COLUMN ONE : S. Africa Braces for a Risky Trial : Eleven top officials from the apartheid era are about to be arraigned in connection with a 1987 massacre. The case has split the Mandela government and raised fears of new racial violence.

After almost four decades as a soldier, retired Gen. Magnus Malan has filled his spacious home with military mementos. Medals and ribbons fill a glass-topped chest. Ancient cannonballs sit on a plaque. And a huge brass artillery shell has been turned into a strange lamp.

But nowhere to be seen is the latest, most dramatic reminder of his years as one of white-ruled South Africa’s most feared, powerful leaders: his arrest warrant on 13 charges of murder.

On Friday, the former defense minister and 10 other senior military and intelligence officials from the apartheid era are scheduled to be arraigned in a Durban court for their alleged role in a hit-squad massacre of a priest, five women and seven children as they lay sleeping more than eight years ago.

Prosecutors will accuse Malan and his former colleagues of deliberately deciding to train, arm and deploy rural death squads, urban assassins and other paramilitary forces to ruthlessly eliminate anti-apartheid forces and suspected political enemies in the late 1980s.

In essence, they are being accused of running the former regime’s “dirty war” against its domestic foes. The agonizing conflict took an estimated 15,000 lives in the final years of apartheid and still smolders in KwaZulu-Natal province, where barely a week goes by without a new atrocity.

But the case is as risky as it is sensational. It has caused sharp rifts in President Nelson Mandela’s coalition government, with top officials of the old order bitterly complaining of a witch hunt--and worrying that they could be next.

Right-wing leaders, meanwhile, warned that the case could rekindle racial violence. Mandela publicly dismissed the threat. But he quietly ordered his defense minister, Joe Modise, to cancel a trip abroad last week so that he could monitor disgruntled white troops in his own army.

In his first extensive interview since his arrest earlier this month, Malan denied any responsibility or role in what he called “this despicable deed,” the assault-rifle massacre of unarmed blacks in mud-walled huts in tiny KwaMakhutha township in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 21, 1987.

“I honestly believe my conscience is clear,” he said at his home in Lynnwood, a leafy Pretoria suburb.

Malan also said he did “nothing wrong” in his 11 years as minister of defense for the apartheid regime, from 1980 to 1991, or in his previous seven years as head of the army and then chief of the defense force.

“If I joined the military again today, I’d still have the same policies I had then,” he said.

Malan’s long tenure covered the most brutal period of the apartheid era, a time when the white-minority regime’s all-powerful security forces used police-state tactics to quell township unrest and wipe out black liberation forces. Malan called it “total strategy,” and few were immune.

Under a national state of emergency imposed in 1986, for example, an estimated 30,000 people were detained without trial and thousands more were tortured, murdered or disappeared. The government used terrorist bombs, poison and deadly dirty tricks to fight opponents.

Malan said he has no regrets about the brutal tactics he used to combat what he called “international communism” at home and in the neighboring Soviet-backed nations of Angola and Mozambique and other “front-line states” in the 1970s and 1980s. “We were in a war,” he said. “We were defending the legal government and our constitution.”

His politics were contradictory, and they remain so. “I’m a democrat,” he insisted. “I believe in democratic principles.”

Reminded that the zealots of apartheid denied voting rights, citizenship, decent schools, good health care and basic human rights to the black majority, Malan conceded: “It was a democracy for the whites, not the blacks, OK. But we had a constitution, and you cannot overthrow it just for the hell of it.”

And although the white regime jailed Mandela for 27 years, and even banned publication or possession of his photograph until his release from prison in 1990, Malan claims he is a staunch admirer of South Africa’s first black president.

“I think he’s doing a wonderful job,” he said.

Malan, considered the most hawkish member of former President Pieter W. Botha’s apartheid Cabinet, was demoted to water and forestry minister in 1991 by the reformist administration of then-President Frederik W. de Klerk. Malan resigned in 1993.

Now 65, tanned and fit, Malan calls himself “a retired gentleman” who spends most days playing golf. He has given up his famed dark homburg for a more casual cap of white straw. He uses his high-level contacts at home and abroad while working as a political and business consultant.

As for prosecution of the men who created the policies and gave the orders to enforce white supremacy, it has brought its own political risks. Analysts say the KwaMakhutha case signals a new toughness by a government that has sought to bury bitter racial animosities and heal the divided nation by championing reconciliation with its former enemies, not retribution.

