It used to be the apartheid government that complained of voter “intimidation.” Indeed, young “comrades” violently enforced an ANC boycott of state-sponsored local elections aimed at circumscribing the rights of blacks. Now it’s Buthelezi, the sole significant holdout from the campaign, who invokes “the politics of resistance.” For months it looked like brinkmanship-an effort to sweeten the constitutional deal for himself and other regional leaders. But with voting five weeks away, Buthelezi’s holdout threatens to push his region into civil war. “The tensions are thicker, and the intimidation is at the highest level I’ve ever seen,” said Carole Baekey an American lawyer who organizes voter-education workshops in Natal last month one session sparked the massacre of 15 youths, allegedly by members of Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party. “It’s a highly effective campaign of terror,” Baekey said.
Some of Buthelezi’s muscle is plain to see. He commands the police force of the black homeland of KwaZulu and relies heavily on some 250 hereditary chieftains known as amakhosi. But powerful outsiders also have meddled in Natal in an effort to prolong white rule, an investigative panel charged last week. A thick report by a government-approved independent commission accused high-ranking South African police officials of direct involvement in a “horrible network of criminal activity,” including gun-running to Inkatha leaders in Natal. The report said the tactics, including fomenting massacres, were intended to destabilize the country in the run-up to the voting. South African President F. W. de Klerk immediately ordered three police generals named in the report, including the nation’s second-ranking officer, to go on leave. De Klerk denied having known about the unit. So did Buthelezi.
Buthelezi’s strategy is hard to read. His alliance with white extremists has cost him support among blacks, and whites who might have chosen him over de Klerk have been turned off by his reluctance to run. Once he was considered a possible runner-up to Mandela; that would give him a cabinet seat. But recent polls show Buthelezi losing even Natal to the ANC. It may have convinced him that he has nothing to gain by participating in the election. “If [Inkatha] agrees to elections under the present Constitution it is going to be wiped out in any case.” says attorney Rowley Arenstein, a Durban attorney long close to Buthelezi.
Now only violence makes Buthelezi a force to be reckoned with. That’s a big comedown for a proud man whose articulate anti-communism and opposition to economic sanctions once made him the darling of many foreign leaders including American presidents from Nixon to Bush. His future, though, maybe “the political wilderness,” he conceded recently. The civil strife in Natal is no guarantee that the next South African government will try to buy him off. President Mandela might prefer to roll in the tanks.
