Word: botha
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...system of apartheid, or official separation of the races. Less than three weeks before the rioting at Crossroads, the government had pledged to suspend, and reassess, its policy of forcibly resettling blacks. A week before the sudden arrest of the opposition leaders, attention was focused on Executive President P.W. Botha's offer to release Nelson Mandela, 67, the nation's best-known political prisoner, and to recognize Mandela's outlawed, militant African National Congress on condition that the A.N.C. lay down its arms. But the eruptions last week suggested that peaceful negotiations between South Africa's white rulers and their...
Signs that Pretoria might be taking two steps backward for every reformist step forward challenged Washington's belief in the Botha government's commitment to real change. Since 1981 the Reagan Administration has steadfastly pursued a line of "constructive engagement," under which the U.S. refrains from openly criticizing the South African regime and hopes instead, through diplomatic pressure and behind-the-scenes negotiation, to coax it toward easing the strictures of apartheid. While making it clear that U.S. policy was not going to change, Washington officials publicly warned that last week's show of force "cannot help prospects...
...American South, Where racism existed in opposition to established constitutional principles, the white Afrikaaner policies of apartheid are part of an entire civil theology and political culture of race separation wherein the hereditary Afrikaaners often refer to themselves as "The White Tribe." Even the token reforms undertaken by the Botha government have drawn vehement criticism within the Nationalist government and have prompted a rightward shift in much of the Afrolaamer electorate. Far from warming to reforms in apartheid, white South Africa threatens a violent backlash...
Four days later, Botha told parliament that the government would be prepared to consider releasing Mandela--provided the black leader promised not to "plan, instigate or commit acts of violence for the furtherance of his political objectives." Said Botha: "It is therefore not the South African government which now stands in the way of Mr. Mandela's freedom. It is himself...
After receiving Mandela's rejection last week, Botha closed the door on the issue. "My government's and my attitude on this matter flows on the one hand from a concern for men who have spent a long time in prison," he said. "On the other hand, we cannot order their release if they remain committed to violence, sabotage and terrorism." Critics questioned Botha's motives, suggesting that he had acted to get into the open the issue of the A.N.C.'s advocacy of violent change. Asked the Rand Daily Mail: "Was it a ploy, couched in such terms that...