Mandela has angrily refused pleas by De Klerk, now his deputy president, as well as other white leaders, to offer immunity to the accused--or to cancel the immunity granted to 77 African National Congress members, including four Cabinet ministers, who were given protection from prosecution for apartheid-related crimes under a pre-election amnesty program.

“Nobody should lecture me about reconciliation,” Mandela said after a tense meeting with De Klerk and right-wing leader Constand Viljoen. “I started reconciliation in South Africa after a lot of humiliation. I am the architect of reconciliation.”

But in an indication of the sensitivity of the case, Mandela has tried to rally support and ensure stability by meeting with the country’s top military and police officers, diplomats, business leaders and church officials. He also met with Botha, the finger-waving, brow-beating ex-president who was Malan’s mentor.

Although the Malan trial is scheduled to start March 4, a verdict may come from elsewhere. Under the law, the 11 former officials, as well as nine lower-ranking police and local officials also facing charges, could apply to a proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty.

To do so, however, they would have confess to crimes.

Malan says he has nothing to confess. “I don’t want amnesty,” he said. “I didn’t ask for it.” He added that he fears attempts to unravel the crimes of apartheid may sunder the country’s fragile peace. “I say let bygones be bygones,” he said.

That isn’t easy for Ernest Thusini, one of the few survivors of the 1987 massacre.

“It’s something I always want to forget,” he said at his home in Lamontville, a hillside slum outside Durban. “But I can never forget. I lost five of my children.”

Fighting back tears, Thusini recalled how he, his wife and six children had spent the day at a prayer meeting. They were sound asleep at 2:15 a.m. when they were suddenly awakened by a fusillade of gunfire. “You didn’t know where to run, what to do,” he said, his face tight and pained at the memory.

Thusini, his wife and one daughter managed to hide behind a bed until the shooting stopped and the killers drove away. Four of his children--ages 3 to 10--were already dead. A fifth died at the hospital. No arrests were made although Thusini said he identified one of the attackers.

“I cannot stop crying,” the 40-year-old man said softly, gently touching his children’s faded photos in a tattered scrapbook. “It’s so painful.”

A priest, the Rev. Willie Ntuli, owned the home where the family lived. Investigators said the ostensible target was his son, Victor, a local anti-apartheid activist. The youth wasn’t home that night but was gunned down three years later while at a wedding. His killer was never caught.

By all accounts, the KwaMakhutha massacre was the start of a devastating spiral of violence in KwaZulu-Natal.

The bloodletting spread to townships around Johannesburg in 1990 and escalated to near civil war during the campaign for last year’s first all-race elections.

Previous judicial inquiries have traced the early violence to 200 men loyal to the Inkatha Freedom Party, the Zulu-nationalist party that the apartheid regime backed as an alternative to the then-banned African National Congress. South African commandos gave Inkatha men covert military training at secret bases in the Caprivi Strip in the north of what is now Namibia.

“This is the crux of the case,” said a source familiar with the evidence. “A force was created that was a death squad, really. And it killed a lot of people.”

The evidence includes official minutes of the State Security Council, hub of the vast security apparatus in the mid-1980s.

They reportedly show that Malan and others authorized a special subcommittee to oversee the Caprivi training and the arming of a paramilitary force to fight for Inkatha against the African National Congress.

“There is a meticulous linking between the decision in Pretoria and the pulling of the trigger,” said another source. “Just like the Nazis used to document their crimes, the Afrikaners at the top documented their atrocities and their obsessions.”

The prosecution is the product of an elite, 30-member investigative task force created in Durban in September to probe hit-squad activity by both Inkatha and the African National Congress. More probes are now focusing on the former regime’s attempts to stoke violence between the two political parties.

“It’s our view that the hit squads were not confined within those particular organizations,” said Howard Varney, a lawyer who is helping to oversee the task force. “So in practice, the investigations have gone a lot wider than that.”

Besides Malan, those accused of murder include: Gen. Jannie Geldenhuys, the former defense force chief; Gen. Kat Liebenberg, the former army chief; Vice Adm. Dries Putter, the retired navy chief, and Gen. Tienie Groenewald, the former military intelligence chief, who is now a member of Parliament.

Thusini doesn’t plan to attend Friday’s hearing. He says he still smells the foul stench of the guns, still sees his children’s bodies, still suffers awful nightmares. He said he hopes only that the law prevails and the truth comes out.

“If things go wrong, then South Africa will never heal,” he said. “But if the truth comes out, then the healing can grow. And maybe I can forgive. But I will never forget the silence of my children.”