COLUMN ONE : Seeking the Truth, Not Vengeance, in S. Africa : Amid heated controversy, the nation considers granting amnesty for crimes committed by people whose confessions will help uncover its painful past.

Koos Botha is a burly, bull-necked man who wears thick, wraparound mirrored sunglasses and a gruff demeanor. On his wall, he proudly displays a 1990 newspaper photo that shows him punching a local official in the face.

But the former Conservative Party member of Parliament doesn’t exhibit the far more disturbing pictures of his once private war to preserve apartheid and a white-ruled South Africa.

It began at 2 a.m. on July 21, 1992, when Botha and four other right-wingers got in his car with 40 pounds of dynamite. They drove to a formerly whites-only Pretoria primary school that had been given to children of returning black exiles. Then they set the bomb on the front step.

“We blew up the school,” he said simply.

Emboldened by the blast, Botha and his band later detonated huge, pre-dawn bombs at a black-led trade union headquarters and two post offices. His next target, “to bomb 20 post offices on one night to paralyze the system,” was foiled when too few colleagues showed up.

Police finally arrested Botha in December, 1992, after he flew home from a session of Parliament. The once-powerful politician was charged with terrorism and attempting to overthrow the state. In theory, he could be sentenced to death.

But Botha hasn’t gone to trial or prison, and probably never will. The judge has agreed to delay the case until Botha can apply to a proposed Commission for Truth and Reconciliation for indemnity from prosecution.

The new, all-race Parliament began hearings on the commission this week, and the panel is expected to begin granting official forgiveness by midyear to white bombers and black militants alike for the nightmares of the past.

When it does, the new South Africa will face perhaps its most difficult and delicate challenge: how to reconcile the conflicting and emotional demands for justice and healing in a land still raw with the wounds of terrorism, torture, dirty tricks and death squads.

“You can’t forgive and forget if you don’t know what it’s all about,” said former police Capt. Dirk Coetzee, who first exposed police death squads in 1989 and has admitted at least six grisly murders under his command. “Healing only comes with knowledge.”

Critics--especially whites--already have called the truth commission everything from an exercise in futility to a public witch hunt.

“The average white South African wants a kind of amnesia, to give blanket amnesty and forget the past,” said Brian Curran, who helped draft the bill as director of Lawyers for Human Rights.

Under apartheid’s police state, thousands of blacks were imprisoned or forced into exile for their beliefs. More than 50,000 people were detained without charge and hundreds were tortured, maimed or killed in custody. Millions were forced at gunpoint from their homes and ancestral lands.

Thousands of township residents were shot dead by police, and at least 225 anti-apartheid activists were assassinated here and abroad by government-run death squads. Thousands more were killed in black-on-black violence secretly fomented by the security forces, especially before last April’s founding democratic election.

The anti-apartheid African National Congress, in turn, has admitted that torture and murders occurred in its military detention camps abroad. Several senior ANC officials were blamed in independent investigations, but none was charged.

The real toll of the bitter struggle on both sides probably never will be known. Nor is it clear how many people will volunteer, or be called before the commission, to confess their crimes.

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Around the world, numerous other nations are grappling with the agonizing legacy of castoff, oppressive regimes.

In the former East Germany, courts have convicted a handful of former Communist leaders and border guards. A controversial commission must guarantee that anyone seeking a public service job or contract did not work for the Stasi secret police.

The United Nations is sponsoring war crimes tribunals for the savage conflict in the former Yugoslav federation and the Hutu-led genocide in Rwanda. Ethiopia has begun its own trial for “crimes against humanity” by the murderous Marxist rulers of the deposed Mengistu regime.

Several Latin American countries, from Argentina to El Salvador, have used truth commissions. In Chile, a panel identified 2,279 people who were killed or disappeared under Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s junta. Courts there recently overturned a blanket amnesty Pinochet gave his security forces before leaving office in 1990. Only a handful of prosecutions have resulted, however.

“I believe that justice is not only to punish the perpetrators,” Patricio Aylwin, the former Chilean president who created the commission, said at a Cape Town conference last year. “To publicly reveal the truth, to vindicate the good name of the victims and to provide reparations for their relatives are also forms of justice.”

South Africa is taking a similar approach. The interim constitution calls for “understanding but not vengeance” and “reparation but not retaliation.” How to do that, without reigniting old hatreds or destabilizing the new government, is the problem.

A political furor already has erupted over a botched attempt to secretly grant limited legal immunity for apartheid-era abuses to two right-wing Cabinet ministers, the police commissioner and 3,478 members of the security forces.

According to the Justice Department, the mass requests flooded the government indemnity office at the height of April’s hectic election week. The photocopies were identical except for name, rank and signature.

The bulk filing became public only in January. The applications have been declared invalid because no specific crimes were admitted, as the law requires.

But in a stormy Cabinet meeting Jan. 18, President Nelson Mandela accused the last apartheid-era president, Frederik W. de Klerk, of being untruthful when he said he was unaware of the seemingly covert, concerted attempt to secure blanket indemnity for the police.

De Klerk, one of Mandela’s two deputy presidents, angrily gathered his papers and threatened to walk out of the meeting and the government. The next night, he announced that he had been “viciously insulted.”

The two men, who shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, later met in private. Upon emerging, they smiled grimly, grudgingly shook hands for the cameras and tersely announced a “fresh start” for their long-shaky relationship.

The start of the truth commission may also be shaky.

