Word: vorster
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...time last week's party caucus began, all other candidates had quietly withdrawn and Vorster was elected Prime Minister by acclamation. "God has put the right man in the right place at the right time," said his brother...
...Wagon Guard. Vorster has not always been so acclaimed. The 13th of 14 children of a wealthy Afrikaner farmer, he studied law at Stellenbosch University, turned up in 1941 as a 25-year-old "general" in South Africa's pro-Nazi underground, the Ossewa Brandwag (Ox-Wagon Guard). Spouting his admiration for Hitler and contempt for democracy, he was arrested as a Nazi agent in 1942, spent 14 months in a dusty internment camp at Koffiefontein in the Orange Free State. So extremist were his ideas that not even the Nationalists could stomach them at first...
...times change. In 1961, shortly after the Sharpeville massacre had set South Africa reeling, Verwoerd decided that authoritarianism was just what the nation needed, named Vorster as Justice Minister, and ordered him to snuff out racial violence. Setting to work with a vengeance, Vorster sent his cops swooping in to arrest African political leaders, beefed up his police force with more men and riot equipment, spent millions of dollars extending the police network of informers...
...year, for 180 days. He also gained the right to extend indefinitely the sentences of all political prisoners, and this year was empowered to take "emergency" police measures such as imposing curfews without declaring a state of emergency. Accused last year of turning South Africa into a police state, Vorster rose in Parliament to offer his defense: "It is not the time to be sensitive about principles...
When he became Prime Minister last week, Vorster assured his fellow whites that there was at least one principle he would uphold. "I will continue along the road of apartheid," he promised, and proceeded to deliver his own definition of it. "It is not," he said, "a denial of human dignity to anyone. On the contrary, it gives an opportunity to every individual, within his own sphere, not only to be a man or woman in every sense of the word, but also to create the opportunity to develop and advance without restriction or frustration-as circumstances justify in accordance...