Word: botha
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...week's all-white ballot for the South African Parliament, but the outcome sent shock waves through the nation. The big winner in the Transvaal provincial by-election was the ultra-right Conservative Party, which strengthened its grip on both rural seats by attacking every concession State President P.W. Botha has made in recent years to South Africa's blacks...
Though the outcome scarcely threatened Botha's control of Parliament, where his National Party holds 133 seats, vs. 22 for the Conservatives, it signaled a gathering white backlash. The extremists want to force all blacks to become citizens of tribal homelands, rather than of South Africa, and would reinstate the infamous pass laws that until two years ago determined where blacks could live and work. They also want to abolish the four-year-old tricameral system that permits Asians and people of mixed race to sit in Parliament, and seek to restore the ban on interracial marriage, repealed...
...repression stifles dissent, can absolute repression smother it entirely? South African State President P.W. Botha seemed intent on testing the proposition once again last week. Since declaring a state of emergency in June 1986, the Pretoria government has virtually stamped out violent protest in black townships that for more than two years seethed with unrest. Under the 1986 proclamation, some 30,000 activists were detained, while thousands more fled into hiding. With all outdoor meetings banned and political funerals tightly restricted, even the most determined antiapartheid groups were close to paralysis...
Last week the government delivered what it hoped would be the final blow. After Botha issued a ten-page enabling decree, Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok prohibited 17 leading black organizations "from carrying on or performing any activities or acts whatsoever." At the same time, he ordered the black Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the country's largest labor federation, with more than 700,000 members, to cease all political activity, including calling for boycotts, work stoppages and the release of detainees...
Opposition politicians and academics in South Africa linked Vlok's announcement to this week's parliamentary by-elections in two Transvaal constituencies. Botha's ruling National Party is eager to win back at least one of the seats from the far-right Conservatives, who seized them in last May's general election and supplanted the liberal Progressive Federal Party as the official opposition in Parliament. Kragdadigheid, or a show of strength, is a standard tool in Afrikaner electioneering, and the security of South African borders and the country's white minority has long been the central plank in the National...