‘Freedom Train’ Kicks Off S. Africa Campaign : Elections: ANC leader Mandela presents party platform after rail trip. President De Klerk courts black support.

Black leader Nelson Mandela laid out his party’s ambitious plans for social justice and economic reform Saturday on a day that essentially kicked off the political campaign for this nation’s first multiracial democratic elections.

Dressed in a dashiki and sporting a broad grin, Mandela rode a 14-car “freedom train” filled with flag-waving supporters to present the platform of his African National Congress to nearly 1,000 diplomats and business, ethnic and religious leaders in a convention center at the edge of this sprawling black township.

“The ANC is ready to govern,” said the 75-year-old Mandela on a stage framed by arches of green, black and gold balloons--the ANC’s colors--and a huge banner with the party’s new slogan: “A Better Life for All.”

President Frederik W. de Klerk, Mandela’s chief opponent in the voting scheduled to take place in three months, will present his party’s platform Wednesday at the National Party convention in Kempton Park, across Johannesburg from Soweto.

De Klerk finished a three-day campaign swing Saturday seeking support from blacks in rural townships east of Johannesburg. But his rallies and speeches were repeatedly marred when hecklers either shouted him down or threatened supporters of the National Party, which created and enforced apartheid.

“The National Party is the real party of peace,” De Klerk shouted into a microphone Saturday as several hundred ANC supporters blocked a road, chanted and sang to drown him out when he opened a party office in the township of Mzinoni. “The ANC is the party of conflict.”

De Klerk has increasingly hammered that theme in hopes of painting the ANC as an organization that sponsors intimidation and terrorism in the townships. Mandela, in turn, has lashed out at De Klerk for not controlling the mostly black-on-black violence that has left more than 13,000 people dead since the dismantling of apartheid began in February, 1990.

Mandela also accuses De Klerk of trying to bury the past. “There are those who would like us to believe that the past doesn’t exist, that decades of apartheid rule have suddenly disappeared,” he said Saturday. “But the economic and social devastation of apartheid remains. Our country is in a mess.”

While the two leading candidates prepared for a busy week of campaign appearances, conservative black and white militants gathered separately to prepare plans to boycott the April elections and use force, if necessary, to resist an ANC-led government.

In Ulundi, capital of the Zulu homeland, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi told a special congress of his Inkatha Freedom Party that his followers should avoid the voting booth and instead use what he called “the politics of resistance” in the face of what polls suggest will be an ANC landslide.

He said the interim constitution passed by Parliament last month, which will serve as the basis of the new democratic government, was “specifically designed to promote ANC power and is an instrument for the Inkatha’s destruction.”

“I say no to the present constitution, and I say as this constitution stands, I do not see how we can enter elections,” Buthelezi said in a rambling, three-hour speech.

With his party in growing disarray, the mercurial Zulu leader who was once Mandela’s chief black rival had been widely expected to tell his party whether or not he was going to join the election. His continuing equivocation passes the ball back to the Freedom Alliance, the unlikely coalition of Inkatha, several black homeland leaders and the Afrikaner Volksfront, an umbrella organization of 60 right-wing white groups.

The government and the ANC have a negotiating session scheduled Monday with the alliance to address the coalition’s demands the constitution be amended to provide for greater regional powers. The closed-door talks have been deadlocked for weeks after the alliance turned down an offer of concessions on the constitution in return for a commitment to participate in the elections.

Clearly, some members of the alliance see little room for compromise.

Pro-apartheid whites, in particular, demand the right to create their own white state within South Africa rather than submit to black majority rule. Several thousand right-wingers, meeting Saturday at a fairground in Pretoria, declared independence for the would-be white homeland and approved the creation of a symbolic transitional government to run it.

Ferdi Hartzenberg, the fiery leader of the white separatist Conservative Party, was sworn in as shadow president. The crowd shouted down a more moderate Afrikaner leader, retired Gen. Constand Viljoen, who suggested continued talks with the ANC and government to forestall bloodshed.

So far, however, bellicose threats from the right have proved all bluster. For one thing, the dozens of defiant white parties involved can’t agree on the proposed borders of the homeland they demand, nor even what self-determination would entail. Some want to ban blacks entirely, others to allow them as servants and laborers, while some want the entire country to simply revert to the racist policies of the past.

Both Mandela and De Klerk oppose creating autonomous territories along racial, tribal or ethnic lines. But negotiators from both parties have indicated they would consider provincial boundaries within a federal system so that particular groups, such as Zulus or whites, would be in the majority.

Despite such conflicting signals from the fringes, one key part of the April 27-29 election--the winner--remains a near certainty. Polls consistently show the ANC will win a clear majority of the popular vote, meaning Mandela would become the first black president. The National Party is favored in only one of the nine new provinces, the Western Cape, where there is a large population of mixed-race voters who are nervous about ANC control.

ANC leaders have said their goal is to win 67% of the seats in the new Parliament, a big enough majority so the ANC can rewrite the interim constitution without cutting compromises or deals.

For now, however, the ANC platform is long on promises and short on specifics.

In his speech, Mandela said the party would focus on improving the quality of life by focusing on job creation. He pledged a massive public works program to provide jobs for some 2.5 million people over the next decade.

For the poor, he said the new government can build 1 million homes in five years, provide running water and toilets to over 1 million families and bring electricity to 2.5 million homes.

He said the government would introduce a single education system to provide 10 years of free and compulsory schooling, rather than the multiple and unequal systems set up under apartheid.

Tokyo Sexwale, a senior ANC leader, earlier had warned that the platform may raise expectations that will be impossible to fulfill and dangerous to ignore.

“For us to turn the country around it will take decades and decades,” he said as the “freedom train” rumbled from Johannesburg to Soweto. “We know that. That is the tragedy of apartheid.”