Word: botha
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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...
...final warning of a government clampdown came last month from Home Affairs Minister Stoffel Botha. It meant that the regime could close the Weekly Mail at any moment. Last week Botha did just that, barring publication of the small (circ. 25,000), liberal, antiapartheid tabloid for four weeks. In a statement released in Pretoria, Botha accused the Mail of "causing a threat to the safety of the public or to the maintenance of public order...
...right Conservative Party, which has become the fastest-growing party in the country's history since it split from the ruling Nationalists in 1982. As the Nationalists see it, black activists cannot topple them from power, but the Conservatives might. Calling for a return to total apartheid and accusing Botha of betraying white Afrikaners, the Conservatives became the official opposition in Parliament last year. All the party's parliamentary seats are in Transvaal province, the northernmost region settled by the voortrekkers who drove their ox wagons across the veld to escape British rule 150 years ago, but last week...
...Botha was not a candidate, but he was a clear winner in the white election. In their Transvaal stronghold, the Conservative challengers captured most of the rural and small-town councils. But in spite of their confident predictions, they were unable to gain significantly in the other provinces. The National Party turned back the opposition's all-out attempt to take over the Pretoria city council, won an absolute majority in Johannesburg for the first time and seized control of Pietermaritzburg, the English-speaking capital of Natal, from a coalition of liberals...
...Botha, the next step is a white parliamentary election, which must be held no later than March 1990. Over the past year, the Conservative surge looked as if it might be unstoppable, and Botha unsuccessfully tried to ! engineer a constitutional amendment that would postpone the test for two more years. Now that the rightist threat seems to be at least temporarily quarantined in the Transvaal, many in Parliament speculate that he will call an election early next year and thus project his brand of crabbed and segregated reform into the middle of the next decade...