Edition: U.S. / Global

Zulu Men Train for a Battle South Africa Hopes to Avoid

Published: April 2, 1994

After a month camped among the thorn trees alongside the world's most famous rhinoceros sanctuary, the eager Zulu men were piling into trucks and buses, taking their new skills home.

"Normally we have a ceremony," apologized Philip Powell, the white South African who commands the training camp, 25 miles from the capital of the Zulu homeland. "Under the circumstances, these people really want to get back to their communities to do what they were trained to do."

For now, he said, their role is to protect their communities from African National Congress vigilante squads.

What the men were trained to do includes stripping and reassembling an assault rifle blindfolded, shooting a target the size of a human torso at 100 yards or more, patrolling, evading, bandaging a wound, and following orders without hesitation.

The graduates of the Umfolozi training camp -- 5,000 of them so far -- form the nucleus of a growing Zulu paramilitary legion aimed at serving tribal leaders who reject the prospect of an African National Congress government.

The camp promises to be one of the most contentious targets of the South African troops sent to subdue the embattled Zulu homeland under a state of emergency declared today by President F. W. de Klerk.

The African National Congress contends the men are insurgents schooled to sabotage the elections late this month, and then to wage guerrilla war against the new government.

Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi, the homeland leader who sponsors the camp, said in an interview the men are a community protection force, "like a neighborhood watch for whites, no more than that."

Mr. Powell, who set up the camp for Mr. Buthelezi last September, is more ambiguous about what his trainees are likely to do.

If the A.N.C. becomes the government and tries to impose its will on the tradition-bound Zulu communities, he said, "it becomes a different scenario."

Then they may follow the example of another resistance group whose military insurgency tactics were the subject of Mr. Powell's master's thesis: the African National Congress.

"The A.N.C. inflicted a political defeat on the white government, and I'm absolutely sure the Zulu people, if they decide to resist, would inflict exactly the same defeat on an A.N.C. government," he said.

Mr. Powell, who is 30, worked four years in the intelligence division of the South African Police before Mr. Buthelezi hired him as an adviser in 1990. He is also secretary of Mr. Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party for the midlands region of Natal Province, one of the bloodier battlefields in the political wars of the last decade.

After being shot in both legs by A.N.C. attackers, he said during a walking tour of the camp, he organized paramilitary training for Inkatha supporters in his region.

Mr. Buthelezi approved, and last year he turned over a conservation training center next to the Umfolozi game reserve for a more ambitious program.

It is an isolated oasis, where two rivers and two streams converge in a valley populated by hyenas and baboons. Mr. Powell pitched 32-man tents under the acacias and turned the stone lodges into lecture halls.

Mr. Buthelezi called on his subjects to support the camp with a special levy. He called it the "umfelandawonye," Zulu for "We all die together."

A month after the camp opened, but before its existence was publicly known, a tribal leader and member of the homeland parliament named Psychology Ndlovu said, "We'll have to go to the bush to train ourselves just to prevent the elections."

Mr. Powell denied that the training is aimed at disrupting the vote. Reporters who visited the camp this week were not permitted to speak to the trainees.

[ Emergency rules issued Friday give the South African troops in KwaZulu power to close down "unauthorized" paramilitary operations. But Mr. Powell said that should not apply to his camp, which is authorized -- by Mr. Buthelezi. ]

His next batch of cadets, about 1,500, is scheduled to arrive on Monday. Chosen by Tribal Leaders

The unpaid recruits come in units of 10 selected by the tribal leaders who are still the supreme authority in the rural hills of KwaZulu, the archipelago of land fragments designated as the Zulu homeland by apartheid.

When they return home to their villages or to worker hostels around Johannesburg, they are expected to train more -- a militia answerable to the Zulu tribal hierarchy.

"What we're training here is a sort of officer cadre," the camp commander explained. The trainees go home in civilian clothes, without weapons. Mr. Powell insisted that they are expected to save their money and buy legal firearms.

Critics say the recruits are issued illegal weapons from Inkatha caches, either black-market AK-47 assault rifles or weapons procured by Inkatha from suppliers in the South African Police. Top police officials were accused in a recent judicial inquest of running guns to Inkatha-controlled migrant hostels.

Mr. Power conceded that illicit weapons flow to Inkatha from the hostels, but said, "I don't know if they were bought off the street or from the police." Biggest Challenge to A.N.C.

Mr. Powell said the young Zulu men present a much more serious challenge to the next government than the "rather tragic posturing" of white separatists.

"For them fighting a war of resistance is still a totally hypothetical thing," he said. "They haven't bled, lost homes, property, possessions. Understand that the Zulu people have been in a war against the A.N.C. for almost 13 years.

"Every single person in this camp will have lost either a relative, a job because of the unions, a car because of unrest, a house burned down, part of their education due to disruptions."

Photo: Philip Powell, a 30-year-old South African, commands a military training camp for Zulu cadets. (Bill Keller/The New York Times) (pg. 4) Map of South Africa showing location of Ulundi. (pg. 4)