Word: botha
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Antiapartheid sympathizers won partial victories in two celebrated South African causes last week. State President P.W. Botha commuted the death sentences of the Sharpeville Six, five black men and one black woman sentenced under the so-called common-purpose law for joining a mob that murdered a black official in 1984. International leaders had long pleaded with Botha to pardon the six. He finally did, but they must still serve jail terms of from 18 to 25 years...
After right-wing Conservative Party whites won victories in several districts in last month's local elections, they talked boldly of reinstituting "petty apartheid" regulations that segregate public facilities, such as toilets, libraries and parks. Under pressure from the U.S., South African State President P.W. Botha charged that such policies would spark fresh pressure for international sanctions. Conservative Party leader Andries Treurnicht, Botha told a conference in Transvaal, "does not have to look his persecutors in the eye in the conference halls of the world...
...Botha government's slow reforms face a far more menacing threat from the ultra-right. Last week, in a mad act of violence, Barend Strydom, 23, an Afrikaner ex-policeman, gunned down blacks on a street in downtown Pretoria, smiling as he killed six and injured 17. Strydom belonged to the neofascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (A.W.B.), whose members openly whip up racial feelings. Public shock led the government to ban a still more radical group, the tiny so-called B.B.B., or White Liberation Movement, as a clear warning to the A.W.B. and other avowed right-wing groups that the government...
South Africa's government and foreign journalists have been at swords' points since 1986 laws declaring a state of emergency squelched most reporting on racial unrest. So Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha should hardly have been surprised when the Foreign Correspondents Association's annual banquet last week turned into an angry slanging match. Botha gave as good...
...sick and tired of a lot of foreign representatives descending on my country and picking up on all the dirty work instead of all the beauty, promise and goodwill," Botha said. Amid hisses and catcalls, he refused to accept the traditional vote of thanks and quoted instead from a speech by Boer War leader Paul Kruger to a group of foreigners. "His opening words were 'Friends, citizens, thieves and enemies,' " said Botha. "And that is how I look upon you this evening...