Word: botha
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DIED. P.W. Botha, 90, apartheid- era South African President whose rigid defense of racial separation overshadowed his secret 1989 talks with jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela; in Wilderness, South Africa. Known as the "Old Crocodile" for his fearsome temper, Botha made some reforms, giving Asians and mixed-race citizens--but not blacks--a limited voice in government. But he also oversaw the detention of tens of thousands of antiapartheid activists. Despite global pressure, he would not free Mandela, who was finally released in 1990, a year after F.W. de Klerk replaced Botha. And he refused to appear before the postapartheid...
...DIED. Pieter Willem "P.W." Botha, 90, hawkish South African politician who led the country during the height of the antiapartheid struggle in the 1980s; at his home in Wilderness, South Africa. As Prime Minister and then President, Botha made reforms at the edges of the apartheid system but refused to release political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela or countenance majority black rule. In 1986, with violence spiraling, he declared a state of emergency. Three years later he was forced to step down by his own party. In a recent interview, Botha said he had no regrets about...
...been willing to talk; violence was his recourse when the other side would not listen. One day in 1986 he sat down and wrote a letter to the government proposing a dialogue on the nation's future. This gesture received a secret but surprisingly willing response from President P.W. Botha, a hard-liner on apartheid who nonetheless had begun to sense his country's escalating dilemma. Apartheid was collapsing of its own inherent absurdity. Moreover, the outlawed A.N.C.'s 1984 call to make South Africa ''ungovernable'' had been answered by a surge of black demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience...
...accommodate irreconcilable forces and had clearly seen that half measures were hardly going to bring domestic peace and renewed economic growth. De Klerk also had a natural interest in his own political future. In 1985 he had asked two consultants what he should do to succeed Botha; they both told him to soften his image on the necessity of preserving apartheid. This, cautiously, he began to do. Upon taking office, De Klerk announced, ''Our goal is a totally changed South Africa.'' In December 1989 he convened a historic bosberaad, or bush council, at which he won his Cabinet's authorization...
...Botha government may focus additional wrath on the white dissenters in its midst. According to the magazine Financial Mail, Finance Minister Barend du Plessis recently told its Washington correspondent that "when the time comes," Pretoria will "know what to do" with South African businessmen who have been strenuously pressing for racial reform...