Zulu Leader ‘Relaxed’ as Tensions Rack Homeland : South Africa: Buthelezi shrugs off charges that his intransigence jeopardizes coming democratic elections.

An armored column of hundreds of South African troops and artillery is massed ominously nearby. Fellow Zulus are slaughtered daily in his name. And his role in a critical summit today may decide whether this nation’s first all-race elections produce peace--or a blood bath.

But Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, arguably the greatest single threat to comity and democracy in this troubled land, sat back Thursday with a wry smile on his face, a gracious laugh and time to invite two reporters for a long interview and leisurely lunch with his Cabinet.

“I am relaxed,” he said. “Why should I not be?”

At 65, His Excellency Dr. Mangosuthu Gatsha Ashpenaz Nathan Buthelezi, Prince of Kwaphindangene, Chief Minister of KwaZulu, president of the Inkatha Freedom Party, and a host of other titles, is a bundle of contradictions.

Long considered one of the most critical leaders in the anti-apartheid struggle, Buthelezi, critics say, now is stirring a volatile mix of ethnic tensions and political hatreds to wreck elections in KwaZulu, the embattled Zulu homeland that he rules, and the surrounding province of Natal.

He insists that he eschews violence. But he sponsors guerrilla training camps and heads a 4,000-member police force that functions as a private army. Two reports by the Goldstone Commission, an independent judicial panel, have accused Buthelezi’s KwaZulu police of supplying assault rifles and other weapons to Inkatha guerrillas and using death squads to support his rule.

Although Buthelezi says he has been “a democrat . . . all my life” with “legitimacy” as an elected leader, he heads a repressive one-party state and personal patronage machine where, according to the human rights group Africa Watch, “freedom of expression, assembly and association for other groups are routinely denied.”

And most important, although Buthelezi says he is only seeking what he calls “a federal formula” for South Africa, similar to that in the United States, he has sworn to boycott the country’s April 26-28 elections, insists that he will ignore the new interim constitution and will not recognize the dawning of democracy and the first government elected by the country’s black majority.

Whether his bitter resistance will lead to brutal guerrilla war in the lush green hills of Natal is unclear. What is obvious is that Buthelezi and his followers are determined to destabilize the new nation by making the eastern province ungovernable unless his demands for virtual autonomy and a sovereign Zulu state are accommodated.

“What you’re talking about is a growling, sad, bitter, endless rumble of violence and discontent,” warned Bill Johnson of the independent Institute for Multi-Party Democracy in Durban. “If we go down that road, we’re in for long, long trouble.”

Hopes of finally crafting a political settlement are riding on today’s long-awaited summit between Buthelezi, his pliant nephew, Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, and their two chief opponents in the crisis, President Frederik W. de Klerk and African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela.

In some ways, it will be Buthelezi’s crowning moment, his place on center stage alongside the leaders with whom he has so often clashed--and whose power he has so long wanted to usurp. So what does Buthelezi expect?

“Just one more meeting,” he said evenly. “Not a big deal.”

He is equally dismissive of the province-wide state of emergency announced by De Klerk last week to stem the bloodletting that claimed almost 300 victims last month alone. More than 2,000 South African troops have poured into Natal, and dozens of heavy armored vehicles, some with mounted cannons, were parked along the road only 18 miles from his office here Thursday.

“They will achieve nothing,” Buthelezi said. “In fact, more people have died since they were deployed here.”

Alternately charming and combative, engaging and explosive, Buthelezi insists he is just misunderstood. To hear him tell it, as he did for two hours Thursday, the press is “demonizing” him. Mandela has been “foul-mouthing” him and “entertaining people at my expense.” De Klerk has “never been a man of his word.” And his legions of enemies “scrape the bottom of the pot to vilify us.”

Questions he doesn’t like are “insulting.” Ask if he agrees with the former friends here and around the globe who call him a “spoiler,” trying to delay or wreck the elections because he can’t win them, his charm turns to cold fury.

“If I called you a bastard and asked you if you liked to be called a bastard, what would you say to that?” he replied icily. “You’re asking if a swearword is acceptable to me.”

Even less acceptable is the fate planned for his fiefdom under the new constitution. KwaZulu and the other nine “homelands” created under apartheid as dumping grounds for unwanted blacks will be reincorporated into the new South Africa immediately after the elections.

At a speech in Durban on Wednesday, Mandela threatened to simply cut the monthly payment used to cover salaries for the Zulu king, Buthelezi, his Cabinet, the hundreds of tribal chiefs and warlords who are under his control, as well as the civil service. An estimated 75% of KwaZulu’s budget comes directly or indirectly from Pretoria.