Up to 15 members, appointed by the president, will have investigators and subpoena power to compel testimony about “acts associated with political objectives” between March, 1960, when police massacred 69 unarmed blacks at Sharpeville, and Dec. 5, 1993, an arbitrary date mandated by the new constitution.

The panel will meet for 18 months to document gross human rights abuses and consider compensation claims. Most important, the commission will grant official immunity from prosecution, or pardons for those already convicted--but only to those who fully disclose their crimes.

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But what the public will learn is still unclear. To win support from De Klerk’s National Party members in government, the current bill calls for all amnesty and indemnity hearings to be conducted behind closed doors. Perpetrators’ names will be published, but few details of the crimes will be released.

Human rights groups plan to challenge the secrecy as unconstitutional, a move that could delay the commission. But Curran of Lawyers for Human Rights argues that the panel’s most important role will be to provide a public catharsis.

“We need to get the former government to publicly acknowledge what happened,” he insisted. “We need the people to hear what happened. There’s been no recognition of the nameless and faceless people who had to suffer.”

But many of the victims clearly are known.

Among those potentially eligible for amnesty, for example, will be the two right-wing whites sentenced to death for the 1993 assassination of Chris Hani, the popular Communist Party leader. Also probably eligible are three black youths convicted last year of murdering Amy Biehl, the Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach.

Less clear are such infamous cases as the 1977 death of Steve Biko, the charismatic leader of the Black Consciousness movement and a key anti-apartheid leader. Biko died of massive brain injuries while in police custody. No one has been charged.

Many fear the commission will never solve such sensitive cases. The blue wall of police ranks, forged in war and cemented by religion and ideology for many whites, may be impossible to crack.

“Nothing has changed in the police,” warned Coetzee, the whistle-blower and former police hit-squad leader. “The whole police force is working against the special investigative team, destroying evidence, obstructing, covering up.”

But Johnny de Lange, the committee chairman who will pilot the bill through Parliament, is optimistic.

“I’m quite confident that the broad picture of the truth will come out,” he said. “That’s our goal. It becomes a bit more difficult when it comes to individual perpetrators.”

Political amnesty is not new here. In December, 1990, unconditional indemnity was granted to all members of previously banned political groups, including the ANC and the Communist Party. Similar protection was given to anyone who had fled the country illegally.

Indemnity later was extended to the thousands given military training to fight apartheid, and to anyone who confessed to a variety of crimes, including high treason, public violence and illegal possession of weapons. Murder and terrorism were not included.

A total of 9,483 people were granted immunity from prosecution under those laws, according to the Justice Ministry.

Not including the 3,481 now-invalid applications, about 375 cases were denied and 649 others are pending or will be referred to the truth commission.

Deputy President Tabo Mbeki promises that the commission will not seek “retribution or Nuremberg trials.”

“We want to move beyond the past,” he said. “We are not after vengeance. We are not after getting people paraded in the street and pilloried because of what they did.”

The new panel’s ultimate success, however, may depend on a watershed trial due to begin Feb. 20 in Pretoria. In the first prosecution of its kind here, police Col. Eugene de Kock has been charged with 121 crimes since 1990, including nine murders, kidnaping, gun running and fraud.

De Kock headed Vlakplaas, a former farm outside Pretoria that was used as a base for “Third Force” secret police operations. Depositions by former members of the infamous unit have detailed more than a decade of police-sanctioned massacres, murder, arson and bombings.

A gruesome hint of the Vlakplaas operations was revealed in January when investigators, exhuming a rural grave for the bodies of four men killed in April, 1991, found the remains of 15 corpses instead.

De Kock denies all the charges and may seek indemnity, his lawyer says. But prosecutor J. P. Pretorius hopes for a conviction instead, to force others to cooperate with the truth commission.

“There must be a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads,” he said. “This prosecution is the sword. They must know that if they don’t confess to the truth commission, they will wind up in court.”

Koos Botha, the pugnacious politician, says he will confess to the commission about his bombing spree. He blames his private war on growing up as one of “God’s chosen people,” a privileged Afrikaner in white-run South Africa.

“As Afrikaners, we were living among the blacks, but they were never part of South Africa,” he said. “The blacks were nonexistent.”

But Botha opened his eyes in February, 1990, when De Klerk announced in Parliament that he was freeing Mandela from prison and revoking key apartheid laws. The white supremacist was furious.

“I could feel a majority government coming,” he recalled. “And I was totally against it. I said no way. It can’t happen.”

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But Botha, now 47, says he has changed since his arrest. In his words, he has “become a free man.”

Working as a real estate broker, he helped arrange for the government to buy land for 20,000 black squatters north of Pretoria. He is obtaining private financing and government grants to build 1,560 low-cost homes at the site. Blueprints include a clinic, schools and business center.

For now, Boikhutsong squatter camp consists of hundreds of sweltering, tin-roofed shacks made from broken packing crates with dirt floors. There is no electricity or sewers. Most residents are unemployed.

But not far away, Botha pointed to a low, red-brick building in a grove of shade trees. Long used as a whites-only school for the children of right-wing farmers, it is a primary school for 384 black children. “I negotiated the school for the squatters,” he said proudly. “I cleaned it for them. Now I’m trying to help them get decent housing.”

Samuel Gumbe, chairman of the camp, says he is willing to forgive, if not forget, Botha’s terrible past.

“This is a changed man,” Gumbe said. “He’s no longer a fascist. He really wants to be part of the new South Africa. He used to blow up schools. Now he’s building them.”