S. Africa Police Armed Inkatha, Panel Finds : Inquiry: Commission says 3 top officers were behind hit squads linked to black party. De Klerk denies involvement.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Three of this country’s most senior police officials secretly funneled weapons to the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party and helped train black hit squads involved in political violence and terrorism, the country’s most respected judicial commission announced Friday.

The explosive allegations, after a six-week investigation by the independent Goldstone Commission, are the first public corroboration of frequent charges by Nelson Mandela and other critics that President Frederik W. de Klerk’s government has used a covert “third force” to foment black-on-black bloodshed.

The long report said the clandestine activity--which allegedly included organizing train massacres, training Inkatha guerrillas with rifles and hand grenades and distributing combat weapons smuggled from abroad--took place from 1989 until “the very recent past.”

The account said guns were provided to Inkatha guerrillas in the nation’s two most violent areas, the impoverished East Rand townships outside Johannesburg and the rural Zulu strongholds of Natal province.

The report specifically named the country’s No. 2 police official, Deputy Commissioner Lt. Gen. Basie Smit, as well as officers in charge of the central investigations and counterintelligence divisions. Police units in East Rand and Durban, in Natal, were also allegedly involved.

Mandela, president of the African National Congress, the country’s largest political party, has repeatedly charged that the government’s white-led security forces were secretly behind Inkatha, the Zulu nationalist party headed by Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, in a conspiracy to destabilize the country and prolong white minority rule.

Bloody massacres and tit-for-tat slayings between followers of Inkatha and the ANC, especially in Natal and the East Rand townships of Thokoza and Katlehong, have claimed more than 15,000 lives in the last four years. Mandela canceled parts of a planned, two-day campaign trip to Natal on Friday because of what aides called assassination threats.

At a news conference in Pretoria, De Klerk strongly denied personal involvement or responsibility in the scandal and denounced what the report called “a horrible network of criminal activity” by senior police and Inkatha officials.

“I have an absolutely clear conscience,” De Klerk said. He called the officers “individuals with their own agenda” who operated a “small cell” within the police.

De Klerk said Smit, who was in charge of all police administrative and staff services, and the two other police generals had been suspended pending further investigation.

The officers have denied any involvement. Commission Chairman Judge Richard J. Goldstone, who attended the news conference, said the available evidence was insufficient to make arrests.

The investigation began Feb. 13 after a veteran police officer, identified in the report only as Q, approached Goldstone through an unnamed foreign diplomat and said he was willing to testify in secret about “third force” activities.

Citing the informant testimony, the report said a clandestine police unit called “Vlakplaas,” apparently named for a farm from which it operated, had manufactured and distributed guns to Inkatha vigilantes in East Rand “for the purpose of orchestrating violence.” Anti-ANC guerrillas in the area were trained to use rifles and hand grenades, the report said.

The report alleged that shipments of guns were delivered to top Inkatha members, including Themba Khoza, the party’s regional chairman for the Johannesburg area.

The police unit also used phony passports to smuggle more sophisticated weapons from former war zones in neighboring Namibia and Mozambique, the report said. The serial numbers were removed from the arms before they were distributed to Inkatha members, it said.

Goldstone said the police group was directly responsible for considerable mayhem and bloodshed.

“The impression I have is that the scale is serious in terms of the number of people whose lives were lost,” he said.

The Goldstone report did not implicate any senior De Klerk aides. But it contained an allegation that his Cabinet authorized an unusually high payout of $343,000 to the commander of the Vlakplaas unit when he was discharged from the police several months ago.

And Goldstone, a 55-year-old former appeals judge, sounded skeptical of official police denials of complicity.

“The professed ignorance by senior members of the activities of Vlakplaas is difficult to understand,” he said.

De Klerk said an international task force would be asked to investigate the evidence to avoid charges of political interference. The members were not named.

“We dare not allow this dark cloud to hang over the elections,” De Klerk said.

But the political bombshell, less than six weeks before the nation’s first democratic elections, cast an ominous pall over De Klerk’s attempts to woo voters with claims that the ruling National Party was a party of peace and stability, while the front-running ANC was a party of terror and intimidation.

More specifically, it undermined De Klerk’s oft-repeated denials of any government involvement in the savage spiral of violence that has ravaged the country since he released Mandela from prison in 1990 and began dismantling apartheid.

The report also clearly discredits Buthelezi, the only major political leader to steadfastly boycott the April 26-28 elections and the move to constitutional democracy and black majority rule.

On Thursday, the hard-line Zulu nationalist warned of a war of liberation with “no parallel in Africa,” if the balloting goes ahead as scheduled.

Mandela canceled a planned meeting in Ulundi on Friday with Buthelezi’s nephew, Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini, after the ANC cited “firm reports” of a planned assassination attempt.

The largely powerless king later appeared at a Zulu rally to proclaim the KwaZulu homeland and surrounding Natal a sovereign state and warned that his subjects would “defend it at all costs.”

Mandela did not appear at a subsequent meeting of church leaders in Durban and scrubbed an appearance scheduled for today at a large Zulu festival in KwaZulu.

Buthelezi, who also is chief minister of KwaZulu, could not be reached for comment on the Goldstone charges late Friday.

But the homeland police commissioner denied any involvement in a televised interview.

The ANC in a statement denounced “the existence of a sinister conspiracy committed to the destabilization of the country and the subversion of the transition to democracy. It confirms the charge the ANC has made many times that there exists a ‘third force’ engaged in murder and other criminal activities in pursuit of anti-democratic aims.”

South African security forces have a sordid history of dirty tricks and covert operations.

In the apartheid era, they used assassins, mail bombs and terrorist squads against the ANC and other political foes.

A more recent scandal in 1991, dubbed Inkathagate, revealed that the government had secretly funneled money to Inkatha.

The commission, officially named the Goldstone Commission of Inquiry Regarding the Prevention of Public Violence and Intimidation, was created in 1991 to examine the causes of the growing black violence.

With sweeping powers to raid and search, subpoena witnesses and compel testimony, the panel of lawyers and investigators has issued more than 30 reports on everything from taxi wars and township massacres to right-wing violence and police abuses.

In November, 1992, Goldstone revealed that a secret military intelligence unit had used a dirty-tricks squad to sabotage the ANC, forcing De Klerk to fire 16 intelligence officers.

In an early report, Goldstone also criticized the ANC, blaming its rivalry with Inkatha for being the “primary trigger” for most township violence.

A commission report last November, however, reported that only 42% of the panel’s recommendations had been carried out or were under way.