Wednesday, November 01, 2006

PW Botha Dies (Die Groot Krokodil frek)

Sorry but I have to have my say. Am I sorry he has died?, I should be as a Christian, but I cannot bring myself to feel any sorrow for a man that was responsible for sending me to war at the age of 17.
I saw my friends killed, saw action in a country that was not mine, fighting an "enemy" we eventually gave (South West Africa) away to, and for what? As long as I live I will remember watching South Africa handing over South West Africa to SWAPO. It was midnight, and the flag came down, and I cried then - it was all for nothing. Why did this man have to send us away from our loved ones, to fight for a cause we never agreed with, and years later, the same thing happened in the country of my birth. Apartheid was wrong, at least FW De Klerk saw that....

I do not think I am the only one who feels this way, but PW and his cronies were evil people. I think many young men had their lives stuffed up by him and his Government, it affected us deeply, and those scars will never heal. South Africa, and the rest of us are better of without PW Botha.

For Nelson Mandela and others to laud him makes them better people than me. The TRC found this man(PW Botha) guilty of gross human rights violations, he never even apologised, never asked for forgiveness, and in his own words would never repent. I hope he reaps what he sewed when he is judged. He too will have to answer for his actions.
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From News24.com...
"Cape Town - Former Prime Minister and later State President Pieter Willem (PW) Botha was a man who by 1989 had lost the political plot as well as control of the ruling National Party.
First it was his stroke of January 1989 which incapacitated him. He stood down as National Party leader - and as Anthony Sampson puts it in his biography of Nelson Mandela - he "unwisely assumed he could remain State President".
Perhaps, wrongly Botha's political legacy is thus defined not so much by the oppressive nature of his regime with a fiscal emphasis on the needs of an ever expanding defence force and dubious actions of the security police, but by his 11th hour meeting with Mandela.

According to They Shaped Our Century published by Human & Rousseau, Botha really made his mark from 1966 when the apartheid architect HF Verwoerd, then prime minister, appointed him minister of defence.
Significantly only recently Botha described the word "apartheid" as a misunderstood Afrikaans word which simply had meant "good neighbourliness". It was the result of his interventions that the South African Defence Force became involved in wars in Angola and Mozambique as he obsessively fought what he described as "the total onslaught" of communism.
He was also behind the conscription of all white males to the defence force. Effectively the protracted war in Angola and Namibia failed. His enemy, the MPLA, took power in Angola and in Namibia - then South West Africa - his enemy, the South West African People's Organisation swept the elections there in 1989.


.....Even in retirement, Botha retained his defiant streak and refused to appear before the country's truth commission which implicated him in human-rights violations.
The commission found Botha personally ordered the bombing of the anti-apartheid South African Council of Churches' headquarters and that, under the sinister State Security Council, issued orders using language which security forces interpreted as authorisation to kill government opponents.
'I will never ask for amnesty'
But, in June 1999, Botha won an appeal against the conviction for failing to heed the subpoena, saying he was "rejoiced by the decision".
"I will never ask for amnesty. Not now, not tomorrow, not after tomorrow," he said.
During a controversial interview ahead of his 90th birthday earlier this year, Botha said South Africa would have "gone down the drain" if it had achieved liberation in the 1960s and 197

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good comments on PW I know the heartache it caused my wife and I when you men were sent into SWA - as you say - for what? We all were fearful of the outcome
JMA