Next Step : Rallying Rightists : * South Africa’s right wing is going on the warpath to stop the dismantling of apartheid. Its goal: a homeland for whites.

A band of white men in ski masks and khaki uniforms, brandy still sweet on their breath, stalked out of a cornfield here at 4 a.m. recently, armed with stiff whips, steel bars and pistols.

Fanning out in pairs, they broke down the doors of tin squatter shacks, shattered windows, swept kitchen supplies onto dirt floors and beat dazed black men, women and children stumbling out of bed.

“Get out of here!” they growled as they worked.

Minutes later, the attackers were gone and a dozen people lay injured, their tattered clothes drenched in blood. Left behind, deliberately or in haste, was the crumpled business card of the public relations man for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement.

The attack a few weeks ago was a special warning to a dozen black families living on the edge of Tshing township, next to a white farmer’s cornfield.

But that attack, like those that followed elsewhere in the country, also was a warning to the reform-minded government not to allow black people to tread on white rights and privilege.

As President Frederik W. de Klerk moves swiftly to dismantle apartheid and accommodate the aspirations of 28 million blacks and 5 million whites in a multiracial South African state, a small but dangerous minority of right-wing whites are on the warpath to stop him.

Frustrated by their impotence in Parliament, where the legal pillars of apartheid officially fell on Sunday, half a million champions of apartheid are plotting new tactics of resistance.

In recent days, they have threatened to stage countrywide strikes of white workers, fire black farm workers and force homeless blacks off “white” land--at gunpoint, if necessary. The extremists have already clashed with police while trying to remove squatters, prevented Nelson Mandela from speaking at a college campus, burned the flag of Mandela’s African National Congress and shut down the streets of Pretoria with hundreds of parked tractors.

In one of the more peculiar displays of resistance, several hundred white marchers were dispersed by riot police recently while trying to deliver a videotape player to jailed right-wingers.

“Any nation worth its salt would use all methods available to it to avoid losing everything it calls its own,” Conservative Party leader Andries P. Treurnicht told a recent rally. If blacks, whom he calls “a foreign nation,” take power and “attempt to take our land, it will be seen as an act of aggression and we will take up arms,” he added.

Treurnicht’s party, which encompasses virtually everyone to the right of the ruling National Party, says it does not officially condone violence or lawbreaking by its supporters. But it never criticizes such behavior, saying only that increasing white militancy is evidence of growing frustration with the government. Paramilitary groups interpret that as a wink and a nod for their activities.

Although right-wingers often warn that war with the ANC is inevitable, the fight today is, simply put, an intertribal white feud over the future of 2.5 million Afrikaners, whose Dutch and French ancestors settled South Africa in the 17th Century.

On one side is De Klerk, an Afrikaner lawyer who believes that the prosperity and security of whites in general, and Afrikaners in particular, can only be assured in a multiracial democracy with protection for the rights of whites and other minorities.

On the other side is Treurnicht, an Afrikaner preacher who believes the only way to assure the survival of the Afrikaners’ culture, traditions and language is to give them the right to rule themselves on their own land.

Since February, the Conservative Party has waged a strenuous and unsuccessful legislative battle against the repeal of laws that segregated residential neighborhoods, restricted black ownership of land and ended a racial classification system on which all apartheid laws were based.

With each law’s repeal, the Conservatives’ “nay” votes in Parliament were consistently buried in the combined “yea” votes of the National Party and the liberal Democratic Party. And the rivalry between the National Party and Treurnicht’s Conservative Party turned ugly.

As the session drew to a close, the Speaker of Parliament took the unusual step of booting seven Conservative legislators off the grounds for five-day penalty periods. The Conservatives had accused National Party legislators of “treason”--and then refused the Speaker’s order to retract the accusation. (It is “unparliamentary” to accuse another member of Parliament of treason.)

One National Party lawmaker, Piet Coetzer, grew so tired of being called a traitor that he took his own, extra-parliamentary steps. He sent a can of skin lightener to one of the name-callers, Arrie Paulus, a Conservative with a dusky complexion. Paulus later took a swing at Coetzer in the lobby.

In the end, though, the Conservatives could do little more than shout as they saw De Klerk’s reforms take hold.

The right-wing ranks have grown since the 1989 elections, when the Conservative Party collected 650,000 votes, and especially in the 17 months since Mandela was freed and the ANC legalized. But the party has no hope of legally forcing another election before 1994. De Klerk has until then to negotiate a new future with the black majority, although he has promised whites an opportunity to approve any new constitution.

