Returned ANC Exiles Glimpse End of Apartheid : South Africa: They promote ‘spirit of conciliation’ at massive rally. Talks with government begin this week.

The highest-ranking exiled leaders of the African National Congress, speaking directly to South Africans for the first time in three decades, told a rally here Sunday that this week’s talks with the government signal the beginning of the end of “the misery of apartheid.”

“South Africa shall never be the same again,” ANC Secretary General Alfred Nzo told about 10,000 supporters gathered on a soggy sports field on a cold, blustery day. “Ours is a society in transition to a new order.”

In one of the most remarkable scenes in the nation’s history, Nzo, South African Communist Party chief Joe Slovo and other leaders who direct the ANC’s guerrilla war against Pretoria mounted a stage in this mixed-race township near Cape Town.

“It’s so weird . . . so very strange to see Joe Slovo up there,” said Alexandra Noble, a 20-year-old white college student in the crowd of black, white, mixed-race and Indian faces.

Nzo, Slovo and their colleagues, who returned Friday from exile in Zambia, have for years been the most notorious of the white government’s enemies. Until February, their words and even their photographs were banned from the country’s books, newspapers and television.

Their public appearance Sunday, guarded by their aides as well as South African police officers, indicated just how far South Africa has come in the 2 1/2 months since President Frederik W. de Klerk lifted the bans on anti-apartheid groups and invited the ANC and others to the negotiating table.

“We are together at last, and we are here because you, the people of South Africa, made it happen,” said Slovo, a 63-year-old white lawyer who fled South Africa at age 35 under threat of arrest.

Until recently, Slovo was the ANC’s chief military strategist and directed operations that killed or maimed hundreds of black and white civilians. As leader of the Communist Party and member of the ANC’s executive committee, he is a key figure in the ANC-Communist Party alliance and the leader most feared by many white South Africans.

Slovo and Nzo, the day’s keynote speakers, abandoned much of the war talk that has characterized ANC speeches in the past.

“We have come in a spirit of conciliation,” Slovo said. “If there is a way forward without bloodshed, the whole world knows we will grab it with both hands.”

During three days of talks beginning Wednesday, an ANC delegation, led by Nelson Mandela, and a government team, led by De Klerk, will discuss the remaining obstacles to negotiations.

Among those hurdles are the ANC’s insistence that the four-year-old state of emergency be lifted, that political prisoners be freed and that the 15,000 ANC exiles be indemnified from prosecution. The government wants the ANC to abandon its armed struggle, which De Klerk claims has fueled an upsurge of township violence in recent weeks.

The ANC leaders used the forum Sunday to explain their reasons for agreeing to government talks, a move that has been criticized by many young ANC supporters who believe De Klerk has not yet moved far enough to warrant talks.

“We have come to the table in search of a future of peace and equality,” Slovo said. He criticized “armchair revolutionaries,” an apparent reference to the radical black Pan-Africanist Congress. Groups like the PAC “scream treason when the word dialogue is mentioned,” he said.

Slovo praised De Klerk’s “courage” in removing some of the obstacles to peace in South Africa. But he said the president “has only removed one or two bolts from the door. The master lock has not yet been opened.”

Part of the blame, he said, lies with white South Africans “who have allowed their human feelings to be washed away by their swimming pools and champagne.”

Slovo said the ANC needs to see more reforms from the government before it considers relinquishing its 30-year-old armed struggle.

“It is because we spoke with the AK-47 (rifle) that dialogue is at least in the air,” he said. “We will be ready to walk through the door (for negotiations) when we see signs of real democracy. Short of that we will have to break down the door.”

Slovo also outlined the ANC’s negotiating strategy, reassuring opponents of the government that his organization would not back down from its demands for majority rule, a constituent assembly to draw up a new constitution and a redistribution of wealth. The government has said it will grant the 27 million black majority the vote but it wants political protection for the 5 million whites.

“We accept that the time may arise when a degree of compromise is needed,” Slovo said. “But there is a limit--and this is the gap that must be closed.

“We can’t go to the negotiating table ready to abandon (the ANC’s demand for) majority rule or forget that 90% of the productive property in this country is owned by whites,” he said.

“A future South Africa without majority rule is a future South Africa in which we cannot touch the economic fruits of our country. It’s just apartheid by another name.”

Until the government shows its willingness to meet the ANC’s demands for negotiations, foreign governments should maintain their economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation of Pretoria, Slovo added.

“There should be no reward yet for a country that still has all the main ingredients of apartheid,” he said.