Word: namibia
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South Africa's response to Mudge's departure was a bland assurance that direct rule from Pretoria would be imposed only temporarily. But no mention was made of new elections to fill the vacant seats in the assembly at Windhoek, Namibia's capital. That omission was greeted cynically by Western diplomats. Said a European representative at the U.N.: "The game Pretoria is playing is obvious. It wants to procrastinate as much as possible...
...brusque dismissals, Dirk Mudge, 55, a blunt-spoken rancher and politician, rang down the curtain last week on the latest act in southern Africa's longest-running shadow play: progress, or more accurately the lack of it, toward independent self-government for the vast and arid territory of Namibia. For more than three decades, South Africa has ruled Namibia in defiance of world opinion and United Nations resolutions. For the past four years Mudge and fellow members of his multiracial Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (D.T.A.) exercised nominal authority over local affairs in the territory. Now all 41 D.T.A. members were...
...South African origin, and Mudge had proposed keeping only dates of purely local significance. Among the holidays to be dropped was the Dec. 16 Day of the Vow, a commemoration of an 1838 victory by white Afrikaners over the Zulu nation in the Battle of Blood River. Members of Namibia's white minority (75,600 out of a total population of more than 1 million) complained, and South Africa vetoed the legislation. As Mudge retold it, that was only the latest in a long series of occasions on which South Africa had ignored, modified or nullified the actions...
Many foreign governments pin blame for South Africa's recalcitrance on the Reagan Administration. Last year the U.S. began insisting that Namibia's independence be linked to the withdrawal of an estimated 30,000 Cuban troops from neighboring Marxist-led Angola. Only a year ago, many diplomats were optimistic that South Africa would succumb to pressure from the U.S., France, Britain, West Germany and Canada to allow U.N.-supervised elections that would lead to independence. Since then, South Africa has embraced linkage as an excuse to defer free elections. Little wonder: such a vote would probably...
...last point worth our attention is the notion of "working within the system." This implies that the system is worth working in. In Namibia, or in South Africa, this is clearly not the case. Would Ms. Schwartz have urged the early American patriots to work within the system, or the laborers in Poland or even the Jews in Nazi Germany to "work within the system...