Peace Corps Heading for S. Africa in ’96 : Diplomacy: Gore announces deployment, signs accords during meeting of bilateral panel.

The United States will send Peace Corps volunteers here for the first time next year in a show of support for South Africa’s fledgling democracy, Vice President Al Gore said Tuesday.

Gore and other senior Clinton administration officials made a whirlwind 36-hour visit here for the first substantive meeting of the U.S.-South African Binational Commission, a Cabinet-level panel created in March to cement and expand post-apartheid ties between Washington and Pretoria.

After a daylong series of meetings, Gore and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki formally signed three agreements in a relaxed outdoor ceremony behind the Presidential Guest House.

The documents authorize creation of a Peace Corps program, establish guidelines for the Agency for International Development’s $160-million aid package for fiscal year 1996 and expand cooperation in science, technology and the environment.

“We’ve gotten off to a flying start,” Mbeki told a news conference. Gore concurred, calling it “a wonderful day of hope and progress.”

For all the rhetoric, the commission clearly has more symbolic than practical value now. President Nelson Mandela’s government has been deluged with offers of assistance as foreign delegations and international lending institutions have streamed into the country.

But Gore said the high-profile panel shows the Clinton administration’s commitment to helping South Africa complete its transition from apartheid and succeed as a multiracial, multiethnic democracy.

“The world is inspired by the process of reconciliation in South Africa,” he said.

Gore and Mbeki acknowledged that they also had discussed irritants in relations between the two countries, including the Clinton administration’s oil embargo of Iran. South Africa, which imports nearly all its oil from Iran, has refused to honor the embargo.

Mandela, in turn, has asked President Clinton to impose oil sanctions against the military regime in Nigeria following the hanging of nine political dissidents there last month.

Gore said Tuesday that the U.S., which imports nearly half the oil Nigeria exports, has not ruled out an embargo. He said, however, that the “response must be multilateral.”

The U.S. is South Africa’s biggest trading partner and largest single foreign aid donor. Trade amounted to $4.7 billion last year, but was heavily in favor of the United States. South African officials are seeking broader access to U.S. markets, especially for agricultural products.

Gore heads a similar Cabinet-level binational commission with Russia. There, the United States’ goal is to assist a powerful nation in shaky transition from communism to a free-market economy and political democracy.

A delegation from Russia upstaged Gore recently by offering to put a South African into space as part of Moscow’s cosmonaut program.

Russia also signed a series of technical, economic and educational agreements with South Africa.