Word: botha
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...routine by-election in Germiston, a working-class suburb of Johannesburg, should have been a shoo-in for Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha's National Party. Instead, Flip van der Walt, 63, barely won, carrying the district by a mere 308 of the 9,111 ballots cast. The vote reflects deep, corrosive divisions among South African whites over the country's future direction. The Rand Daily Mail judged the outcome the nation's "biggest electoral shock since 1948," when the National Party swept to power under the banner of white supremacy...
Judge James declared that individuals in the National Intelligence Service and Defense Force had clearly known about the operation but, nonetheless, ruled that allegations of an official South African connection to the operation were "purely hearsay." The day after the trial, Prime Minister P.W. Botha, who had refrained from commenting until the legal proceedings were completed, insisted that the government had not known of the affair. He charged that Hoare had approached members of the intelligence and military forces with his plan and admitted that arms and ammunition had been given to him. Botha said that "departmental action" would...
...party accepts the proposals, the government may submit them next year to separate referendums of the white, colored and Asian communities. Replying to Treurnicht, whose group opposes any notion of power sharing, Botha declared: "We are not taking a highway to complete integration [but are seeking] the decent, Christian course of action in granting the coloreds the right of self-determination in their own affairs." His Minister of Police Louis le Grange put it more vehemently. The country's whites, he warned, could not reject power sharing forever "and then bluff yourselves into thinking that you are not sitting...
...interview with Botha...
...standards of South Africa's all-white National Party, Prime Minister Pieter Willem Botha, 66, is a moderate. In his 18th-floor office in Cape Town, he talked with TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief Marsh Clark about the political battle raging within Afrikanerdom. When Clark joked that the Prime Minister, who describes himself as a conservative, though not an "embalmed" one, bore no visible scars from his recent skirmishes, Botha replied: "I suppose I am like a crayfish-always in hot water." Excerpts from the interview...