Word: apartheid
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When F.W. De Klerk took his oath of office one year ago, few predicted that the cautious and conservative lawyer would move so quickly toward ending the scourge of apartheid. But since then De Klerk has been cheered by blacks during a tour of Soweto and booed by right-wing white students at the University of Pretoria...
...Inkatha movement. Last week the bloodshed reached a numbing climax, when black men rampaged through a Soweto-bound commuter train with guns, pangas and knives, killing at least 26 people. The violence poses a threat to the fundamental change promised by President F.W. de Klerk, whose efforts to dismantle apartheid nonetheless achieve an important milestone next week when he meets with President Bush. Not since Jan Smuts visited the U.S. in 1945 -- three years before De Klerk's National Party wrote racism into the statute books -- has Washington deemed it appropriate to receive a South African head of state...
...into hotels, bars, theaters and schools previously denied them by law, no more segregated beaches, toilets, parks or benches. This very week the governing National Party had voted to open its membership to blacks, an organizational turnaround analogous to a P.L.O. recruitment drive among Jews. If not entirely dead, apartheid was clearly in the intensive care unit with the oxygen turned...
...this was how a returning Soviet dissident would feel on revisiting Lubyanka prison. As I talked with Colonel Nel, it seemed to me that the biggest change in Security Police thinking was the death of the old obsession that international communism was all powerful and that opponents of apartheid were putative communists if not actual paid agents of the Kremlin. The young colonel agreed. The whole approach was more sophisticated these days, he said, and the country faced a different set of perceived challenges embodied by the alienated black youth in the townships...
...seemed a massive irony. Through four decades of apartheid, the Afrikaner Nationalists had outlawed effective political structures in the townships and devastated black family life, creating in the process a generation of scary kids ready to burn, maim and hack to pieces real or fancied enemies -- kids who had never known a home with parents, never been to school or followed any rule but the rule of survival by violence. Now to save the whites from this Frankenstein monster of their creation, the government was counting on the recently legalized African National Congress (A.N.C.) and leaders like Nelson Mandela...