Buthelezi scorns the notion. Mandela, he said, would “be utterly mad” to cut off money used for schools, hospitals, clinics, welfare and pensioners. “The people as taxpayers . . . are entitled to that money,” he said.

Buthelezi’s role as a sharp thorn in the side of his opponents is not new. In the 1970s, he refused to accept “independence” for KwaZulu, foiling the white supremacist regime in Pretoria in its effort to win legitimacy for its crude attempts to officially expel as many blacks as possible.

That, and his brave, persistent calls to release Mandela from prison, gave Buthelezi--who never was imprisoned--towering stature abroad. So did his staunch anti-communism, his support for free enterprise and his refusal to support the ANC campaigns of mass protest and armed struggle.

And it has made his fall from grace even more dramatic.

He was welcomed to the White House by Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. He considers former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres close friends. A shelf in his circular Cabinet room is crowded with dozens of other signed, smiling portraits of his meetings with everyone from former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to Pope John Paul II.

Buthelezi is bitter that President Clinton never responded when he wrote, congratulating him on his inauguration; Clinton has refused to invite him to Washington. The U.S. Congress also cut off funds to Buthelezi after allocating $4 million last year to assist Inkatha’s expected election preparations.

“The Clinton government is anti-us,” Buthelezi complained. “I mean anti-me and anti-Inkatha. . . . They have decided that Mr. Mandela and Mr. De Klerk will sort out the problems and they are concerned about them, and not about us.”

It is a melancholy refrain, one he repeats over and over. “People pretend we don’t exist,” he said.

But he is a sad figure these days. He lingers with reporters long after their questions are done. With few others singing his praises, he autographs and hands out hagiographies of his achievements; he sends an aide scurrying to fetch a London newspaper editorial that supports him.

Some of his closest supporters were baffled, then horrified, when he joined an anti-ANC negotiating alliance that included the most rabid fringes of right-wing whites, groups that have threatened to launch civil war rather than submit to black rule.

He is given to harangues and tirades, not to mention speeches so long-winded that he holds a spot in the 1994 The Guinness Book of Records for the longest address ever--he spoke for 11 days at the opening of the KwaZulu Legislative Assembly last year.

Analysts and diplomats who study Buthelezi call him a tragic figure, an embittered man whose overweening pride and ambition have blinded him to reality. Mary de Haas, a University of Natal sociologist who has written on Inkatha and the Zulus, has an even harsher assessment.

“I used to think he was a shrewd politician,” she said. “I now think he’s stark, stirring mad. He’s a megalomaniac, and he’s paranoid, as well.”

The estimated 7 million Zulus are South Africa’s largest ethnic group. Although Buthelezi invariably speaks of himself and King Zwelithini as their only true leaders, the Zulus in Natal are not a monolithic group. Polls show younger, urban and educated Zulus support Mandela’s ANC, while older, rural and poorer Zulus back Buthelezi’s Inkatha. And the ANC is clearly more popular.

“The political universe in Natal is split pretty much in half between the ANC and everyone else,” Johnson said. “And that other half is split between Inkatha and everyone else.”

But Buthelezi’s appeals to Zulu ethnic passions and warrior traditions to shore up his dwindling power base have fanned emotions that may be difficult to extinguish. A Western diplomat who has known and studied him for years is grimly pessimistic.

“I would not be surprised if he dug in and fought to the end,” the diplomat said. “You think we’re having trouble now? Wait until after the election. This will look like a picnic.

“He wants Natal,” the diplomat added. “He’s got to have a position that he thinks is worthy of himself, not a position that is dictated or negotiated or crafted by anybody else. I’m convinced that no rational solution is going to work unless it gives him what he wants, which is control of Natal.”

Barring that, the diplomat said, Buthelezi owns property in the United Kingdom, and has “socked money away” overseas.

Buthelezi declines to talk about his future plans. He is “not a prophet,” he said. For that matter, he added, he is not a politician either. “I’m a chief,” he said proudly, a member of the royal family of one of Africa’s great warrior tribes. “I could never not be part of serving my people.”

But he has painted himself into a corner that seems smaller and smaller by the day. He, of course, sees it another way. “I do things on principle,” he explained. “I have always been principled in my politics. I don’t care how lonely I am.”

What the Zulus Want

KwaZulu is one of the 10 homelands created during the apartheid era to deprive blacks of full citizenship. They are due to disappear after South Africa’s first all-race elections April 26-28. Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party says the interim constitution, under which South Africa will be ruled for five years after the elections, does not meet their demands for a large degree of autonomy for the provinces, which will be redrawn. More Zulus say they will not take part in the elections and have been in a virtual civil war with ANC supporters in Natal province.