S. Africa moves on after Botha’s death

Terry Leonard

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Something remarkable happened after the Oct. 31 death of the ruthless and reviled P.W. Botha, apartheid South Africa’s last hard-line president: The black government Botha toiled to prevent sent condolences, offered a state funeral and ordered flags flown at half-staff.

The reaction to Botha’s death pointed to the extraordinary strides toward reconciliation made by a country once bitterly divided. The gestures made last week also show a desire to relegate the wounds inflicted by apartheid to the past.

In a measure of the progress, former President Nelson Mandela — who Botha kept in prison despite enormous international pressure to free him — gave him some credit for helping to pave the way for multiracial democracy.

Yasmin Sooka, a former member of the commission that investigated apartheid atrocities, said that for most black South Africans, Botha had “become irrelevant, a nonentity.”

“For any black South African he was no longer part of the picture and didn’t impact their lives. People will remember him as a vile man, but they saw him as an old man who was left alone to live in his own bitterness,” she said.

Still, Sooka wondered whether the government was not being just a bit too big-hearted.

“If you look out across the world people are being pursued for violations of human rights. He should have stood trial. Can you imagine the generosity that allowed him to live out his life peacefully still enjoying the benefit of state resources?” she asked.

Botha, known to many as the “Big Crocodile” because of his fierce temper, ruthlessness and overbearing leadership style, was president from 1978 to 1989, the years of some of South Africa’s worst racial repression and deepest international isolation.

He depicted himself as the first South African leader to pursue race reform. But he tenaciously defended apartheid, sharply restricted the activities of black political organizations and detained more than 30,000 people for fighting apartheid.

His so-called reforms were aimed at prolonging apartheid by winning support from Asian and mixed-race communities through creation of separate parliamentary chambers. But he did lift restrictions on interracial marriage and, shortly before he was ousted in 1989, he met with Mandela — although he refused to release him and other political prisoners.

As the anti-apartheid movement gained momentum, Botha’s government declared a state of emergency in 1986 and was responsible for some of the worst reprisals in four decades of apartheid.

“While to many Botha will remain a symbol of apartheid, we also remember him for the steps he took to pave the way toward the eventual peacefully negotiated settlement in our country,” Mandela said in a terse statement released last Wednesday, a day after Botha’s death.

“The passing of Mr. Botha should serve to remind us not only of our horribly divided past, but also of how South Africans of all persuasions ultimately came together to save our country from self destruction,” added Mandela, who spent 27 years at hard labor as an apartheid prisoner.

President Thabo Mbeki, in his weekly column last Friday, reiterated his condolences to Botha’s family and defended the decision to offer a state funeral. He said the government and the African National Congress had decided to honor all leaders equally, including the captains of apartheid, because of a commitment to national reconciliation.

In the column, Mbeki gave the history of Botha’s brutal leadership. But he said the new South Africa could only be built successfully based on unqualified respect for the “principle and practice of forgiveness, as well as acceptance of the eminently humane proposition that ‘the quality of mercy is not strained.’”

The diplomatic reactions to Botha’s death are a sign of maturing race relations in South Africa, said Lawrence Schlemmer, the vice president of the Institute of Race Relations.

“Race relations are quite good. No doubt given our past and the short time we have had an open system they are surprisingly good,” he said.

But not all of the reaction was as diplomatic as the comments from Mandela and Mbeki.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions issued a statement rejecting the notion that Botha had contributed to democratic transformation and calling him a brutal dictator who the majority of South Africans would remember with hatred and disgust.

“He remained to the very last a staunch defender of apartheid, racism, dictatorship and inequality for which he refused to make the slightest apology,” the statement said.

And the opposition Pan Africanist Congress said offering Botha a state funeral and flying the flag at half-staff was “an insult to African people.”

Jan Hofmeyr, a senior researcher at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, agreed the muted reactions were possible only because Botha had become irrelevant.

“It is an indication that South Africans have moved on,” he said. “People are already passed the stage of retribution. They don’t want to dwell on the past because it doesn’t contribute to the improvement of the quality of their lives.”

AP writer Celean Jacobson in Johannesburg contributed to this report.

(Associated Press)