Zulu Chief in Dramatic Plea to Delay Voting : South Africa: Buthelezi leaps into gathering of foreign mediators to warn of worsening violence.

Already 40 minutes behind schedule, the seven foreign dignitaries, South Africa’s foreign minister and hundreds of journalists, diplomats and others had just settled down for opening speeches here when a commotion erupted at one side of the hotel penthouse ballroom.

As heads and television cameras turned, Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi suddenly bounded onto the dais, throwing the news conference into an uproar.

The dramatic entrance briefly upstaged former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and six other international mediators who arrived here Tuesday to try to narrow constitutional differences between Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party and Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.

But what happens over the next week to 10 days, while the seven mediators retire to a game lodge somewhere in the northern Transvaal, may determine if the charismatic Zulu chief will be able to stay in South Africa’s limelight much longer or will be left in the dark after national elections scheduled for April 26-28.

For now, Buthelezi has essentially hijacked his nation’s attention at a time when Mandela appears only two weeks away from achieving his lifelong vision of holding democratic elections.

Whether Buthelezi, whose political support is tiny in comparison to Mandela’s, can hijack the elections as well remains to be seen. He has demanded the balloting be postponed until the 1993 constitution can be amended to make it sufficiently “federal” to guarantee a degree of Zulu autonomy.

In his opening remarks Tuesday, Buthelezi warned that the violence that has ravaged the Zulu strongholds of Natal province in recent weeks will worsen if the vote is not postponed.

It is difficult to see how the seven foreign mediators can heal the wound. Their mission--whom they will talk to and what they can do--was not clear even as they arrived. Most of the group had never met before, Kissinger said. “Seven extraordinarily busy individuals have managed to clear their schedules and done the unimaginable--arrive the same time in a distant place,” he said.

He appealed to the ANC and Inkatha to be flexible. “Sometimes in negotiations, people put forward a bargaining position and then go back step by step to their real point,” he said. “In the limited time available, can I ask everyone involved to start with their real position?”

But the ANC and Inkatha have yet to agree on just how broad the mediators’ mandate will be. And the two political rivals remain diametrically opposed on Inkatha’s key demand since the ANC refuses to consider postponing the vote.

Another mediator, A. Leon Higginbotham, a former federal judge in Philadelphia, said he was optimistic anyway. “I’m coming with the belief that rational people can make rational decisions,” he said.