi and his 67-person delegation, asking that the two sides not dwell on their past differences.

“Among ourselves, we could point fingers and apportion blame in all direction,” he said. “We could climb the shelves and dust off old chapters to pontificate. But the carnage will not have come to an end.”

Mandela also blamed white domination for attempting to divide black South Africans along ethnic lines, “to turn our rich variety into a dagger with which to pierce their hearts.”

In his speech, however, Buthelezi dwelt extensively on the past, telling the 20-member ANC delegation that the violence between their supporters had been caused by an ANC “vilification campaign” against Buthelezi.

The Zulu leader cited newspaper and television interviews dating back as far as 12 years to support his contention that ANC leaders, including Mandela and others in the room, had tried “to castrate me politically.”

At one point, Buthelezi demanded that John Nkadimeng, an ANC delegate, “tell the world that he was wrong in calling me a snake that must be hit on the head.”

When Buthelezi concluded his remarks, Mandela rose and preempted any remarks from his colleagues, saying that the ANC would respond at a later date, according to those present during the closed-door session.

Buthelezi later defended his harsh tone, telling reporters that in African culture “men don’t skirt issues if they want to settle them. My approach is: You go right to the marrow and solve them.”

Buthelezi and Mandela said that, while their organizations still differ sharply on many matters, their talks were cordial. The two men greeted each other with a hug as the meeting began and talked at length during breaks for lunch and dinner.

The joint ANC-Inkatha declaration appeared to address some of Buthelezi’s concerns by calling on members of both groups “to desist from vilification of either of our organizations or leaders.”

It also called on its supporters “not to coerce or intimidate anyone in pursuit of their strategies and programs”--an apparent reference to previous ANC claims that the recent spate of violence near Johannesburg was triggered by an Inkatha membership drive.

Buthelezi said that the ANC also had met his primary request--that it recognize Inkatha as a legitimate political organization that deserves its own place at the negotiating table for a new South African constitution.

Buthelezi and Mandela have been friends since the 1940s when both were members of the ANC. For years, the Inkatha leader had called on the government to release Mandela from jail.

But during the mid-1970s, while Mandela was in prison, Buthelezi broke with the ANC over its strategy of guerrilla war and sanctions against Pretoria. Buthelezi formed Inkatha, a Zulu-based organization, and angered many ANC leaders by accepting the white government’s offer to be head of a self-governing homeland for Zulus.

Inkatha now says that it has 1.8 million members, about a fourth of the country’s Zulu population. The ANC, with 300,000 paid members but broad support in South Africa’s townships, considers itself a multiracial organization. Its first leader was a Zulu, but members of a smaller ethnic group, the Xhosas, like Mandela, have played a leading role in the congress for nearly three decades.

The fighting in Natal has been among Zulus, who constitute the largest black ethnic group in South Africa. But in Johannesburg-area townships it has generally pitted Zulus against blacks from other ethnic groups.