S. Africa Right Wing Faces Choice: Ballot or Boycott : Elections: Some believe they can guard their interests within the system. Others are bent on violent opposition.

The debate in the Dutton household here Wednesday, as in so many right-wing white homes in this mining town, was not who to vote for, but whether to vote at all. Frank and Myra Dutton wanted to vote. Their 26-year-old son did not.

Finally, the son gave his father the keys to his car. “Go ahead and vote,” he said. “But not me.”

And his parents waited two hours, avoiding being sandwiched between new black voters, to cast their ballots for the rightist Freedom Front.

“Some people were saying we shouldn’t vote, as a protest against the coming of a black government,” Myra Dutton said. But for whites, old habits die hard. “I just think it’s a person’s right to vote, and his duty to vote,” she said.

On the first full day of countrywide voting for a new South Africa, with a new flag flying from the masts of city halls, courthouses and police stations across the nation, the decision facing many whites in conservative communities such as Carletonville was the same one that select black voters opposed to apartheid once faced in rare situations--whether to participate or boycott elections they were permitted to participate in.

The right wing is sharply split over how to achieve its goal of autonomous homelands for whites inside South Africa.

On one side is the Freedom Front, which is participating in the contest. It argues that the best way to protect white rights is within the new system.

The party has also won an unusual concession from Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader who is expected to become South Africa’s next president. Under this deal, the elections have become a kind of referendum on white sentiment. In regions where the right-wing party wins substantial support, Mandela has agreed, the new government will discuss some form of autonomy.

On the other side is the Conservative Party, for a decade now the white opposition in Parliament, and a vast array of white militants using harsh talk and bent on violence.

They contend that the elections--in the words of the right-wing Radio Pretoria, which has defied a government ban on it--are “a macabre circus” that could never achieve a white homeland for the Afrikaner descendants of South Africa’s original white settlers.

As if to reinforce the boycotters’ call, a car bomb exploded at Johannesburg’s international airport Wednesday; 18 people were injured in the blast, the third major car bomb attack in the last four days.

But police reported a breakthrough Wednesday in their probe of the bombings, which killed 21 people and injured several hundred. Gen. Johan van der Merwe, commissioner of police, said that 31 members of the armed wing of the far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement had been arrested. Among the suspects were two white policemen.

“We have good reason to believe that the people we have arrested are the brains behind these terror blasts,” he said. “But obviously there may be some other groups committing terror of this nature.”

The right-wing violence did not scare many voters away. In fact, it was one thing that drove the Duttons and many others to the polls on Wednesday.

“These things don’t gain them anything,” Frank Dutton said. “We can’t support actions like that. I think most South Africans want peace, and they’ll do anything for peace.”

Carletonville, a mining community 60 miles west of Johannesburg, is one of South Africa’s most notorious right-wing cities. Down in the mines here, the deepest in the world, blacks and whites work peacefully, side by side.

But above ground, police here for years tortured black suspects, resulting in at least eight deaths.

Most of those officers have been retired or transferred, but the city is still run by 10 right-wing city councilmen who have fought orders from Pretoria that they merge administrations with the next-door black township of Khutsong.

But Wednesday in Carletonville, and in Khutsong, the elections went smoothly. Many of the region’s 130,000 voters, about 80% of whom are black, stood in lines together, rarely speaking and avoiding eye contact. The quiet queues made clear that many whites had decided to accept the tide of change and use their vote against what is expected to be a black-controlled government.

“It’s not a question of how you feel, it’s more a question of what you must do,” said Steve Gouws, 25, a mine shift foreman who came with his wife, Ria, to vote. “We’ll have to see what happens after this. You’ve got to hope for the best.”

Some whites and blacks in Carletonville said they already noticed a slight easing of racial tension. About 400 blacks have moved, without incident, into the formerly whites-only town of 10,000.

“They don’t worry you,” said Myrtle Viljoen, a white 45-year-old who waited more than two hours to vote. “Their gardens are nice. They look after their houses. We are all friends, even your blacks.

“The Conservative Party wants blacks on one side and whites on the other,” she added. “But that’s when you get into trouble.”

For the Duttons, who voted against reform in the 1992 whites-only referendum, the voting day marked a change in their attitudes.

“This is the first time I’ve ever stood in a line this long to vote in South Africa,” Frank Dutton said. “It’s really quite amazing. But I guess blacks and whites both realize the importance of this vote.”

Standing in line near the Duttons was Abey Kitime, a 39-year-old black man who works as a nurse in the local mine company’s hospital. “It’s quite unusual for them,” he said, lowering his voice so the Duttons didn’t hear. “But, as time goes by, they’ll get used to it.”