South Africans Rush For Amnesty Deadline Man Expected To Next Head Anc Among The Applicants

Hundreds of people from both sides of this country’s once-bitter 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.

Mbeki is 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.

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 days saw a deluge of at least 1,200 amnesty pleas, raising the total to more than 7,000.

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 embers of disbanded black vigilante groups, incarcerated prisoners and others.

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

The commission was created in an attempt to heal a nation bloodied and battered after years of racial hate and political strife.

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 exwife Nomzamo Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was convicted of kidnapping and assault in 1991.

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.