ANC Offices Targets for Terror Bombs

The late-night bomb exploded without warning, shattering windows in five shops and offices and scattering shrapnel that cratered concrete, pierced metal frames and splintered wood furniture.

Amid the broken glass and debris, the target was obvious: The bomb--one of at least 30 tallied by police since late December--had been placed on the doormat of the recently opened office of the African National Congress. The black-led ANC is the largest political party and likely winner of the country’s first democratic elections this April.

“This area is a conservative area, right wing,” explained the local ANC leader, Neo Mutle. “And putting an ANC office in this place, we should expect retaliation.”

The wave of terror has seen a sudden surge, with nine bombings since Wednesday. Targets have included ANC offices, billboards and homes of supporters. Two explosions Friday night derailed a freight train and destroyed a rural electric pylon, blacking out a small town.

No one has been killed and no one has claimed responsibility, but police and other authorities say they have no doubt who is to blame: increasingly desperate far-right whites, who have repeatedly threatened to use violence to sabotage the transition to black majority rule after more than three centuries of white domination.

“We have every reason to believe it is the far right wing,” Craig Cotze, spokesman for the Ministry of Law and Order, said Saturday. Police have made no arrests, he said, partly because they have too many potential suspects in the ever-splintering network of neo-Nazi, pro-apartheid groups. “It could be any one of 200 far-right-wing groups. . . . It’s hard to point the finger at any one group.”

Cotze and other officials warned that the suspected right-wing terror campaign could mark the start of a long-threatened war of resistance by racist militants who are demanding a self-ruled white homeland and are opposed to the country’s first all-race elections, scheduled for April 26-28.

“We must expect the closer we get to the election, the more extremist right-wing behavior will manifest itself,” Cotze said.

More than 4,000 people died in political violence last year, and officials fear even greater carnage unless the right-wingers and other ANC opponents are somehow persuaded to join the democratic process. Intensive, closed-door talks to bring the holdouts on board have been deadlocked for months, with only a week to go before a deadline expires for political parties to register for the election.

Cotze cautioned that the right-wing threat should not be underestimated.

“They operate in cells,” he said. “Many have special training from the military or police. They are well-armed. They are highly motivated. We’re dealing with formidable opponents.”

Stephen Maninger, spokesman for the Afrikaner Volksfront, a coalition of 60 or so right-wing groups, said his organization is not involved in the bombing campaign. But he didn’t deny that right-wingers are responsible.

“It’s an indication of the frustration on the grass-roots level,” he said. “We’ve been experiencing a lot of problems trying to restrain people because they feel the negotiation process has brought nothing. We feel marginalized, and a lot of individuals are becoming restless.”

On a campaign swing through the Western Transvaal and Orange Free State, the right-wing strongholds where the bombings have been concentrated, ANC President Nelson Mandela grimly warned that the bombings could backfire.

“They have made a mistake by trying to use force to intimidate us,” he told cheering black supporters who packed a soccer stadium Friday in Maokeng, a township outside Kroonstad. “People are angry, and we’re finding it difficult to stop them from taking the law into their own hands.”

Earlier, Mandela chided several dozen mostly white business leaders in Sasolburg for staying silent while armed right-wing whites try to “turn this country into Bosnia, into Somalia.”

“The threat from the right wing is to plunge the country into civil war,” Mandela said. “. . . When that happens, it is not just blacks who are going to die, as is happening now. Blacks and whites are going to die.”

Ironically, the ANC bombed Sasolburg’s sprawling synthetic-fuel-producing complex in 1980, when ANC-backed guerrillas attacked symbols of the apartheid regime. Two chemical tanks were destroyed, and a guard was wounded.

Justice Richard Goldstone, who heads a widely respected independent commission that investigates violence in the country, said last week in an interview in Johannesburg that the ultra-right threat will probably be most severe in the weeks ahead.

“One of the causes of political violence is . . . people who want to derail the current process and stop the election,” he said. “After the elections, that threat is gone.”

The demand to create a self-ruled white homeland appears impossible to fulfill. Mandela, who is almost certain to become the country’s first black president, has repeatedly said he will not allow the dismemberment of the nation to satisfy a militant white minority.

“Nothing of the sort will ever happen,” Mandela said Friday. “They are going to live in South Africa like everyone else.”

But the demand, among others, lingers on the table in negotiations among the ANC, the government and a coalition called the Freedom Alliance. The alliance is made up of the Afrikaner Volksfront, the right-wing umbrella group, together with several anti-ANC black leaders, including Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, who heads the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party.

One of the more bellicose members of the Volksfront, neo-Nazi leader Eugene TerreBlanche, insisted at a right-wing rally Saturday that the demand for the homeland, or volkstaat, is non-negotiable.

“Mandela, give us a volkstaat or you’ll have total war in South Africa,” he told several hundred khaki-clad followers, according to the South African Press Assn. He warned that “more explosions will occur from tonight.”

As before, most of the bombings this week used commercial explosives. Among the targets was a wall outside the home of Jan Serfontein, one of the few white farmers supporting the ANC in Potchefstroom. He made local headlines when he greeted Mandela at a nearby training center for black farm workers Monday.

Other targets included an ANC office in Ottosdal, two trade union offices in Klerksdorp and a community hall in Groot Marico.

Here in Bothaville, a sleepy white farming town where traffic signs are plastered with blue-and-white stickers that proclaim, “This is our Volkstaat ,” the Jan. 17 bombing of the ANC office came as little surprise.

Several hundred right-wingers gathered to block the road when the ANC opened the election campaign office downtown last fall. The white owner of the building later received telephone threats for renting the space.

Mutle, the local ANC coordinator and a former guerrilla, said the explosion caused up to $60,000 in damage. But he said the bombers failed if they hoped to frighten him or to force him to close the office he’ll use to organize blacks to vote for the very first time in the land of their birth.

“The right wing, if they are trying to scare us, they are mistaken,” Mutle said. “We know the danger. We expected this. . . . But whether they like it or not, we are going to use these offices.”