Word: bothas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year later, with South Africa reeling from two years of unrest that left 5,000 people dead, the government acceded to Mandela's request for top-level political talks, initially focusing on the release of political prisoners. But a historic 45-minute tea with Botha last July, the first and last meeting between the two men, seemed only to show how little they had to say to each other...
...issue is no longer really apartheid; it is political power. Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha explains that the government began to shift away from apartheid when the National Party realized that it was impossible to stem the tide of blacks moving to urban areas in search of employment. "As the economic realities overwhelmed the dream," he says, "so did we come to realize that there were consequences of these policies that were indeed oppressive and humiliating." Bowing to those realities, P.W. Botha scrapped the hated pass laws...
...attempt to soften the face of apartheid, he had set up the tricameral Parliament in 1984. It established a strictly limited form of power sharing that for the first time included coloreds, or people of mixed race, and Indians, but not blacks. Whatever the failures of that system, Pik Botha insists, it at least helped condition the minds of whites "to see a man of color acting like a gentleman just like everybody else." By the time De Klerk ordered the removal of the remaining WHITES ONLY signs on South Africa's beaches just before the Christmas holidays, whites complained...
Whatever the government's cause for hesitation, Mandela has none. Newspapers last week published the text of a document he had delivered to the government prior to his tea with Botha last July. In it he urged both the A.N.C. and the government to "meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement." But he also made it clear exactly where he stood. "White South Africa," he wrote, "must accept the plain fact that the A.N.C. will not suspend, to say nothing of abandoning, the armed struggle until the government agrees to negotiate" with recognized black leaders. In addition, wrote Mandela...
...answer is no, or at least not yet. Pretoria's calls for change are not a recent concession to foreign pressure. As early as 1979, long before economic sanctions were considered, President P.W. Botha told his Afrikaner volk to "adapt or die." In 1986 he described apartheid as "outdated and unacceptable." It was only later that year, to push for faster change, that the U.S. enacted its comprehensive sanctions bill. Those measures hit South Africa where it hurts: in the economy, and in the keen sense among whites that they are pariahs in the world's eyes and will remain...