S. Africa Violence Ebbs; 95% Voter Turnout Predicted : Elections: Attacks decline sharply between members of ANC and Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party.

As reports of pre-election violence and intimidation plummeted nationwide, senior political leaders Thursday predicted a 95% turnout when the country’s long-disenfranchised black majority goes to the polls for the first time next week.

The falloff in attacks, especially between rival members of the African National Congress and the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party, followed the dramatic decision Tuesday by Inkatha’s chairman, Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, finally to join the country’s first all-race elections.

Instead of the violence, leaders of the two parties blasted each other’s policies in a bitter battle of words--and a high-tech, high-altitude campaign ploy.

Cyril Ramaphosa, the ANC secretary general, said the vastly improved political climate, especially in battle-racked Natal province, proved that Inkatha had been “using our people as cannon fodder” in what he called “a sinister strategy” to achieve their goals “at all costs.”

“They put the whole country in jeopardy,” he told a news conference here. “They stand disgraced in front of the whole nation.”

For his part, Buthelezi appeared earlier at his first official campaign rally and blasted the ANC for its longtime alliance with the Communist Party. He warned that Communists in the ANC are seeking “central government tyranny” to achieve “dictatorial Communist rule.”

“The Communists in the ANC want a central government so they can embark on their program of nationalization and the redistribution of wealth directly after the election,” Buthelezi told about 12,000 people in Enseleni township, according to the South African Press Assn.

Shortly before he spoke, however, a small plane repeatedly circled the sports field and showered the crowd with thousands of ANC leaflets. Many of the Zulus, who came armed with sticks and spears, tore the leaflets up.

ANC officials have repeatedly denied allegations that they will nationalize industries if, as expected, they win a landslide victory in the elections Tuesday through Thursday and Nelson Mandela becomes the country’s first black president.

Inkatha has begun campaigning with a vengeance in Natal. It has run radio and newspaper advertisements and hung long-stored posters that show a smiling Buthelezi and a logo, “When the Time Comes!” Some posters have now been hastily amended with stickers that read, “The Time Has Come!”

“Our supporters are utterly, utterly ecstatic,” Peter Smith, spokesman for Inkatha in Durban, said in a telephone interview. “You’ve never seen such jubilation, and such a sense of victory.”

A palpable sense of relief has swept the whole nation since Tuesday, with nervous financial markets rallying and radio talk shows suddenly filled with voices of enthusiasm and hope for a peaceful election after so many tense months of uncertainty and fear.

Soaring political violence claimed more than 552 victims last month, more than double February’s toll, according to the Human Rights Commission, an independent monitoring group. More than half those killed were in bitterly divided Zulu townships and villages in the Zulu homeland of KwaZulu and surrounding Natal province.

So far this month, 341 people have been killed, including 269 in KwaZulu and Natal after a province-wide state of emergency took effect April 1. Although the emergency remains in effect, the carnage has been sharply curbed in the last two days, with three deaths reported in Natal on Thursday.

“Yesterday and today have been very, very quiet,” said Patrick Kelly, national director of the commission. “We’re hoping and praying it stays quiet.”

The major exception was a pre-dawn bomb blast that ripped through a regional office of the Independent Electoral Commission in Hoopstad, a conservative white farming town in the Orange Free State. There were no injuries, but it was the first direct attack on the IEC, the independent group that is overseeing the election, since the campaign began.

Judge Johann Kriegler, the IEC chairman, said millions of ballots were already being shipped to warehouses for distribution to about 9,000 polling stations, including 1,475 in Natal. He said Inkatha’s participation “quite clearly . . . enhances the prospect of our being able to declare the election substantially free and fair.”

Both Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer, the constitutional development minister in the ruling National Party government, predicted that at least 95% of the eligible 22.7 million voters will cast ballots in national and nine provincial elections.

With 19 parties on the national ballots and a total of 27 registered for the provincial ballots, the only major group still outside the election process is the ever-shrinking, pro-apartheid Conservative Party, which on Thursday reaffirmed its decision to boycott the polls and follow the “route of resistance” to achieve an all-white independent state.