Many right-wing whites think a return to old-style apartheid will be difficult, if not impossible, with all its statutory framework now gone. Their only real hope, they say, is to demand that the government create a white homeland where Afrikaners will have complete control of their destiny.

Ferdi Hartzenberg, deputy leader of the Conservatives, argues that De Klerk’s plan is doomed because he cannot create a peaceful nation of whites and a dozen African ethnic groups.

“If you do that, you will not have a ‘new South Africa,’ you will have the old South Africa with more trouble,” Hartzenberg said. “We (whites) have been here for 3 1/2 centuries. If it was possible to create one nation, don’t you think we would have done it?”

But De Klerk counters that white rule--not reform--is the recipe for revolution.

“Holding on to it (white rule) is a suicidal path of growing conflict, isolation and chaos,” De Klerk said recently. “The reform program is aimed at saving South Africa from a terrible fate.”

De Klerk has tried to lure right-wing whites to the negotiating table, where some government officials have suggested the notion of a white homeland might be considered. But Treurnicht and other right-wing leaders refuse to negotiate unless the government guarantees whites the right to self-determination.

“If our right as a people is recognized, and our claim to land is recognized, then there is something to talk about,” Treurnicht said. “Those are rights that are not negotiable.” Treurnicht has vowed never to live in a country where a black is in power.

Although the Conservative Party carries the banner of right-wing whites in Parliament, its supporters are split into several dozen separate camps.

Among the more moderate is the Afrikaner Volkswag, or Afrikaner People’s Guard, which would turn over most of the country to black majority rule in exchange for an independent homeland in the northern Cape Province, far from major cities.

More militant groups include the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, or AWB, for its Afrikaans initials, which believes Afrikaners will soon have to fight the ANC. The AWB has an armed militia and training facilities, and its members wear khaki uniforms with a swastika-like emblem.

A dozen AWB members are on trial or in jail for attacking and killing blacks. One of them, Eugene Marais, was convicted of seven counts of murder and 27 of attempted murder in March for opening fire on a busload of blacks last year. Marais testified that he saw blacks as “animals” and “at the time, I thought it (the attack) was the right thing to do.”

Many believe that white extremists, working inside as well as outside the government, also are helping stir up black internecine strife by giving weapons and logistical support to black combatants. The government’s inability to stop the fighting, which has killed 3,000 blacks in the past 18 months, has delayed De Klerk’s black-white negotiation plans.

Several dozen right-wingers have been granted political amnesty for bombing government facilities, including National Party offices.

AWB leader Eugene Terre Blanche, a masterful orator and controversial figure in right-wing circles, recently threatened to fire all black farm workers if the government didn’t agree to his demand for a separate white state. In an unusual public disagreement with the AWB, though, the Conservative Party said it didn’t make sense to make black workers pay for the sins of the government.

Despite the fractures in conservative politics, analysts say the right wing has never been better organized or more of a threat to stability in the country.

“The potential threat of the extreme right is far greater today than it was last year at this time,” said Wim J. Booyse, a Pretoria expert on the right wing.

Once composed mostly of blue-collar workers and farmers, the extreme right now encompasses the spectrum of white life, from college students to churchgoers. But most experts say a right-wing coup d’etat is not a strong possibility.

“They don’t have the dedication for a full-out insurrection,” said Chris Orr, a researcher with the Informal Board of Inquiry Into Informal Repression, a group of human rights activists. “They’re not an oppressed people, regardless of what they say. They haven’t had the years of oppression necessary to drive them to the point where they have nothing to lose.”

But Orr and other analysts say white extremists have the military training and firepower to create havoc as the country lurches toward a black-white agreement.

“We’re going to see a lot more attacks on squatters,” Orr said, “because the issue of land touches the rawest nerve of the Afrikaner.”

Right-wing leaders worry that their property rights are threatened by the repeal of the Land Acts, which reserved 87% of the country’s property for whites. Although the government has promised whites that their deeds will be honored, many fear that a government under ANC control would take their land away and restore it to some of the 3.5 million blacks forcibly removed over the years.

Ventersdorp’s Tshing township, about 100 miles west of Johannesburg, was the first flash point in the land war.

It had begun about 10 miles away, where more than 500 angry white farmers from across the country converged to launch an attack on about 80 black squatters at Goedgevonden.

