Five Conditions Set for South Africa : Olympics: If deadline is met, expelled country could compete in 1992 Games.

Twenty-one years after expelling South Africa, the International Olympic Committee conditionally recognized the country’s new nonracial Olympic committee Wednesday and kept alive the possibility of a return to world competition in the 1992 Summer Games.

But the IOC laid down five conditions for lifting the moratorium on international competition with South Africa and gave that nation’s Olympic committee six months to meet them. The conditions include abolishing apartheid, unifying rival sports bodies in the country and restoring relations with black African Olympic organizations.

To receive an invitation to the Games at Barcelona, Spain, South Africa would need to satisfy the IOC’s preconditions even sooner, though. Invitations to the Olympics will be mailed to member countries no later than July.

“This is not a message to hurry up, but these are the facts,” said IOC Vice President Keba Mbaye, who led a delegation to South Africa for five days of discussions with sports and political leaders. The group, which included U.S. hurdler Edwin Moses and IOC Director-General Francois Carrard, flew to Europe Wednesday.

The IOC’s decision to recognize the Interim National Olympic Committee of South Africa was “tremendous news,” said Johan du Plessis, the South African group’s secretary general. “Now we have been recognized by the IOC, and I believe it will not take us long to meet their conditions.”

South Africa’s last appearance in the Olympics was in 1960 at Rome, where it fielded an all-white team. The IOC banned South Africa from competing in 1964 because of apartheid and ousted Pretoria’s Olympic committee from the organization in 1970. Most international sporting bodies followed the IOC lead.

That worldwide boycott of athletes who compete in South Africa has been one of the most painful sanctions imposed on the country’s avid white sports fans. And in the years since the expulsion, South African whites have taken steps to desegregate their sporting organizations, hoping to end their days as a sporting pariah.

The primary condition for South Africa’s return to Olympic competition, and the return to worldwide acceptance that would probably follow, is the dismantling of apartheid.

President Frederik W. de Klerk has promised to remove the remaining pillars of apartheid--laws restricting black ownership of land, segregating residential neighborhoods and classifying all citizens by race--in the current session of South Africa’s white-controlled Parliament, which adjourns in June.

Although De Klerk’s initiatives will technically remove all apartheid legislation, black groups in the country, including the African National Congress, embrace a broader definition of apartheid. They say international pressure on South Africa should remain until the government takes even greater steps toward redressing the economic imbalances created by four decades of apartheid, and granting blacks, who outnumber whites 4-1, the right to vote.

Mbaye declined to say what criteria the IOC would use in determining whether South Africa had abolished apartheid.

The IOC delegation, the first to visit South Africa since 1970, met a range of officials, including De Klerk, ANC Deputy President Nelson Mandela and Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. Its every step was greeted with extensive news coverage.

The panel revealed its decision on conditional recognition of South Africa’s Olympic committee at an airport news conference Wednesday, describing it as a ruling of the full IOC that would be ratified by “competent IOC organs.” Other conditions for formal acceptance by the IOC were that the South African Olympic committee comply with the provisions of the Olympic Charter and the “pursuit of the unification of sports on a nonracial basis.”

The IOC delegates also said they wanted to see sports facilities, equipment and coaching improved for “all disadvantaged groups in South Africa.”

The ANC, which wants to keep the pressure on De Klerk to speed up his reform program, was pleased with the IOC decision. ANC International Affairs Chief Thabo Mbeki, after hearing the IOC announcement, was seen giving the thumbs-up sign to Barbara Masekela, former chief of the ANC department overseeing the cultural and sports boycott.

Mbaye, a judge in the World Court at The Hague, sidestepped several questions about South Africa’s chances of participating in the Barcelona Games.

Asked whether the IOC would reconsider South Africa’s position if any individual sport broke the sports moratorium, Mbaye said all the local sports bodies had agreed to the moratorium in their discussions with the IOC delegation.

Although South African sports officials would like to field an Olympic team in Barcelona, they acknowledge that their re-entry is more likely to occur in the 1994 Winter Games at Lillehammer, Norway, or in the 1996 Summer Games at Atlanta. Although South Africa plays only a few winter sports, it would be able to send some ice skaters and, perhaps, an ice hockey team, officials said.

The country’s sports officials believe they have a strong summer team, with a dozen or more track and field athletes who have posted competitive world marks in South African meets. Among those is Zola Budd Pieterse, the barefooted distance runner who competed for Great Britain in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and gained notoriety for running up Mary Decker’s heels in the 3,000-meter final. After a two-year retirement, Pieterse, now 24, has started running again and recently taken five seconds off her South African-record time in the 5,000 meters.