Slain Woman’s Family Makes Plea for Peace : South Africa: Loved ones place flowers at site where O.C.’s Amy Biehl was fatally attacked by angry mob.

In a black township riven by violence, in a nation echoing with calls for race war, the grief-stricken family of Amy Biehl tried to turn her vicious murder here into a fervent plea for peace Sunday.

One by one, the Orange County family knelt, cried and placed red, white and pink carnations against a roadside gas station’s white wooden rail where the 26-year-old Fulbright scholar was dragged from her car, hit in the face with a brick and stabbed to death by an angry mob chanting anti-white slogans on Aug. 25.

“Rest in peace, Amy,” whispered her weeping mother, Linda Biehl, gently laying the first flowers down. Her husband, Peter, embraced her and their three remaining children after each completed the sad memorial rite. Then they joined hands in a circle and prayed on the litter-strewn grass.

The slain woman’s fiance, Scott Meinert, stood back silently until the family and several dozen friends, supporters and reporters had drifted away. Then he walked up and fell to his knees beside the fence, sobbing with his head in his hands.

But the family insisted that they had come here from Newport Beach with neither anger nor remorse. Rather, they said they hoped that Amy Biehl’s dedication to bringing multiracial elections and democratic change to South Africa would help heal and inspire a deeply divided land where racial hatred and political murder have claimed an estimated 16,000 victims over the years.

“All the attention is a little embarrassing,” Peter Biehl, 50, marketing officer for an Oregon-based food company, conceded in an interview. “Certainly Amy would be mortified. But that’s OK.

“What she was involved in is much bigger than her, and much bigger than all of us,” Biehl said. “We want to make sure that’s not lost sight of. . . . That’s the main reason we made this trip. So that elections are held next April and peaceful change can occur.”

Even as the Biehls completed their first day of a weeklong visit arranged by Cape Town’s mayor, the bitter aftermath of the shooting deaths of five black youths in a house at dawn Friday by South African Defense Force commandos in the nominally independent homeland Transkei overshadowed their call for peace.

The government of President Frederik W. de Klerk insisted that, despite claims by the victims’ families, the youngest of those killed was not 12 years old, but 17. Police officials said three of those killed were armed terrorists in the military wing of the radical Pan-Africanist Congress, and the other two were suspected collaborators.

But family members and PAC leaders said the five were unarmed children who were shot as they slept. “We won’t take this lying down,” PAC’s military spokesman, Peter Mayende, said after the raid.

The U.N. observer mission in South Africa condemned the raid “in the strongest possible terms.”

In Guguletu, not all those who gathered to commemorate Amy Biehl’s death spoke only of peace.

“There is a war in our country,” Dullah Omar, a regional African National Congress leader and head of the University of the Western Cape law center where Biehl had worked for 10 months, warned several hundred black parishioners who packed Biehl’s memorial Mass at St. Gabriel’s Church in Guguletu. “That war will not end until we have wiped out apartheid from this country.”

Father Basil van Rensburg said the congregation should remember not just the blond, idealistic Californian who had studied the Xhosa language and worked among them, but the 16,000 mostly black, mostly forgotten South Africans who died without headlines, politicians or public memorials.

“It’s more than irony that Amy Biehl became a victim of the oppression that can craze people,” he said, as the Biehls--parents Peter and Linda, 16-year-old Zach, 23-year-old Molly and 27-year-old Kim--sat and wiped away tears in a nearby pew. “That is the tragedy.”

After reading a verse from the Bible, Peter Biehl thanked the speakers for including his daughter in the honor roll of those who died fighting apartheid. “You have made it much easier for us to have counted her among the many thousands of her brothers and sisters who have given their lives in the struggle,” he said.

As part of her research, Amy Biehl had been working to develop voter education programs and to help write the laws that, for the first time, are supposed to guarantee equal opportunity and protection for all South Africans. She was killed days before she was to return to the United States to pursue a doctorate degree at Rutgers University.

Among other plans this week, the family will meet with women’s groups, attend a dance and music festival, open a juvenile justice center and dedicate a day-care center named for Amy Biehl in Pietermaritzburg. They will return to California next Sunday.

U.S. Ambassador Princeton Lyman and his wife, Helen, attended the Mass and laid flowers at the murder site. Earlier this week, the U.S. Embassy announced that two Fulbright scholarships will be awarded in Amy Biehl’s honor next year.

The awards will go to an American studying in South Africa and another researcher in the United States.

“I believe Amy Biehl’s memory will so inspire others, including South Africans of every color, that she will keep contributing in ever larger measures to the quest for justice and equality,” a spokesman said.

In a separate development, Cape Town police announced the arrest of two youths in the stabbing attack on Brown University exchange student Daniela Malin, 24, Friday night. Malin, a volunteer math teacher at an integrated school near Cape Town, was in stable condition Sunday.