Scandals of Yesterday Could Haunt De Klerk : South Africa: New allegations of corruption and murder, although dated, may slow the reform process.

The credibility of President Frederik W. de Klerk, crucial to any compromise with blacks in South Africa, stood severely damaged Monday by new allegations of assassinations and scandal from his party’s apartheid past.

“It can only weaken the reform process,” said Robert Schrire, a professor of African studies at the University of Cape Town. “And the mass public is going to be more and more skeptical of any promises De Klerk or his government make.”

Liberal and conservative opponents of De Klerk took turns Monday night attacking the government in Parliament, demanding Cabinet minister resignations over multimillion-dollar corruption in the state agency that administered development programs for the black homelands in the 1980s.

At the same time, black leaders sharply criticized De Klerk after a newspaper published evidence that senior security force officers proposed that three anti-apartheid leaders be killed--two weeks before they were found dead in 1985.

Although the allegations are dated, the furor they have created here suggests that it will be extremely difficult for South Africans to agree to forget the past--a step that analysts say is necessary to keep the reform process moving.

Many key political leaders, including African National Congress President Nelson Mandela and others, would have preferred to put the past actions of the government behind them and move rapidly toward a new constitution that gives blacks real power, analysts say.

“But now there will have to be some form of reckoning,” Schrire said. “And the fact that it is white Afrikaner judges and policemen who have been making the allegations shows that it really is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The assassinations-and-corruption scandal has mushroomed as a political issue in South Africa partly because of other events in recent weeks. The two most prominent have been:

- A white judge, in sentencing a white policeman to hang for killing 11 blacks in 1988, found substantial evidence of a police cover-up in the investigation of that massacre.

- And a policeman in one of the black homelands was released after serving only nine months of a 27-year sentence for murder, even though the judge in his case had described the policeman as a “beast” who showed no remorse and was unlikely to be rehabilitated.

De Klerk has denied any direct links with any of the recent events. But the scandals could damage his growing reputation internationally. And they already have scarred the National Party, in which De Klerk and his family have played leading roles over nearly four decades of apartheid rule.

Black and white leaders contend that De Klerk is responsible for helping build a system that made corruption and state-sponsored terrorism inevitable.

And analysts say the scandals could hamper the five-month-long process of black-white negotiations by making it even more difficult for the ANC to sell any agreements to blacks, who already distrust De Klerk and his negotiating team.

It was a De Klerk-appointed judicial investigation that uncovered the corruption in the now-disbanded Department of Development Aid. The judge’s report found that 10 officials in that department had, through fraud and corruption, squandered vast sums of taxpayer money intended for developing black homelands.

Among the men who headed that department in the 1980s were Gerrit Viljoen, De Klerk’s minister in charge of negotiations; Piet Kornhoof, former South African ambassador to the United States, and Stoffel van der Merwe, a former Cabinet minister who now is secretary general of the National Party.

Peter Soal, a spokesman for the liberal white Democratic Party, demanded in Parliament on Monday that De Klerk permanently appoint a judicial commission to investigate corruption in the civil service.

“Has there been any attempt to rectify the matter, or have you all simply sat about wringing your hands and wondering how you can . . . secure your own personal survival?” Soal asked the government.

The Conservative Party, De Klerk’s right-wing opposition, also called for the resignations of Viljoen and Van der Merwe, accusing them of being ultimately responsible for the scandal.

De Klerk has promised an investigation into the newspaper allegations that Mathew Goniwe, Mbulelo Goniwe and Fort Calata were killed in 1985 by the security forces. The evidence of a state-ordered hit is a memo, obtained by the New Nation weekly newspaper, in which a general and a brigadier in the South African Defense Force intelligence unit propose that the three men be “permanently removed from society, as a matter of urgency.”

The newspaper claimed the decision was made at a meeting of the State Security Council attended by De Klerk, who was then the education minister; Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha, and former President Pieter W. Botha.