Mandela Halts All Talks With White Leadership : South Africa: The ANC leader says last week’s massacre in black township irreversibly changed the political scene.

Nelson Mandela announced Sunday that the African National Congress is suspending all direct talks with the white government because he can no longer explain to his supporters “why we continue to talk to the regime that is murdering our people.”

Mandela’s surprise decision, a risky stroke of political brinkmanship, came in the wake of the Wednesday night massacre of 39 black men, women and children in Boipatong township. The ANC claims the attack was carried out by 200 Zulu migrant workers loyal to Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, with help from President Frederik W. de Klerk’s police force.

In a matter of days, that massacre has become a rallying point for rising black anger with De Klerk’s inability to halt township bloodshed and frustration with what the ANC believes is the government’s unwillingness to budge at the negotiating table.

“The negotiation process is completely in tatters,” Mandela told a militant rally of about 20,000 supporters in a township stadium south of Johannesburg.

Earlier, the ANC president had been warmly welcomed by the same Boipatong residents who had cursed De Klerk and chased him out of the township on Saturday. Police shot and killed at least one protester and injured dozens of others after De Klerk’s departure.

Mandela said the massacre has irreversibly changed the political scene in South Africa, turning the clock back three decades to the bloody confrontations between the white government and oppressed blacks.

“One thing is clear: We are back in the Sharpeville days,” Mandela said, referring to the 1960 police killings of black protesters in nearby Sharpeville that helped launch the underground guerrilla war against the white-minority government.

“The gulf between the oppressed and the oppressor has become unbridgeable,” Mandela added. “Mr. De Klerk . . . wants to keep power by brute force.”

Mandela, his voice still hoarse from a bout with the flu, said he has instructed the ANC’s secretary general, Cyril Ramaphosa, to cancel the next round of one-on-one talks with the government scheduled for Tuesday. Instead, he said, the ANC will hold a meeting of its national executive committee to discuss how to proceed.

The suspension technically affects only one-on-one talks between the ANC and the government over such issues as political prisoners and the ANC’s armed wing, which have been continuing for more than two years. Multi-party constitutional talks among the government, the ANC and 17 other black and white political groups in South Africa will go on.

But those multi-party talks have been stalled since mid-May, when the historic negotiating forum, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), failed to reach agreement on how to write a new constitution. And Mandela’s decision Sunday marked the lowest point in the peace process since CODESA was launched with great fanfare last December.

The ANC and the government are the two most important players in the negotiating process, and their relationship is considered vital to breaking the CODESA deadlock. Mandela said the future of ANC participation in CODESA will be discussed at the ANC executive’s meeting Tuesday.

Widespread township violence, which has left more than 3,000 blacks dead since De Klerk launched his reform program in 1990 and legalized the ANC, has triggered a sharp increase in black militancy and threatened the jobs of ANC leaders who have continued to negotiate with the government.

During Mandela’s address Sunday, youngsters in the crowd shouted “We want arms!” and carried placards reading, “Mandela, Give Us Permission to Kill Our Enemies.”

The ANC president, who was making his first public comment on the massacre, said after his tour of the massacre scene that he had “never seen such cruelty.”

“We are no longer dealing with civil human beings,” he added. “They are animals.”

Mandela stopped short of promising to arm his supporters. But, in his most scathing attack ever on De Klerk, he blamed the president, the ruling National Party and Buthelezi’s Inkatha Party for “killing people simply because they are blacks . . . just as the Nazis in Germany killed people because they were Jews.”

Buthelezi’s Inkatha and the government have been close allies for years, and the government admitted last year that it had funneled more than $3 million in taxpayers’ money to support Inkatha.

Although the government and Inkatha leaders deny any role in the Boipatong massacre, residents say the attacks were carried out by Inkatha supporters with police help. No government official has ever suggested that Inkatha should shoulder any of the blame. Instead, officials have blamed the ANC for creating a climate for the massacre by launching a countrywide protest campaign of “mass action.”

Mandela claimed that the killings were the result of “contingency plans” by De Klerk to counter the ANC’s protest plans, which will begin in earnest next month in an attempt to force the government to hand over power to a multiracial interim government.

De Klerk, who has ordered a special police squad of 200 officers to investigate the massacre, left the country Sunday for Spain, where he is to attend South African Day at the 1992 World Expo in Seville.

The rapid deterioration of negotiations in South Africa has raised renewed calls for international mediation, something the ANC has long supported but which the government opposes. Mandela said the ANC will ask for permission to address a special session of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the Boipatong massacre.

Mandela also reacted angrily to De Klerk’s suggestion Saturday that he might be forced to reimpose a state of emergency in the country to quell the violence.

“Let me warn him,” Mandela said to cheers. “The introduction of anti-democratic measures today will result in a defiance campaign, with me leading that defiance campaign.”

Meanwhile, police reported 15 more deaths Sunday in overnight violence, including five residents of a Zulu workers hostel in Soweto. An Inkatha spokesman said the victims belonged to his party, and he blamed the attack on the ANC.

In Washington on Sunday, Secretary of State James A. Baker III urged De Klerk and Mandela to resume their negotiations on the future course of South Africa.

“President De Klerk and Nelson Mandela have both exhibited extraordinary political courage to bring the negotiations on democracy as far as they have come . . . and it is very, very regrettable to see these negotiations broken off,” Baker said on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this story from Washington.