Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...26th year of a life sentence for plotting to overthrow white rule. Most of his powwows have been with leaders of rival antigovernment groups. But last week Mandela, 71, a leader of the banned African National Congress (A.N.C.), traveled under escort 30 miles to Cape Town for his first meeting with Botha's successor, President F.W. de Klerk. By granting his request for a meeting, De Klerk signaled that Mandela will play a crucial role in proposed negotiations aimed at giving black South Africans the right to vote...
...Buthelezi supporters. Pan-Africanists have warned that they would join in fighting the A.N.C. if it strikes a separate deal with De Klerk. What Mandela can do to unite blacks and lead them into negotiations will be better known when he is out of prison and able, for the first time in a quarter-century, to act freely...
Gorbachev too is likely to regret that Sakharov's prophetic voice has been silenced. Despite their differences, the two men had managed to carry on something resembling a dialogue amid all the clamor at the Congress. Seven months have passed since the new parliament held its first meeting, more than half a year in which political change has outpaced progress in solving economic problems and ethnic tensions. At times last week, Moscow's maestro tried to orchestrate the debate, cutting off talk with a curt "That's all." Still, plenty of sour notes were struck. The Armenian delegation stormed...
...Alexander Melnikov, party boss from the Siberian city of Kemerovo, one of the sites of coal-mining strikes that swept the nation last July. In an article in the liberal weekly Moscow News, journalist Danil Granin, who was a guest at the plenum, expressed alarm that "here for the first time, not at a factory meeting but from the mouths of leaders of major party committees, I heard direct accusations against Gorbachev." Granin even heard complaints that "if the capitalists and the Pope are praising us, we are taking the wrong road...
...found an envelope in my mailbox containing two sheets of onionskin paper. The first sheet was an anonymous report on the arrest and confinement in a psychiatric hospital of Viktor Kuznetsov, an artist who had helped draft a model constitution for our country, which the authors hoped would spark discussion about the introduction of democracy...