The Goedgevonden squatters had moved to reoccupy farmland forcibly taken from them 13 years before. That property now is owned by the government but leased to white farmers, who pay a fraction of the market rate.

Shortly after midnight, the farmers began to move into the squatter settlement, firing tear gas and beating residents with sticks. Four shacks were burned, and residents fled into the bush.

Police and soldiers repelled the attack with rifle fire, marking the first time in modern history that the state had turned its weapons on white protesters. Two white farmers were injured and a tense standoff began. A few hours later, one group of the farmers, apparently AWB members, launched a separate attack on the outskirts of Tshing township.

“They came by surprise,” resident Judas Sithole said later. “They said nothing. They just hit. Then they said, ‘Get away from here.’ ” Sithole, 58, had a long gash on his forehead. His wife, Pauline, and 18-month-old daughter were beaten with stiff whips, known as sjamboks .

The Sitholes and their neighbors had been removed from another white-designated tract of land near Ventersdorp several months earlier. The sympathetic black council in Tshing had given them permission to settle in a designated “buffer zone” between the township and local farms. But the move had angered whites in Ventersdorp, the conservative white town a mile away that is home to AWB leader Terre Blanche.

“It’s still apartheid as usual in Ventersdorp,” said Tshing councilor Thabo Mosikidi. “Apartheid there is too much.”

After the attack in Tshing, the white men returned to their encampment. After a 12-hour standoff with police, the government law and order minister, Adriaan Vlok, persuaded the farmers to await a court ruling on the blacks’ land claims.

The farmers left in a convoy, their license plates covered with mud to prevent identification. No one was arrested.

“We’ve told Vlok,” one farmer said as he left, “that if he doesn’t get rid of them, we’ll be back.”

A few weeks ago, the court ruled that the squatters have no right to the land, but they have been allowed to remain while their attorneys appeal. And the AWB is under a court order not to attempt to remove them.

“We say the individual is not entitled to take up arms against the government,” Conservative leader Treurnicht said. “But the official representatives of the (Afrikaner) people . . . should offer resistance when you have an unjust government denying the rights of your people.”

The Evolution of the South African Right NATIONAL PARTY

Founded 1912, dominated South Africa since 1948.

Leader: South African President Frederik W. de Klerk.

Politics: Formerly backed apartheid. Now advocates multiracial state with protection of “minority,” i.e. white, rights.

DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH. A major denomination

Leader: General Synod Moderator Pieter Potgieter. Politics: Heavily influential in National Party. In 1986, acknowledged that apartheid was a mistake and said racism is a sin.

Right-Wing Political Parties Reformed National Party

Founded 1969 by right-wingers forced out of National Party.

Leader: Jaap Marais.

Formed following the death of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the father of apartheid, by four right-wing members of the National Party who were effectively forced out of the party.

Polictics: Advocates “Christian Nationalism,” apartheid; wants Afrikaans to be sole official language.

Conservative Party of South Africa.

Founded 1982 by rightist lawmakers bolted National Party

Leader: Andries P. Treurnicht.

Supports apartheid and an independent white state; favored by most right-wingers.

AFRIKAANS PROTESTANT CHURCH.

1988, broke away from the Dutch Reformed Church.

Leader: Nico van Rensburg. Beliefs: Accepts only whites may be members; close links with the Conservative Party of South Africa

Non-Party Right-Wing Groups

AFRIKANER PEOPLE’s GUARD.

Founded 1984.

Leader: Carel Boshoff. Politics: Right-wing cultural movement; supports a separate white homeland for Afrikaners.

ORANGE WORKERS SOCIETY.

Founded: mid-1980s.

Leader: Hendrik Verwoerd. Politics: Wants white homeland in northern Cape Province and Orange Free State.

AFRIKANER RESISTANCE MOVEMENT.

(AWB) Founded 1974.

Leader: Eugene Terre Blanche.

Extreme right-wing paramilitary group.

BOER FREEDOM MOVEMENT 1989. Leader: Jan Groenewald. BOER RESISTANCE MOVEMENT 1990. Leader: Andrew Ford. BOER COMMANDOS. Founded 1991. Leader: Gawie Volschenk WHITE FREEDOM MOVEMENT.

Founded in 1983.

Leader: Johan Schabort

Politics: Supports the principles of Nazism and wants to banish South Africa’s 130,000 Jews.

BOER STATE PARTY.

Founded 1988.

Leader: Robert van Tonder. Politics: Seeks return of Transvaal and Orange Free State provinces and northern Natal province to Afrikaners.