Word: klerk
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...activities, and by allowing their celebrations to take place unhindered, the government seemed to grant the group a sort of provisional legal status. The leaders will appear at an A.N.C. rally in Soweto this Sunday, the first such assembly to be permitted in 30 years. State President F.W. de Klerk was beginning to make good on the promise he made at his inauguration last month to ease tensions and move the country into a new era of negotiations. His action signaled his potential willingness to go even further -- to free Nelson Mandela, the symbolic leader of black nationalism...
...antiapartheid organizations, Sisulu believed the government's nascent benevolence had been forced on it by domestic and international pressure as well as by its desire to avoid further economic sanctions. While no one from the government notified Sisulu's wife Albertina that he was to be released, De Klerk found time to telephone British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to tell her he was freeing a group of aging black leaders as she had urged him to do. Thatcher took that news with her to the Commonwealth conference in Kuala Lumpur last week, where she opposed all proposals for additional sanctions...
Other, more radical activists of the Pan-Africanist Congress, which is also banned, reject talks altogether. Jafta Masemola, a P.A.C. leader released with Sisulu, said, "We cannot negotiate with the usurpers of our land." While most black leaders agree that De Klerk has set off in a new direction, they remain skeptical because of the destination he has in mind. De Klerk's policy, fully endorsed by the ruling National Party, is one of constitutionally guaranteed "group rights" defined by race, including the right of whites to veto legislation they might consider threatening, to live in whites-only neighborhoods...
...core, the A.N.C. position is equally nonnegotiable, calling for a swift transfer of state power from whites to blacks. The exiled organization stands unwaveringly for one-person, one-vote majority rule in a unitary state. Such an arrangement is "unfair" and unacceptable, says De Klerk. "Afrikaners won't agree to that until they are militarily defeated," says a senior diplomat in Pretoria, "and the balance of power in the country right now does not favor revolution...
...domestic Mass Democratic Movement are in a quandary: they tend to favor negotiations because the process might lead to government concessions that are unforeseen now, but they do not want to go to the table if their presence offers nothing but a public relations success for De Klerk by making him look like a peacemaker. Ramaphosa, head of the black National Union of Mineworkers, concedes that the government does appear to be seeking change. "One could say they are willing to usher in a new South Africa," he says, "but some of us have serious doubts because they are still...