Profile : ANC Leader in Ciskei Protest Is a Veteran of Brinkmanship : His role in the massacre may have alienated some supporters. But his passionate dedication still makes him a beloved anti-apartheid leader.

Ronnie Kasrils made his first bomb more than 30 years ago with chemicals from a drugstore, a capsule of sulfuric acid and a condom. His target was a government office that issued passes preventing free movement for blacks in South Africa.

Kasrils, a “thrilled and scared” white 23-year-old, placed the crude device next to a wall of the pass office, hoping to destroy it.

“It wasn’t terribly successful,” Kasrils said recently with a laugh. “We broke a few doors and windows. But it had symbolic impact.”

That bomb, and others detonated that December day in 1961, launched the African National Congress’ armed struggle--and Kasrils’ career as one of the most influential and popular leaders of the anti-apartheid group.

Last week, the burly 54-year-old was again at the forefront of the black liberation struggle. He led ANC protesters on a dangerous end run to Bisho, capital of the Ciskei homeland created by the South African government, that triggered a fusillade of gunfire.

That operation, like so many in Kasrils’ long career, was well-planned but very risky. It also was political brinkmanship, for which 28 ANC supporters paid with their lives.

Kasrils, head of the ANC’s campaigns department, and other leaders had planned to lead the 20,000 protesters only into the homeland’s soccer stadium, under a compromise with the homeland government.

But Kasrils had checked out the stadium and spotted a large hole in its fence. In a meeting of ANC leaders the night before, Kasrils volunteered to lead a small group of protesters through that hole to Ciskei’s government offices, 300 yards away.

When Kasrils and his group emerged from the opening, though, Ciskei troops opened fire on them--and on all the demonstrators waiting to enter the stadium. Kasrils dived for cover as the bullets whizzed overhead, striking some of his compatriots.

Afterward, the government and an array of liberal whites, including major newspapers, charged that Kasrils provoked the shootings and callously used ANC supporters as “cannon fodder.”

Indeed, he and other ANC leaders now admit they may have miscalculated. They had thought they could outflank the Ciskei soldiers, and they also thought many soldiers would join them in ousting Ciskei’s military ruler, Brig. Gen. Oupa Gqozo.

“Everyone knew there was a risk,” Kasrils said. “But we believed getting rid of Gqozo was worth the risk.”

Although Kasrils regrets the loss of life, he refuses to second-guess the decision. “We have been in a life-and-death struggle for decades,” he said. “If we had not been prepared to sacrifice, we would not be where we are--on the eve of liberation.”

The unrepentant ANC leader is a stocky man with thick, dark eyebrows, tousled curly hair and a boyish, friendly grin. He is a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee and the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.

His role in the Ciskei massacre may have alienated some supporters. But his passionate dedication to the cause of black liberation, his long years underground and his ready sense of humor still make him one of the most popular leaders among the ANC rank-and-file.

“He is one comrade who is so loved by the masses,” Winnie Mandela, estranged wife of ANC President Nelson Mandela and an ANC militant herself, told The Times. “A man like him gives us hope that whatever brutality has been meted out on the black skin by the white skin, that there is still hope for inter-race relations.”

Although he was head of military intelligence for the ANC guerrilla army during the 1980s, Kasrils was little-known outside the close circle of exiled leaders until he returned to South Africa when the ANC was legalized in 1990.

He had been in the country only a few months when the South African police uncovered Operation Vula, an old ANC plan to build a vast underground of leaders inside the country.

The government revoked Kasrils’ amnesty, and he dove underground for 11 months, until the government changed its mind.

While on the run, his antics made him a legend in the ANC, particularly among angry, militant young blacks.

A few days after the police began looking for him, Kasrils surprised foreign correspondents by keeping a luncheon appointment made weeks before. He arrived, sweating and grinning, and ordered a drink (“Whiskey--and don’t drown it in water”).

Then he spent a half-hour defending Operation Vula against government claims that it was as a Communist-inspired plot to overthrow the government.

“I don’t think this nonsense will last long,” he said before dashing out the door.

But it did last, and the local newspapers tagged this Communist fugitive the “Red Pimpernel.” Years earlier, Nelson Mandela, another beloved fugitive, had been known as the “Black Pimpernel,” a reference to the novel “The Scarlet Pimpernel.”

Kasrils used a variety of disguises and safehouses to escape detection, but he surfaced occasionally to tweak the authorities.

One Sunday, he appeared on a soccer stadium stage before 60,000 cheering supporters at the formal launch of the South African Communist Party. He got into one of the cars leaving the stadium, and the car was later stopped by police and searched. But they didn’t find Kasrils. He had slipped out just before the car exited, then changed clothes and walked out with the crowd.

Kasrils also made appearances on the letters page of the pro-government Citizen daily newspaper, which signed his name, “Ronnie Kasrils, No Fixed Abode.”

In one of those letters, Kasrils “congratulated” the newspaper for having identified him, in a story, as being at the scene of a police raid on some union offices in downtown Johannesburg. But, he pointed out, “at the time I happened to be in a kosher restaurant in Doornfontein (a few miles away) dining on pickled herring and potato latkes.”

Kasrils was born in Johannesburg and grew up in the lower-middle-class suburb of Yeoville. His parents were Jews from Lithuania, and his father worked as a traveling salesman for a candy factory.

He remembers being troubled even as a young boy by similarities between oppression of Jews in Germany and of blacks in South Africa. And, like so many of his generation, his political awakening came in 1960 with the police massacre of 67 black protesters at Sharpeville.

While working as an advertising copywriter, he joined the Communist Party, then a mostly white organization that had --and still has--strong links to the ANC. And he helped found the ANC’s underground guerrilla army, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).

In the early 1960s, he planted a dozen bombs at government installations; he says no one was killed by those blasts. Then, in 1963, he left for military training in the Soviet Union.

He became a leader in the guerrilla army, training and sending hundreds of soldiers on missions inside South Africa. He also was a target of Pretoria’s secret agents. While his wife and two children remained in London, he moved from house to house and country to country in Africa and Europe, always keeping one step ahead of would-be assassins.

When he returned to South Africa in 1990, that past, along with his Communist Party membership, made him one of the ANC leaders most feared by white South Africans. But his return to the underground had made him an even bigger hero among the disenfranchised black majority.

“I’ve pursued a just cause,” Kasrils insists. “It wasn’t criminal, and we weren’t standing for anything that could be construed as evil.

“My hands are clean. My conscience is clean.”

Biography

Name: Ronnie Kasrils

Title: Head of ANC campaigns.

Age: 54

Personal: Born in Johannesburg to Jewish parents of Lithuanian extraction. Father was a traveling salesman for a candy factory. Spent 27 years in exile, rising to become chief of military intelligence for the ANC’s guerrilla army. Favorite drink is Scotch and water.

Quote: “I’ve pursued a just cause. My hands are clean. My conscience is clean.”