The Ugly Fight for White Rights

"We are Boer people! We are fighters!" thundered Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (A.W.B.), the bastion of white supremacists unwilling to accept South Africa's changing destiny. "I think there will be more explosions and more actions if the government ignores the just claim of my people who demand some land." The fiery rhetoric inspired some of the 300 khaki-clad men and pistol-packing women to rough up and then oust a black American reporter attending the otherwise desultory rally. The motive behind all the violence: a whites-only homeland.

The election-eve bombings are more likely to signal the last gasp of a weak, splintered racist Afrikaner minority than the start of the long-threatened great Boer revolt. Three of the 32 arrested are close to Terreblanche, including leaders of his personal bodyguard unit, the elite Iron Guard. The long, resolute march of democracy has caused deepening divisions within the white right. "The bombing campaign," says Wim Booyse, a political consultant in Pretoria, amounts to "a struggle for control of the heart of the right wing."

The fortunes of apartheid-forever whites have been declining steadily since the all-white referendum on reform in 1992, when moderates gave President F.W. de Klerk's National Party a landslide victory over the diehards led by the Conservative Party. Since then the number of active right-wing organizations has declined from 186 to 20.

Although the A.W.B., the most militant of the groups, claims 65,000 members, analysts say there are no more than 15,000, fewer than 5,000 of whom are violent activists. Most members are working-class or poor whites struggling as crop farmers and factory workers to make ends meet -- the Afrikaners who feel most threatened by black equality in the workplace.

The election drove a wedge between Terreblanche and his political ally, Afrikaner Volksfront leader Ferdinand Hartzenberg, and the supporters of former South African Defense Force chief Constand Viljoen. All three men want an Afrikaner state, or volkstaat, but Terreblanche and Hartzenberg believe it can be achieved only by the gun. Viljoen thinks he can persuade the government to grant Afrikaners their own piece of the country. In March he formed the Freedom Front Party and registered to participate in the elections. If he wins support, as expected, from more than half the estimated 1 million conservative white voters, it will prove that a majority support peaceful rather than violent moves to win their political and cultural goals.

Viljoen was wooed away from the hard-liners with a promise from the African National Congress that a volkstaat council would be set up in the new government to explore the possibility of an Afrikaner homeland. The A.N.C. has largely defused the right-wing threat, placating many frightened whites by accepting a mandatory government of national unity for five years and guaranteeing jobs and pensions for more than 200,000 civil servants, policemen and soldiers.

The bombs that went off in Johannesburg, however, are proof that a few hate- filled racist groups are capable of carrying out sabotage and murder for the foreseeable future. The A.W.B.-aligned Volksfront is planning acts of & civil disobedience aimed at provoking confrontations with government security forces. Many South Africans may think it fitting if the A.N.C. chooses to use some of the same methods to crack down on the right that the apartheid government used against its freedom fighters for the past 46 years.