PERSPECTIVE ON SOUTH AFRICA : Apartheid’s End Spirals Into Chaos : Ensuring order is the responsibility not only of the local players, but also of a once-critical world.

CAPE TOWN â€”  A South African Sarajevo cannot be totally ruled out as a crisis awaiting the new U.S. Administration. The new President could be faced with critical decisions in a deteriorating Southern African theater as early as next year, in addition to urgent domestic and world priorities. Early attention to the problem could help to head off turmoil.

Nearly three years after the dramatic reforms launched by President F.W. de Klerk, parts of South Africa are slipping into chaos. Local newspapers, with reason, talk of looming civil war.

People are dying at a rate of nearly 10 a day. The number of police officers killed has doubled in three years. Motorists are being stalked and shot at random on highways near Johannesburg. Black train commuters in Transvaal province are regularly attacked by heavily armed thugs. Political leaders find themselves frequently burying massacred colleagues and supporters.

In such a bloody spiral, whose fault it is becomes largely irrelevant. Mindless tit-for-tat violence eclipses the question of blame and threatens to bring everyone and everything crashing down. The local and foreign peacekeepers wring their hands, but the massacres and assassinations go on.

The economy, slowed by years of under-performance caused by apartheid, international sanctions and now a cruel drought, teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. The growth rate is negative. Unemployment is staggering: 40% to 50%.

Optimism about the future has turned to foreboding. The business community knows that foreign investment to reconstruct the economy will arrive only when society is stable and government democratically secure.

The irony is that the very act of dismantling apartheid, far from bringing about peace and stability, has unleashed new passions in the body politic, particularly among black Africans, who have streamed to cities in large numbers.

The apartheid era had a crude order: Those who got out of line were clobbered by a heavy-handed white government.

Now, their time running out, the security forces are reluctant to be cast as aggressors. As it is, they face numerous allegations of involvement in killings and fomenting violence dating to the P.W. Botha era--and more recently even under De Klerk. Only the general amnesty recently rammed through Parliament by De Klerk can save them.

As apartheid goes, its residual evils in the black community--warring tribal fiefdoms and once-favored elites, poorly educated jobless youngsters, the gangsterism born of hopelessness--conspire to defy those seeking peace.

A country once ostracized by the world, with a white government previously hostile toward international involvement, now bustles with invited peace-monitors, from the United Nations, British Commonwealth, European Community and Organization of African Unity--not to mention South Africa’s own overworked National Peace Accord secretariat.

Commissions, thick with lawyers, plod vainly around the country trying to get to the bottom of the most appalling incidents of violence. Arrests are too few; killings go on. Clearly, the most dangerous area of all is the subtropical province of Natal on the eastern seaboard, where an obdurate Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi guides his Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party, which defies laws banning the public carrying of dangerous weapons such as spears. The Zulu people are divided between those who support the African National Congress of Nelson Mandela and those who support Buthelezi, who is politically closer to Pretoria--indeed, not uncomfortable even in the company of whites who stand to the right of De Klerk.

The Buthelezi dispute with the ANC goes back to a breach in 1979--partly, it seems, over personalities and partly over politics. It is a power struggle over who emerges with what influence in the new South Africa. Buthelezi is battling to shore up his Zulu power in the face of opinion polls that give him low public support. But he remains a formidable--and troublesome--factor in South African politics.

Unless the ANC/Inkatha quarrel can be patched up, it will cost many more lives. In fact, Natal at times raises the prospect of a Biafra, reminiscent of the separatist struggle in eastern Nigeria.

Scattered around Natal province, the Zulu “homeland� is not one piece of territory, which complicates a separatist strategy. But Buthelezi could, playing a last desperate card, issue a call to arms throughout Natal--which would see his Zulu followers in bizarre coalition with conservative English-speaking whites who traditionally ran the province.

The warlike defiance of election loser Jonas Savimbi in Angola could be repeated in Natal after South African elections. The ANC has been making conciliatory noises before ruptured talks take place again with the South African government. Some ANC quarters are generously advocating a coalition among the ANC, the ruling National Party and other groups, not just for the interim period but lasting for some time after free elections.

But continuing violence will inhibit any attempt at democratic process. It fuels mistrust among all South Africans, black and white, who surely need help from outside to restore trust. This is where an early initiative--on Camp David lines--could come from the Clinton Administration. It could fail, but the situation is serious enough to make it worth the try.

Apartheid was internationally condemned, and rightly so. Now the ending of apartheid, a violent and risky enterprise, is arguably the responsibility not only of the distrustful South African players, but also of a once-critical world. Because of its past, South Africa is an abnormal country.

The world community, led by the United States, could do much to coax the players to a durable settlement. More, it should move to underwrite--in every way possible--the resulting agreements, which could open up a peaceful era in Southern Africa.

That is the best way to avert a Sarajevo.