Deadline in S. Africa Spurs Amnesty Pleas

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Hundreds of people from both sides of this country’s racial divide scrambled Saturday to beat a midnight deadline to seek amnesty for political crimes and human rights abuses committed in the apartheid era.

Among those who applied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were some of the government’s most senior officials, including Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, several Cabinet ministers and at least 370 other members of the ruling African National Congress, officials said.

Mbeki is widely expected to succeed President Nelson Mandela as head of the ANC at a party convention in December and as president of South Africa in national elections scheduled for 1999. Details of his application were not released.

Officials said only a handful of applications were submitted by members of the former whites-only government, which created apartheid and embraced white supremacy and police-state repression as official policy for nearly five decades.

But the final frantic days before the amnesty deadline saw a deluge of at least 1,200 pleas for clemency, raising the total to more than 7,000 since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission held its first hearings early last year.

Last-minute confessions were faxed or hand-delivered to commission offices in major cities from prominent politicians, current and former military officers, former police death squad members, former members of disbanded black vigilante groups, incarcerated criminals and others.

Among the applicants were three youths convicted of murdering Newport Beach student Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old Fulbright scholar who was brutally beaten and stabbed by a stone-throwing mob in a township outside Cape Town in August 1993.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created in an attempt to heal a nation bloodied and battered after years of racial hatred and political strife. Thousands of people were killed in a spiral of massacres, bombings and assassinations in the final turbulent decade of white rule.

The post-apartheid Constitution empowered the commission to grant applicants immunity from prosecution or civil lawsuits, or a pardon for previous convictions. The applicants must confess to crimes with a political motive between March 1960, when black protesters were massacred by white police at Sharpeville, and three years ago Saturday, when Mandela was inaugurated as the first post-apartheid president.

Mandela, who spent most of those years as a political prisoner, did not apply. Nor did his ex-wife Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was convicted of kidnapping and assault in 1991.

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Neither Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Zulu chief and Inkatha Freedom Party leader, nor the last two apartheid presidents, Pieter W. Botha and Frederik W. de Klerk, applied. De Klerk shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela for jointly leading the transition of power to the black majority.

In a statement last week, De Klerk said the commission was “not the correct channel for accepting political responsibility for policy.” He said the National Party, which ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994, had decided that only individuals guilty of crimes should apply.

The highest-ranking official from the former government to apply was Adriaan Vlok, a former law and order minister who has been accused in court testimony and previous commission hearings of ordering bombings, sabotage, torture and other abuses aimed at black activists.

One of apartheid’s most powerful figures, former Defense Minister Magnus Malan, told the commission Wednesday that he accepted moral responsibility for his army’s actions, including cross-border raids on ANC targets. But Malan, who was acquitted last year of murder charges for a 1987 massacre of 13 people, said he would not seek amnesty.

Another apartheid-era defense chief, Gen. Constand Viljoen, applied Saturday with up to 50 members of his conservative Freedom Front party. A spokesman said they would admit to sabotage, conspiracy and plotting a military revolt to create a whites-only nation before the 1994 elections.

ANC officials delivered a large cardboard box stuffed with applications to commission offices in Cape Town, including 40 from members of the party’s National Executive Committee and 200 from former guerrillas from its disbanded armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.

Mongezi Tshongweni, head of the ANC’s amnesty desk, said the applications covered such crimes as bombings and sabotage in South Africa as well as torture and executions at ANC military camps in exile.

So far, the commission has granted pardons to 39 prisoners. Nearly 800 cases have been rejected as ineligible.

“We have more applications than we can handle, but we can never say we have enough,” the commission’s chairman, retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, told reporters.