Factional Violence Deepens S. Africa’s Despair : Crisis: Tit-for-tat killings could scuttle stalled talks on giving blacks more say in a post-apartheid government.

Four white guys wearing baseball caps and carrying revolvers in their blue jeans crept around Mbonwa Sabelo’s home Friday, searching the eerily quiet hillside for bullet casings.

“I hope the police will get these people and bring them to court,” said Sabelo as he watched the police forensic team work. “But I really have no hope that this violence will ever end.”

During a coming-of-age celebration for Sabelo’s daughter a few nights earlier, eight gunmen opened fire here, killing 20 people, including four children. One, an infant boy, died with his mother, in her arms.

That massacre--about 15 miles southwest of Durban--has touched off a new wave of civil war between supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress, a conflict that has claimed 2,000 lives in the past two years in Natal province.

But this time, the violence and the charges and countercharges have thrown the country into one of its deepest crises. It has raised serious questions about the prospects for a resumption of constitutional negotiations aimed at giving blacks a greater say in a post-apartheid government. And it has made many South Africans doubt that the fighting will ever end.

The government sent army reinforcements to patrol the region Friday and offered big rewards to apprehend the killers. But few believe it will be enough. The tit-for-tat violence has a momentum of its own, fed by an unbridled desire for political supremacy--and for revenge--in the villages scattered over hundreds of miles of this beautiful countryside.

“You have reprisal and counter-reprisal,” said Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, the 1984 Nobel peace laureate. The situation, he added, “is desperate.”

ANC President Nelson Mandela asked, “When we promised the people freedom, were we offering them a mirage?”

The escalating war between Zulus in Natal, which has claimed 200 lives in the past two months, is directly linked to the floundering constitutional negotiations.

Inkatha’s leader, Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, has refused to return to the negotiating table in anger over an agreement reached last month between President Frederik W. de Klerk and Mandela. De Klerk’s government has long been a Buthelezi ally and Mandela’s ANC a bitter Buthelezi foe.

Buthelezi believes that his predominantly Zulu party and other leaders in South Africa are being cut out of the negotiations.

The massacre of Inkatha supporters at Mbonwa Sabelo’s home this week was preceded by the killing of seven ANC supporters in the area. That incident was preceded by a series of attacks on both ANC and Inkatha members. By week’s end, the massacre had led to several killings, including the assassination of a regional ANC leader and the murder of an Inkatha-supporting tribal elder and two of his lieutenants.

The ANC leader, Reggie Hadebe, was killed in an ambush as he returned from a peace meeting with Inkatha and the police. Hadebe, 35, whose wife is expecting their seventh child, had once been an Inkatha leader before he switched allegiances. “Reggie was a particular thorn in Inkatha’s side because he was a person who had come through Inkatha’s ranks,” said John Jeffrey, an ANC official in Pietermaritzburg who was driving the car in which Hadebe died.

A police reward offered for information leading to the arrest of Hadebe’s killers has drawn fire from Inkatha. The police also are offering a reward in the Sabelo massacre, but Inkatha spokesmen said few rewards have been offered for the deaths of their leaders. More than 60 Inkatha leaders have been slain in the past year.

De Klerk, Tutu and other leaders in South Africa have urged Mandela and Buthelezi to meet to resolve their differences. “We both have to come up with solutions,” said Muzi Mkhwanazi, an Inkatha field worker in Durban. “If the ANC doesn’t want to play ball, though, we can’t do it ourselves.”

But ANC leaders, under pressure from grass-roots supporters in Natal to isolate Buthelezi, point out that past agreements reached by Buthelezi and Mandela have not been honored. Mandela has refused another one-on-one meeting with his foe, but he has agreed to meet Buthelezi if De Klerk and other parties who signed the national peace accord last year are present.

The ANC and Inkatha blame each other for perpetuating the civil war. Inkatha charges that the ANC is fighting for control of the country; the ANC says that Inkatha is trying to gain more political power with the government’s help.

“The ANC won’t stop until they gain complete power,” said Kim Hodgson, an Inkatha spokesman in Durban.

Harry Gwala, the most powerful ANC leader in Natal, admitted: “We are not sitting passively. We are organizing to destroy apartheid and Inkatha is defending the vestiges of apartheid.”

Inkatha, with 1.7 million paid members, is the largest political organization in Natal, home to nearly 7 million Zulus. But many Zulus are forced to join Inkatha to keep their jobs in Buthelezi’s homeland government. Although the ANC has fewer paid members nationwide, it is regarded as the most powerful black organization. And the ANC’s strongest support in Natal is among younger Zulus who distrust the tribal system that Buthelezi embraces.

For Mbonwa Sabelo and the countless other Zulus caught in the cross-fire of this ugly power struggle, the damage has been done. The 42-year-old laid-off factory worker lost two brothers and two nephews in the massacre. He is ready to abandon the place of his birth.

“I’m scared of living here anymore,” Sabelo said, looking at the bloodstained walls of his homestead. “These people sneak up on us in the night. They are nothing more than thugs and criminals.”