Word: mandelas
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...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...
...Klerk's most important step was to begin a personal dialogue with Mandela, a revered leader of the African National Congress. The government wanted to speed up the "talks about talks," designed to get formal negotiations under way. On Dec. 13, at the presidential residence in Cape Town known as Tuynhuys, the two men held the first of a planned series of meetings on ways to convene an indaba (Zulu for "negotiations") that would write a new constitution granting blacks the right to vote for a national government. The meeting signaled that De Klerk, unlike his predecessors, was willing...
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...
Freedom will mark a great personal triumph for Mandela, who has repeatedly refused offers for his conditional release and never wavered from his demand for a multiracial South Africa based on a system of one man, one vote. When Botha announced in 1985 that Mandela could go free if he simply renounced the A.N.C.'s armed struggle, Mandela defiantly replied, "Let Botha show that he is different. I cannot and will not give any undertaking. Only free men can negotiate...
...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...