Foreign Mediators to Try Solving S. African Impasse : Diplomacy: Kissinger and others will take up Zulu refusal to participate in this month’s democratic voting.

With only two weeks until this country’s first all-race elections, a private business group announced Monday that seven foreign jurists, academics and diplomats will arrive today to try to mediate a last-minute solution to a constitutional impasse over battle-racked Natal province.

The group will begin meeting Wednesday with leaders of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which is expected to win the elections, and Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, which is seeking to delay the elections as part of its militant campaign for greater provincial autonomy and an independent Zulu state in Natal.

The mediation group includes former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., a chief judge emeritus of the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said both men are coming as private citizens and not as Clinton Administration envoys.

Buthelezi first proposed using international mediation in March to bridge his dispute with the ANC. But the announcement Monday by the Consultative Business Movement, a private group of South African business leaders who have sought since the 1980s to foster political change, appeared to catch both the ANC and the government by surprise.

“We received information this afternoon that the mediators would be arriving tomorrow,” said ANC spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa. He said the mediation will not affect the April 26-28 balloting. “Those dates are sacrosanct. They will not change.”

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The government of President Frederik W. de Klerk was also notified Monday, said spokesman Richard Carter. He said government officials will meet with the group but had not been involved with setting up its mission.

“The government’s feeling has always been that we were never convinced that international involvement could bear much fruit,” Carter said. “We have consistently believed South Africa’s problems should be solved by South Africans.”

The call to outside mediators came after an unsuccessful summit last Friday attended by Mandela, De Klerk, Buthelezi and the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini. The meeting failed to draw the defiant Zulu leaders back into the democratic process.

But foreign diplomats and analysts were skeptical that a sudden attempt at international mediation by a group with limited or no experience here will succeed where intensive negotiations by South Africans over more than two years have failed.

“It’s hocus baloney,” said Robert Schrire, a political scientist at the University of Cape Town. “I don’t think it amounts to much. The issues here are not those that lend themselves to mediation.”

Schrire said Buthelezi is using the high-profile mediation to keep himself in the world spotlight as South Africa anxiously prepares to elect its first post-apartheid government under black majority rule. “The ANC is humoring him,” Schrire said. “Once they get their landslide victory, they won’t have to worry about silly things like this. In two weeks, this will all be superseded by events.”

A Western diplomat, who has followed the dispute closely, agreed. “I don’t know what they’re going to do when they get here,” he said. “I can’t see what rabbit they’re going to pull out of the hat in the next two weeks.”

But a South African official said the group might provide a “face-saving mechanism” for Buthelezi and the king to accept ANC offers--under international auspices and language. “There may be a positive spinoff,” he said. “It may be helpful if the king hears that the deal he’s being offered is a bloody good one.”

Jeanne Pfaff, a spokeswoman for the Consultative Business Movement, said the group will make recommendations to the ANC and Inkatha in about 10 days. “This is mediation, not binding arbitration,” she said.

Buthelezi insists that the five-year interim constitution adopted last December is “fatally flawed” because it does not offer enough autonomy, especially on issues of taxation and police, to the nine provinces that will be created under the new government.

But Buthelezi walked out of the multi-party constitutional negotiations last summer and has refused to participate in the elections. More important, national election officials say Buthelezi has obstructed their efforts to organize polling in Inkatha-dominated areas.

Violence between pro-election and anti-election Zulus in Natal has surged to record levels since Buthelezi announced his boycott in February. A state of emergency that took effect April 1 has had little apparent effect.

Buthelezi is chief minister of KwaZulu, a one-party tribal homeland for Zulus created under apartheid. His many critics argue that he is using his calls for federalism as a front to maintain control that polls show he would lose if he joined the race.