COLUMN ONE : S. Africa’s Feared Law Enforcers : Police are accused of murder, intimidation and assault. The government aims to clean up the force. But misconduct continues, and mistrust among blacks runs deep.

Police riot investigator Fente Rampete was on duty at 9 a.m. on a recent Monday, carrying his 9-millimeter Beretta automatic pistol and reeking of alcohol.

“Get away from there or I’ll arrest you!” Rampete snarled at two black men talking with suspects in the dark holding cells beneath the courthouse here. The visitors walked quickly away.

Standing just 5 foot 2, with a scarred black face and a thick mustache, this constable in plainclothes is one of the most feared police officers in these parts.

A judge recently found Rampete “criminally responsible” for chasing down a 19-year-old black suspect and executing him as he cowered under a bed. And Rampete and his colleagues are alleged to have beaten and given electric shocks to dozens of suspects during questioning.

“Yes, I am famous,” Rampete said on that recent morning. “They know me. I am tough.”

Eleven black and white police officers already face charges of assault and attempted murder in this mining area, where 17 blacks have been killed by police in the two years since President Frederik W. de Klerk began to dismantle apartheid and promised to take politics out of police work.

But assaults continue. And Rampete is still on duty.

“We don’t understand how some police get suspended and one of the most dangerous is still working,” said Kgomotso Makoti, 20, a black activist shot in the leg during a police raid near here a year ago.

“It tells us that the police are still our enemy,” Makoti added. “You can never trust them.”

As South Africa stands on the verge of talks leading to a new constitution, the 110,000-member national police force, about half of which is black, remains deeply distrusted and feared by many in the townships.

The police and their critics agree that an impartial, respected force is the only hope for the success of any new constitution in this troubled land. But the enormity of that task, amid the jockeying for political advantage, is becoming increasingly apparent.

Political violence during the past year has claimed 3,000 lives but resulted in relatively few arrests. The African National Congress and other black groups accuse the police of collusion in some of the killings and of lacking the will to put an end to the others.

De Klerk and his police generals routinely deny those charges and blame the ANC for creating a climate of violence. They point out that a third of the police force is permanently assigned to combatting political crime and that more than 130 officers, 35 of them in the township of Soweto alone, have died in the line of duty this year.

The government recently has taken steps to carve a new image for the police. Officers are signing a new code of conduct, the product of a national peace accord reached last month by the government, the ANC and 21 other political groups. The code says there is “no place for policing based on personal racial prejudice, corruption (or) excessive use of force.”

While independent investigations of police actions remain rare, and internal probes are widely viewed as whitewashes, the police assigned a general earlier this year to oversee cases of alleged misconduct on the force. The general, Ronnie van der Westhuizen (von-der-VEST-haze-in), a criminal investigator with 35 years’ experience, has reopened dozens of investigations and has begun to win the trust of human rights lawyers and black activists.

So far, 28 officers have been suspended as a result of Van der Westhuizen’s investigations; seven of them are on trial for murder. Dozens of other officers across the country have been accused of beating and killing black suspects and activists, but so far they have not been suspended or charged.

“The only way we can restore confidence in the police and show we are not covering up is to take action against officers who go out of step,” Van der Westhuizen said.

But the general admits that widespread suspicion of the police, especially among blacks, has made his job difficult.

“You can’t take steps against officers without evidence from the public,” Van der Westhuizen said. “And most of the public doesn’t have the confidence in the local police to go to the station and make a charge against an officer.”

That lack of confidence has deep roots in the townships that ring conservative white communities such as Carletonville and nearby Potchefstroom, in gold-mining country an hour’s drive west of Johannesburg.

Van der Westhuizen says he has “a very strong case” against the 11 officers suspended here in Rampete’s home territory. It is now up to the attorney general to decide whether charges are warranted.

Yet those suspended officers, and others like Rampete who are still on duty, have continued to harass and threaten their black accusers, human rights lawyers say. And while black activists have been pleasantly surprised that police officers have been suspended, they believe that the police remain a law unto themselves.

“This is South Africa, man,” said David Lesotho, a township leader here. “The National Party flag is still being hoisted up there.”

The Independent Board of Inquiry Into Informal Repression, a human rights organization, has been helping Van der Westhuizen’s investigators obtain statements from blacks who say they’ve been assaulted by police.

But it hasn’t been easy to convince the victims, who remain powerless in white-ruled South Africa, that complaints filed at the same police station where they were assaulted will be investigated and will not get them into deeper trouble with the police.

Some police officers here have tried to undermine the internal investigations by arresting and threatening blacks who have made complaints against them. A few weeks ago, Rampete exchanged angry words with Sally Sealey, a field researcher for the repression board, and promptly had her arrested on a charge of assault.

