Massacre on a Commuter Train: 9 Killed, Dozens Hurt : South Africa: But the ANC and the rival Inkatha Party restate support for peace accord.

At 5:55 a.m. Wednesday, in the smoky dawn of this sprawling black township, a noisy red-and-gray commuter train braked to a halt at a central Soweto station on its way to Johannesburg.

The doors opened, more than 50 armed men on the platform climbed aboard, and another South African massacre began.

Commuters were slashed and hacked with machetes. A few of the wounded leaped from train windows, dying later in the tall weeds as they awaited help. One man, wearing a tie and jacket, was shot in the chest. His expression was still locked in surprise when the coroners arrived.

The massacre, which police said was a revenge attack for the fatal stabbing of a man from a nearby hostel the night before, left at least nine people dead, three dozen wounded--and a national peace accord signed with much fanfare last month in tatters.

More than 150 black people have died in political violence since Sept. 14, when South Africa’s leading black and white politicians sealed their peace pact. All sides agreed Wednesday that the accord was still alive, though just barely.

“I just feel angry,” said Elias Mosunkulu, a civic association official who came to the blood-stained Nancefield train station soon after the attack. “Our trains have been the scene of massacres for months now. We take it up with the police, they promise to take action, but these massacres continue.

“People are asking, ‘What has happened to the peace accord?’ ” Mosunkulu added. “They are confused and I don’t blame them.”

The high hopes generated by the signing of the peace accord have been dragged down by five weeks of bureaucratic delays in setting up the secretariats and commissions to investigate the violence. And, in the meantime, it has been difficult for the National Peace Committee “to do anything other than voice its concern to the authorities,” said panel chairman John Hall, a Johannesburg businessman.

The government, the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party, the three most important of the 23 signatories, repeated their support for the accord Wednesday.

But it will take more than mere pledges to end the political violence that so far this year has claimed 3,000 black lives, at least 100 of them in the often-baffling attacks on innocent bus and train commuters.

The causes of the bloodshed are complex and, to a large degree, unknown.

In Johannesburg-area townships and Natal province, the violence stems partially from a longstanding rivalry between Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha and the larger and more powerful ANC. But, in places such as Soweto, it also is the result of deep animosity between township residents and thousands of migrant Zulu workers, usually Inkatha supporters, who live behind rolls of razor wire in cramped, dilapidated hostels for single men.

And, to the dismay of even the government’s staunchest supporters, the 110,000-member national police force seems powerless to stop the killing.

The ANC believes the attacks are part of a broad strategy to eliminate and harass ANC activists.

ANC President Nelson Mandela suggests that police may be orchestrating the violence. He blames President Frederik W. de Klerk for allowing a sinister “third force” to direct the violence from within the government.

Police said the trouble in Soweto began Tuesday night, when a Zulu resident of the sprawling Nancefield hostel, a bastion of Inkatha supporters, was accosted while driving home. The man was stabbed several times but managed to make his way to the hostel, where he told other residents of the attack. He died en route to the hospital.

Within hours, hundreds of hostel dwellers had hatched a plot to attack the Nancefield station, about 200 yards from the hostel, police said. They gathered on the platform shortly before dawn and, when train No. 9023 pulled into the station, they retaliated.

An hour later, another train, No. 9025, which is known in the township as an Inkatha train, pulled into the Orlando station, the next stop after Nancefield. When the doors of that train opened, the riders emerged and attacked commuters waiting on the platform, killing at least one.

An ambulance leaving the scene was fired on from the Nancefield hostel, and police conducted a room-to-room search as residents of the hostel shouted insults at them. The gunman was not found and no one was arrested.

Inkatha offered an account that differed sharply from that of the police, the ANC and several witnesses.

“Everybody blames Inkatha for the violence, even though it’s not so,” said Themba Khoza, an Inkatha spokesman. He said the clash occurred when ANC supporters prevented Inkatha supporters from getting on the train at the Nancefield station.

Khoza said Inkatha is committed to working for peace “and we will do everything in our power to bring peace in this country.”

The ANC also expressed its continued support for the peace accord. Ronnie Mamoepa, an ANC spokesman, said the violence was an attempt “to make people lose hope, to question the peace accord.”