Word: apartheid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Apartheid always was an unworkable as well as immoral system whose breakdown was inevitable. But the trade and financial sanctions imposed by the U.S., the European Community, the Commonwealth and other groups of nations hammered home to South African whites, as probably nothing else could have, the fact that their country had become a global outlaw, judged unfit for membership in the world community of nations. Their dismay at that knowledge accelerated the process of dismantling apartheid at least a bit, and perhaps with somewhat less violence than would have been the case without sanctions. Now that the process seems...
Others have also been rushing to reopen the door of the global community to South Africa ever since last spring, when President F.W. de Klerk asked parliament to repeal the last major apartheid laws; lawmakers did so before the end of June. The 12-nation E.C. voted in April to remove its ban on imports of certain products, though Denmark has been holding up implementation, and London will try to talk Commonwealth countries into doing the same at their annual conference in October. The International Olympic Committee last week decided to let South African athletes compete in future games, ending...
...effective is such pressure? It certainly gives the world community a ) peaceful way to express its opprobrium. But it seems obvious that apartheid was a doomed policy from the start. South Africa built a huge, sophisticated economy but did not have enough whites to run it. Business needed skilled black technicians and middle managers, and it could not get them while government policy confined blacks to hardscrabble shantytowns and limited their education. Moreover, repression of the black majority could eventually be maintained only at the price of more violence than most whites would tolerate. As long ago as 1979, President...
...world opinion. That happened in Rhodesia in the late 1960s, but exactly the opposite seems to have occurred in South Africa: the | shock of finding themselves moral outcasts stung many of the nation's whites so deeply that they went along with a faster and more thorough dismantling of apartheid than they might have countenanced otherwise. "It was the feeling that the country had become a global pariah rather than the economic pressures, however substantial, which seems to have given De Klerk the green light for reforms," says a British official. Laurence Besserman, a Cape Town importer-exporter, puts...
When Nelson Mandela gathers his followers next week for their first conference inside the country in 30 years, they should be able to review their achievements with pride. The African National Congress, established in 1912, is nearer than ever to its goal of replacing apartheid with democracy for all races. Last week the last legal pillar of segregation tumbled when the Parliament revoked the Population Registration Act of 1950, fulfilling President F.W. de Klerk's promise to abolish South Africa's major discrimination laws...