Factional Violence Grows as S. Africa Takes Road to Democracy : Politics: The last white Parliament prepares for open elections. But rivals engage in ‘low-intensity civil war.’

INIWE, South Africa — After a weekend of celebration, Azariah Luthuli’s uMemulo , a traditional Zulu ritual to mark a man’s coming of age, was winding down. He and his friends had danced in a mud hut, bathed in the river, slaughtered a cow and drunk bottle after bottle of sweet Black Label beer.

So by 10 p.m., only he and his family were left around the fire when the killers came. Without warning, they began blasting away with AK-47 assault rifles. By the time the shooting stopped, Luthuli and seven other family members, including a 4-year-old boy and 6-year-old girl, were dead.

Luthuli’s wife, Fikile Gina, who was shot in the leg and back, recalls only two things about the little-noted recent slaughter here.

First, she said, “they took a long time shooting” her family; scores of spent cartridges were found on the ground. And second, the raiding party fired more shots in triumph as they fled down the hill, crossed a shallow river and ran through corn fields and mango trees to a rival Zulu village on the next hill.

“There are a lot of terrible things happening here,” Gina, 26, said from her hospital bed in nearby Empangeni.

Iniwe, the destitute village where the massacre took place, is filled with Zulu supporters of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Its bitter rival on the next hill, Ndabayakhe, is a stronghold of Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party.

The valley between them represents a political gulf that threatens to cause havoc, if not disaster, as South Africa’s last white Parliament prepares to ratify the country’s first democratic constitution. The vote, expected by Wednesday, will formally start the race for the first multi-party, multiracial elections next April 27.

The parliamentary debate began Friday in Cape Town, where the white-led government’s chief constitutional minister, Roelf Meyer, issued the strongest official apology yet for apartheid, the oppressive laws of racial separation.

“We, who were responsible for apartheid, are now saying that we want to leave that wrong behind,” Meyer said. “We are saying we are sorry. But we are also saying that we are now determined to rectify what went wrong.”

But not everyone agrees, at least here in rural Natal, traditional home of the Zulus, South Africa’s largest ethnic group.

Buthelezi has so far refused to endorse the constitution or recognize its provisions. He also refuses to join or allow elections in Kwazulu, the apartheid-created Zulu homeland that he controls as a one-party state. One result has been a sharp upsurge in clashes between Buthelezi’s Inkatha followers and Mandela’s ANC supporters.

An early campaign swing by Mandela into Natal last month, for example, drew tens of thousands of cheering Zulus to his rallies--but sparked the worst violence yet in an already bloody year from factions who see each other as mortal enemies rather than as political rivals.

On Nov. 26, a key organizer for Mandela’s visit was gunned down on a busy street in Pohola. Eight other ANC members were shot and wounded at his funeral vigil. Farther south, an Inkatha leader and two others were shot to death in their car.

Ten other people were shot, stabbed or stoned to death near Umlazi. Dozens of houses were razed or torched in several villages. Then came the Sunday night massacre at Iniwe. In all, police said, at least 35 people were killed over the weekend, and a record 216 during the month.

“A low-intensity civil war is going on here,” Ziba Jiyane, political director of the Inkatha party, warned several days later, citing separate bombings that morning of a bus and hotel in downtown Durban.

And Senzo Mchunu, the ANC secretary general in northern Natal, warned that the worst is yet to come.

“We’re expecting more and more violence,” he said simply. “The climate right now is there is no free campaigning. We can’t hold open meetings. It’s very difficult to say there will be free elections.”

The stakes are high. The ANC-Inkatha rivalry, aggravated by traditional clan feuds and land disputes, is a chief cause of the violence that has left more than 17,000 dead in the last decade. Unless the fighting is curbed, the first democratic government may find it impossible to govern.

Buthelezi, who was once a credible rival to Mandela for leadership of the country’s black majority, is trying to use that leverage. He is the pivotal figure in the Freedom Alliance, an unlikely coalition of Zulu nationalists, white supremacists, Afrikaner separatists and conservative black homeland leaders who have lined up to fight the march to democracy.

The Freedom Alliance, which boycotted the constitutional negotiations, has repeatedly threatened to launch everything from a campaign of civil disobedience to a full-scale war unless granted ethnic self-determination and regional autonomy. Critics say the leaders simply fear giving up the power they assumed under apartheid.

But weeks of talks between the Freedom Alliance and its opponents in the ANC and the lame-duck white government of President Frederik W. De Klerk have been fruitless. Indeed, compromise now seems less likely than ever.

At an emotional ceremony Thursday on a hilltop in Isandlwana, site of a famed 1879 Zulu victory over British troops, Buthelezi and his longtime ally, Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini, vowed defiance of the new South Africa.

“We demand Zulu self-determination,” Buthelezi told the cheering crowd of 10,000, many of whom wore animal skins and waved long, broad-bladed spears.

The king, a moderate who had appeared to criticize the Freedom Alliance several weeks ago, was even more hard-line.

“I will die rather than insult the memory of my great ancestral kings by handing over the land of their people to our political enemies,” he said.

“Until we get what is justly ours, there can be no rest for any true Zulu,” the king added. “Resist, I command you. Resist, I implore you!”

The two leaders broke down in tears as a traditional soothsayer chanted that the Zulu kingdom’s future is at stake. That may be true: Any hope of winning significant concessions runs out when the Parliament passes the draft constitution. Amendments after that become much more difficult.

And if Buthelezi stays out of the election, he loses all power in the new ANC-ruled nation. Most of the Kwazulu budget comes from Pretoria, which means the new ANC-led government could literally cut his water, power and payroll.

Even if Buthelezi eventually joins the campaign, as many in his party are urging, polls show Zulus are fiercely divided between the ANC and Inkatha. By all accounts, the ANC will not only win control of the national Parliament but could even win control of the provincial assembly in Natal.

In any case, peace is hardly assured if Inkatha takes part in the election. The ANC and Inkatha accuse each other of secretly planning military offensives, including the use of clandestine death squads, to intimidate and kill local political opponents during the campaign.

The allegations were partly substantiated last week when an independent commission headed by Judge Richard Goldstone cited “the high probability” that the Kwazulu police--which Buthelezi heads--had deployed an elite hit squad to kill at least nine ANC leaders and members in the last two years.

Inkatha leaders deny the charges and insist that ANC-sponsored gangs have murdered 350 party leaders and thousands of grass-roots members in the last decade.