S. African Police Hunt White Rightists : Violence: Alleged ringleaders sought in bombings. The crackdown could cripple extremists.

A week after the inauguration of this nation’s first black-led government, police have intensified a crackdown on militant white extremists in what appears to be a severe blow to right-wing efforts to destabilize the new democracy.

Police said they are searching for 21 avowed members of the far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a neo-Nazi group allegedly involved in a wave of deadly pre-election bombings. Mug shots of eight alleged ringleaders of the terror campaign were splashed across front pages of newspapers Tuesday.

Thirty-two other group members were arrested and charged with multiple counts of murder April 27--as the rest of the nation lined up to vote in the historic elections--after four bombs in three days left 21 people dead and nearly 200 wounded. Police estimated damage at more than $20 million.

“We’re after the big fish,” police spokesman David Bruce said Tuesday. “These people have declared war on the people of South Africa.”

Col. Cornelius van Wyk, commander of police intelligence, said at a bail hearing for the 32 suspects Monday that the extremists also had planned to detonate a massive bomb to disrupt the May 10 inauguration of Nelson Mandela, the newly elected president. He said Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts International Airport was the apparent target and that “there was talk of three to five tons of explosives being used.”

A car containing an estimated 200 pounds of explosives blew up at the airport April 27, injuring about 20 people.

In a telephone interview, Afrikaner movement spokesman Fred Rundle called Van Wyk’s allegations “absolutely ridiculous” and accused the police of sensationalism. “They want to impress their new communist masters at how diligent they are at hunting down their own people,” he said.

But analysts said the crackdown will further splinter the already fragmented and fast shrinking right wing, which once was feared as the most serious threat to the advent of black majority rule.

Several dozen racist hate groups have vowed to fight for a self-ruled white homeland, but extensive press coverage has probably exaggerated both their influence and danger.

The new manhunt also further confirmed the loyalty of the nation’s white-led security forces to the new political order, despite frequent boasts by right-wingers that the police are on their side.

“The threat isn’t over, but they’re getting a very clear message that the new government will deal with them severely,” said Wim Booysie, a political consultant and expert on the right wing. “They’ve got them on the run.”

The demoralization of the right wing became obvious after a ragtag army of white vigilantes was routed in disarray when members tried to prop up the apartheid-created regime in the now-defunct homeland of Bophuthatswana in March. Their humiliation was captured for the world when a black police officer executed two wounded group members in front of television cameras and the press.

Six other members were sentenced to death last week for the execution deaths and mutilation of four blacks, including a boy. The white extremists had pulled the blacks from their cars at gunpoint at an illegal roadblock outside Johannesburg late at night Dec. 12.

And despite a much-publicized boycott of the election by the Afrikaner movement and other pro-apartheid groups, an estimated four out of five conservative whites went to the polls, analysts said.

The Freedom Front, which campaigned for support to create a white homeland through legislative means, won 2.2% of the total national vote, enough for nine seats in the 400-seat National Assembly. The party won considerably more in regional elections, however, drawing about 638,000 votes in all.