Word: klerk
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With expectations growing daily, antiapartheid leaders will be listening closely this Friday when De Klerk delivers his maiden state of the nation address to the opening session of Parliament in Cape Town. They want the President to outline a timetable for negotiations and to meet the main conditions blacks have laid down for participation: Mandela's release, an end to the 1986 state of emergency and the lifting of bans on antiapartheid organizations...
...step was a huge psychological leap for the National Party. But, acknowledges Roelf Meyer, Deputy Minister for Constitutional Development, "there is no chance of a legitimate process of negotiations if only three- quarters of the players are around the table." Adds Education Minister Stoffel van der Merwe: "Mr. de Klerk has fully accepted that blacks, whoever they are, have a right to participate...
...South Africa in the mid-1960s, "there has not been a time in my association with this country that the prospects for a settlement along just lines have been as favorable." Yet Pretoria is notorious for its habit of taking two steps backward for every step forward. De Klerk is urging against unrealistic hopes. But if he fails to fulfill at least some of the expectations, he will risk a powerful backlash that could wreck any prospect for progress in the near future...
What private understandings, if any, De Klerk and Mandela may have already reached is a tightly guarded secret, but indications are that the two leaders have come to respect each other. "Mandela had the impression that De Klerk was a man he could do business with," said Azhar Cachalia, treasurer of the A.N.C.-allied United Democratic Front. "But he also made the point that history is not simply made by people who are good and honest. Whether the National Party as a whole will shirk its past, he is not able to say." For his part, De Klerk confided...
Following De Klerk's election, according to a Cabinet minister, the government's talks with Mandela took on real meaning. In October they worked out the release of eight political prisoners, including Walter Sisulu and other A.N.C. leaders who were convicted along with Mandela in the Rivonia treason trial a quarter-century earlier...