South African president P.W Botha dies

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Author Message   Serenasailor Veteran Poster Username: Serenasailor Post Number: 807 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - 06:31 pm:        Former South African president P.W. Botha dies By Victor Mallet Published: October 31 2006 22:59 | Last updated: October 31 2006 22:59 Pieter Willem Botha, the former South African president who has died at the age of 90, was a godfearing Afrikaner nationalist who saw the failings of apartheid and reformed the system but could not bring himself to abolish it completely. That task fell to his successor F.W. de Klerk, who earned Botha's scorn by negotiating the transfer of power from the white minority to the African National Congress. Universally known as “PW” from his initials, Botha was a career politician in the National party which ran South Africa from 1948 until the first, all-race election in 1994. Although he was a hardliner by instinct, he dimly sensed that he was presiding over the final phase of white rule and famously told whites after he became prime minister in 1978 to “adapt or die”. ADVERTISEMENT Yet the curmudgeonly Botha, who earned the nickname “Die Groot Krokodil” (the great crocodile) and had a habit of wagging his finger menacingly at his critics, could never reconcile himself to the inevitable. He resented the liberals and left-wingers in South Africa and abroad who had helped destroy apartheid. He never apologised for the torture, the killings and the poverty inflicted on South Africans and on the inhabitants of neighbouring states by his regime. “We are a small country, but I am not going to be buggered about,” he told Herman Nickel, the US ambassador, in 1986. “I'd rather fight.” Even in retirement in 1998, Botha refused to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was investigating the crimes committed by both sides during the apartheid era. He called it a “circus” and a “witch-hunt” against Afrikaners. He was born on January 12, 1916 on a farm in what was then the Afrikaner stronghold of the Orange Free State, but spent most of his political life in the Cape. In the years before the National party's 1948 election victory (when he began his 36-year stint as MP for the George constituency), he was a successful party organiser with a reputation for breaking up meetings of Jan Smuts's United party with thuggery and heckling. Nothing in his early years suggested he would become a reformer. He briefly joined the right-wing Ossewabrandwag, which rejected support for Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany in the second world war. As defence minister for 14 years from 1966, as prime minister from 1978 to 1984 (for a while he held both posts), and then in the newly created post of executive state president from 1984 until he was removed after suffering a stroke in 1989, he favoured military solutions to South Africa's foreign and domestic political problems. During the cold war, Botha subscribed to the view that his government faced a “total onslaught” from Communist guerrillas and their allies, and must fight them with a “total strategy”. He presided over a 20-fold increase in the country's defence budget, nurtured Armscor, a home-grown military equipment group which had some success in bypassing economic sanctions, and oversaw an invasion of Angola in 1975. He turned the State Security Council, which had been an advisory body, into a powerful and secretive inner cabinet. But it would wrong to portray him, as his enemies often did, as no more than a tyrannical right-winger. For Botha undermined the very foundations of apartheid. He legalised the black trade unions that were to become a motor of political change; he abolished the Mixed Marriages Act outlawing inter-racial weddings; he negotiated South Africa's withdrawal from southern Angola and Namibia, paving the way for Namibian independence; he repealed the “pass laws” preventing blacks from entering “white” urban areas; he opened secret talks with the jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela; and he gave coloureds (people of mixed race) and Indians the vote. It was this half-hearted concession to the rights of other races in the mid-1980s that accelerated the end of white rule. Although Botha survived a split in his National party over the new constitution and its tricameral parliament (the breakaway right-wing Conservative party was formed in 1982), the still unenfranchised black majority took to the streets in a violent uprising that ultimately destroyed apartheid. Botha never understood the forces that he had unleashed. Thousands of South Africans were subsequently killed in riots by troops and police, or in clashes between rival political groups. Some victims accused of being traitors or informers were burnt alive in motor-tyre “necklaces” by the young revolutionary “comrades” who paid allegiance to the United Democratic Front, a sort of internal wing of the ANC created out of a common hatred of the new constitution. The government imposed a partial state of emergency in 1985 and a full one the following year, thinking it could crush the uprising. Even when he accepted the idea of political negotiations, Botha deluded himself that he could strike a deal with “moderate” blacks who would demand something less than full political rights. Likewise, he thought he could divide the nationalists from the Communists in the ANC (many ANC members were both) and assumed that he could eventually release Mandela to prevent him dying in jail a martyr without seeing him become president. He was wrong on all counts. The defining moment of Botha's presidency was when he made the famous “Rubicon” speech in August 1985. Pik Botha, his foreign minister (and no relation), raised international expectations to a fever pitch that P.W. Botha would “cross the Rubicon” by outlining fundamental reforms and promising to free Mandela. P.W. Botha did make significant concessions, but, obstinate as ever, he refused to deliver the speech prepared for him and spoke to the waiting world in a hectoring tone and in coded political phrases that only South Africans could understand. Foreign opinion was horrified. The rand plunged and South Africa was obliged to declare a moratorium on repayments of its foreign debt. From that day on, it was clear that Botha would not be the man to lead South Africa into the post-apartheid era. He was twice married, first, in 1943, to Anna Elizabeth Rossouw, with whom he had two sons and three daughters. She died in 1997. The following year at the age of 82 he married Barbara Robertson, a secretary 25 years his junior. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006   Yvettep Veteran Poster Username: Yvettep Post Number: 1387 Registered: 01-2005 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 - 11:51 am:        "Ding-dong, the witch is dead..."   Mzuri "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mzuri Post Number: 2028 Registered: 01-2006 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 - 11:59 am:        I second Yvette's sentiments. I'm happy he's dead. He should have never been born.   Chrishayden AALBC .com Platinum Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 2923 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 - 12:01 pm:        I hope he suffered a long time first.   Mony Newbie Poster Username: Mony Post Number: 41 Registered: 02-2006 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 - 05:24 pm:        I am prostrate with grief.