Advocate and mother

At a luncheon Wednesday, Linda Biehl of Newport Beach spoke about two

of her favorite young men. Poor South Africans by birth, they entered

military training at a young age and vowed to dedicate their lives to

fighting apartheid.

Now, Biehl proudly told the audience, they are getting married,

building homes and learning to use the Internet -- a rarity in South

Africa until recently.

The young men Biehl described are two of the four men who murdered

her daughter, but she accepted that fact years ago.

“For me, forgiveness was not the issue,” Biehl said. “Forgiveness

is really a private thing. The word that comes out of South Africa is

reconciliation.”

In August 1993, Biehl’s daughter Amy was driving through Cape

Town, South Africa, and was killed by a mob of black militants. Amy

Biehl -- a valedictorian at Newport Harbor High School and a

Fulbright scholar who went to South Africa on an exchange program

from Stanford University, where she had graduated with honors -- had

ventured to South Africa to help with voter registration during the

country’s first-ever multiracial election.

Four men were convicted of her slaying, but they were granted

amnesty years later and were released from prison. Far from fighting

the men’s release, Linda and her late husband Peter Biehl, encouraged

it.

In the years since, they founded the Amy Biehl Foundation to aid

the poor black communities of South Africa, and they visited the

country to do additional outreach work.

Linda Biehl’s speech Wednesday touched on the modern issues facing

the Third World as much as it did on her daughter’s legacy. The

event, sponsored by the Newport-MesaIrvine Interfaith Council, hosted

several church leaders from the three cities.

“For Linda Biehl, justice is more than rights written on an

official document,” council Vice President Greg Kelley said in his

introduction. “Justice is converting those rights into reality.”

During an approximately 40-minute speech, Biehl spoke about her

daughter’s murderers -- not as monsters, but as victims. Their

perception of Amy, she said, came out of a lifetime of hatred of

white people fueled by apartheid.

“They were taught to throw bombs at government vehicles,” Biehl

said. “That’s how they grew up.”

Of the four killers, Biehl has kept in touch with two; another,

she said, has landed back in jail, and she has lost track of the

fourth. The two she is close with have traveled to the United States

and have spoken with her at public events.

Early in the speech, Biehl grew teary talking about her daughter,

who would have been 38 this year. She noted, however, that she had

spent the last 12 years fighting the victim mentality.

“If you are stuck as a victim, you are stuck,” she said.

Dennis Short, the president of the council, said that having Biehl

as a speaker had special significance for him. As a chaplain at

Chapman University in the 1970s and ‘80s, he said, he got a copy of

the documentary “Last Grave at Dimbaza,” which depicted the lives of

white and black people in apartheid South Africa, and he showed it to

students.

“As a minister, I’ve been concerned with the South African scene,”

he said.