Johannesburg, Sunday

PRESIDENT Nelson Mandela's orders for guards to kill if necessary to

defend his headquarters during a Zulu march in 1994 were within

international law, South Africa's ruling ANC said today.

''The president was not giving an order for people to go on the

offensive to murder. Under South African and international law you are

permitted to kill to defend yourself,'' African National Congress

spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa told Reuters.

''He was reiterating the right to self-defence.''

Mandela's admission last Thursday provoked a storm of protest from his

black and white partners and foes.

The president has called a snap national assembly debate on Wednesday

into the incident on March 28 last year.

Sixty people were killed in and around Johannesburg, eight outside the

ANC's Shell House headquarters, when supporters of Zulu Chief Mangosuthu

Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party marched in support of their king and

against the country's first democracy elections to be held the next

month.

Police found a weapon on only one of the eight victims, although the

ANC has maintained its headquarters was about to be stormed. Inkatha has

denied this.

Johannesburg's Sunday Times quoted Witwatersrand acting

attorney-general Clive Attwell as saying if people were attacked they

had a right to self-defence.

''If that attack is on your life and if it is a last resort, then you

are entitled to even shoot. Shooting and killing is a last resort. Our

law recognises the right to defend yourself and even to kill in

self-defence,'' Attwell told the paper.

Velaphi Ndlovu, Inkatha's spokesman on safety and security, said on

Friday that police chief George Fivaz should question Mandela and charge

him as an accomplice to murder.

Inkatha said later that Mandela, who became South Africa's first black

president on May 10 last year, would be held personally liable for civil

damages claims arising out of the shootings totalling nearly $3m.

The Sunday Times said in an editorial that Mandela's admission raised

questions about his moral culpability about what followed when ''nervy

ANC guards fired into a crowd of marchers killing eight . . . but it was

not a 'shoot to kill' order as has been comprehensively suggested''.

''At best it was a legitimate instruction to exercise the lawful right

of self-defence in life-threatening situations, at worst a seriously

misjudged statement at a time of high tension,'' the paper said.

Political sources viewed the row as a continuation of the war of words

between the ANC and Inkatha, its main black opponent, but most did not

see it as a crisis yet for the unity government in which Inkatha is a

partner.

Buthelezi, scotching rumours that he intended to resign from Mandela's

government, did not refer to the president's admission during a rally in

KwaZulu-Natal today and instead criticised white Inkatha members he said

were demonising him.Reuter.