“The police here think they can do these things and no one really notices,” Sealey said. “The fact that they can trump up charges at will is unbelievable. It doesn’t give us much hope.”

Police and black activists in this region have been in a running battle for nearly two years, in a pattern familiar across South Africa. It began with township gangs burning houses and killing residents in the name of the ANC. Then other township residents, supported by the police, countered with their own vigilante violence, assassinating gang leaders.

The burden for investigating that violence fell on a team of plainclothes investigators, drawn from Carletonville and Potchefstroom and stationed at a quiet, red-brick house midway between the two towns at Welverdiend.

Dozens of young blacks say they were beaten, given electric shocks and threatened with death by zealous police in the interrogation room at Welverdiend.

Only days before black liberation leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison last year, a 14-year-old black youth, Nixon Phiri, died during interrogation at Welverdiend. The police said he had an epileptic seizure and fell against a file cabinet. His family said he had no history of epilepsy. An autopsy indicated that the cause of death was a skull fracture roughly the shape of a shoe heel.

But a court inquest earlier this year ruled the death accidental. The Phiri family’s attorney received notice of the inquest a day after it concluded.

Phiri’s death was only the beginning. In July, 1990, 15-year-old Eugene Mbulawa was beaten into a coma during questioning at Welverdiend and later died. Six other detainees said they saw the beating and blamed the police, naming names in affidavits and interviews with The Times last year.

Since then, three of those six witnesses have been slain by police. William Makatje, who had the clearest view of the assault, was taken into custody and shot to death by police two days later. Officers said he had tried to escape.

Van der Westhuizen has suspended some officers here for assaulting suspects but has found no police wrongdoing in the deaths of Mbulawa, his three friends or the 13 others who have died in police custody or from police bullets.

And the assaults have continued.

In July, four young men were arrested and questioned about the murder of a white man whose body had been found in the township outside Carletonville. Each detainee said a bag was put over his head, wires were attached to his hands and feet and electric shocks were administered during questioning by several officers, including Rampete and Lt. Waks Viljoen, a white officer in charge of the Welverdiend unit.

The four suspects were released without charge when officers learned that the white man’s death had been the result of a family feud. With the encouragement of human rights lawyers, the former suspects made formal complaints at the Carletonville police station against Rampete, Viljoen and several other officers.

And, a week later, the notorious Welverdiend police unit was disbanded and the door to the house locked for good.

But Viljoen and Rampete remained on the job and, in late September, they arrested one of their accusers, Thomas Monene, on a township street. In a search they conducted alone in Monene’s home, the officers claimed to have found ammunition for automatic weapons. Monene was charged and released on bail.

Monene’s mother, Elsie, said Viljoen told her that he would leave her family alone if she persuaded her son to withdraw his charges against the police.

“Since he brought those charges, we are harassed day and night,” Elsie Monene said. “But I don’t want my son to withdraw the charges. Even if he does, they will keep coming back.”

Later that week, Viljoen and Rampete arrested another of their accusers, 23-year-old Thomas Mvundle, and also reported finding ammunition in his home. Mvundle said Viljoen told him that if he didn’t drop the charges of brutality, “I won’t leave you in peace.”

Mvundle had given Viljoen’s threat some thought by the time he was charged and released on bail four days later. “I was thinking of withdrawing the charges,” he said. “But I think maybe they will try some means to kill me anyway.”

Rampete refers questions about alleged brutality to Lt. Viljoen, who says he, Rampete and others are confident that the attorney general will not file charges against them.

In the meantime, the lieutenant and the constable are still on the force, still carrying guns and still making arrests in the townships.

And Viljoen still works from an office whose walls display the flags of the right-wing Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) and its military wing. AWB urges whites to arm themselves for war with the ANC when blacks come to power. Viljoen says the flags are souvenirs from investigations of the AWB.

Van der Westhuizen says the South African police have always thoroughly investigated allegations against their own officers. But he believes that zealous questioning is a problem for police forces around the world.

“Sometimes you know the person is guilty,” he said. “You just ask them questions, give them a few slaps and so on, and then you’ve assaulted them.”

However, the general thinks that the vast cultural differences in South Africa make it especially prone to police misconduct.

“To investigate white people or even the Colored (mixed-race) people is far easier,” he said. “But if you want to question the black one, you can’t go to the point with him. You have to start where he was born. It will take you all day.”

And although most top police officers seem to have accepted the government’s decision to open negotiations with the ANC, Van der Westhuizen admitted that the rank-and-file policeman has been slow to embrace the changes in South Africa.

“It is a problem,” Van der Westhuizen said. “There are good relations between us and the ANC command. But it will take time to convince the man on the ground that he has nothing to fear from the police, and to convince the police that the ANC man is not a terrorist anymore.”