Rather than slow the change to majority rule, a raid Friday by hundreds of armed white separatists in South Africa seemed likely to backfire on the attackers.
The protesters stormed the constitutional negotiations, smashing through the plate-glass front of the World Trade Center in an armored truck and holding many of the country's senior politicians under siege to dramatize their bitterness at the approach of black majority rule.After two hours of swaggering through the convention center just outside Johannesburg, spraying graffiti and throwing punches, the khaki-clad mob dispersed without causing any serious casualties.
Politicians from several camps said the assault would discredit the Afrikaner reactionaries just when they had been trying to unify as a serious and respectable political force and would make it easier for negotiators to brush aside right-wing objections.
"I'm afraid they have lost the cause today," said Roelf Meyer, the government's chief negotiator.
President F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress moved swiftly to capitalize on the episode. Mandela flew back from a vacation to demand an acceleration of the transition to majority rule. De Klerk went on live television to condemn the attack in language apparently aimed at white conservatives who had been drifting away from him.
The two leaders said the aftershocks of Friday's attack could disrupt their departure next week for the United States, where they are to meet with President Clinton and receive the Freedom Medal in Philadelphia on July 4.
Mandela and de Klerk do not normally attend the negotiations where the future South Africa is taking shape, but delegates who were driven from the meeting chamber included several Cabinet ministers and much of Mandela's top leadership.
The invasion of the country's most important political venue was spearheaded by the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, which hijacked what was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration by a broad right-wing coalition, the Afrikaner People's Front.
About 1,500 followers of the white separatist front, many armed with shotguns and pistols, massed outside the trade center complex Friday morning to complain that negotiators had rejected their demand for an independent Afrikaner homeland.
The demonstration was timed to coincide with the negotiators' vote confirming the date of the first election for voters of all races next April, which separatists see as the date of their ethnic demise. But the ratification of the election date was put off until next week before the protest occurred.
When the police refused permission for the protesters to rally on the trade center grounds, witnesses said, Eugene TerreBlanche, the leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, directed his followers forward.
Riot policemen put up no resistance as the crowd poured through the building, waving guns and roughing up black journalists and an Indian negotiator.