Word: leaders
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Krenz, who had long been expected to succeed his mentor, will get no honeymoon, since the change at the top does not alter the crisis down below. Given Krenz's hard-line convictions, there is little expectation that he will be the leader who will guide East Germany along the path toward social and economic reform. Krenz may turn out to be only a transitional figure, put in place, like the Soviet Union's Konstantin Chernenko, to warm the chair for a more visionary thinker. "The real reformers will take over power in the next six to twelve months," predicts...
Banned since 1960, the A.N.C. vividly returned to the South African political stage last week. By releasing several A.N.C. leaders without restricting their 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...
Cyril Ramaphosa, a leader of the Mass Democratic Movement, says Viljoen's proposal would cause the A.N.C. to "lose ground" if it were simply "one of many groups." Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, head of the 1.5 million-member Inkatha movement and an opponent of the A.N.C.'s socialist orientation, responds, "I shudder to think what would happen to South Africa if we all stood aside and allowed only one black party to negotiate the country's future." To try to hurdle this and other obstacles and preconditions, Viljoen suggests preliminary "talks about talks...
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...
...Leaders of the 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...