Word: apartheid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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PORT ELIZABETH: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is unlikely to achieve the harmony suggested by its name. Five policemen are seeking amnesty for their role in the 1977 killing of anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko. And TIME correspondent Peter Hawthorne believes that Biko?s family are unlikely to be able to stop their bid for freedom from prosecution...
Despite Wednesday?s admission by one of the cops that Biko was effectively beaten to death, Hawthorne says the policemen are appealing on the basis that beating up apartheid?s foes was part of their job: ?As bizarre as it may sound, they may succeed on that basis.? There are precedents of policemen being indemnified for killings on the grounds that they were committed in the line of duty, and Hawthorne believes ?these guys may well be able to do the same thing...
...Biko family's anger indicates, while those who suffered under apartheid are eager to learn the truth, they're not necessarily prepared to forgive the people who did the system's dirty work...
...conservative, dark-suited son of Afrikanerdom, President Frederik Willem de Klerk could not have rocked the political world more when, in 1990, he unbanned the African National Congress, released Nelson Mandela and set South Africa on the road to the end of apartheid and a black-majority democracy. And when De Klerk, who with Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize for engineering the transition to a new South Africa, surprised his nation last week by announcing that he was retiring as head of the opposition National Party, South Africa had more to reflect on than his role in the historic...
...Klerk, 61, gave as a reason for his retirement the fact that despite his huge contribution to the salvation of his country, he is demonized as a symbol of the apartheid past and is therefore more of a liability than an asset to today's multiracial National Party. Last week he told TIME: "I've always adhered to the management philosophy that a top manager shouldn't be in the job too long." The remark was characteristically De Klerk: low key, declining the chance to paint himself as a large figure in history...