A Brutal man lost in time ap Botha, apartheid, racism

A brutal man lost in time

November 2, 2006

P. W. Botha refused, ever, to acknowledge that he was wrong, writes Lynne Duke.

PW. BOTHA sputtered and bellowed, mad, sweating, his bald, waxen-looking head glistening in the glare of a South African courtroom.

"Die Groot Krokodil", Afrikaans for "the great crocodile", had been trapped by the laws of a country he never wished to see. He had spent his entire life, like generations of his people before him, with his proverbial boot on the neck of South Africa's black majority. But that day in 1998, he faced a black judge, in a land ruled by a black president, Nelson Mandela. Botha, a man frozen in amber, still pining for the days of apartheid and white minority rule, was beside himself with rage.

With his death this week, the memory of that day comes flooding back. The former South African leader, among the hardest of the hardliners, was being held accountable, even in some small way, for the apartheid era. Sure, I had to endure the droplets of spit that kept flying from Botha's mouth and landing on my notepad and hands as he ranted, but that was a petty inconvenience.

A throng of reporters gathered before him. Though his charge was a minor one - contempt of court for defying a subpoena from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission - he became the first and only apartheid-era political leader to be prosecuted.

And all because Botha would not explain himself. That's all the truth commission wanted. As part of the negotiated settlement to end apartheid, the new government had opted to reconcile with the bitter past.

So the commission asked Botha to appear. He refused.

Prime minister and then president from 1978 to 1989, Botha refused to discuss his rule that day in court. He refused to acknowledge that he had ordered any of the violence that was a hallmark of that era: the thousands of people massacred, assassinated, disappeared, bombed, tortured or detained without trial, by order of a state that had adopted what it called a "total strategy" to thwart black protest.

Senior law enforcement officials told the commission that Botha had ordered them to bomb the offices of apartheid opponents, which they dutifully did. They hit the headquarters of a church group and a trade union federation.

South Africa's most infamous hit man, Eugene "Prime Evil" de Kock, told how Botha conferred upon him a medal of appreciation for the bombing

of an anti-apartheid office in London.

And documents gathered by the truth commission showed how Botha's State Security Council had a policy to "remove" and "eliminate" its adversaries (though some apartheid-era officials denied those terms meant murder).

Finally came the day, Botha's day in court. Botha admitted nothing. He regretted nothing.

Time, for him, had not passed. His old battle against the "swart gevaar", or "black peril", seemed still to be in full tilt.

"I am not prepared to apologise," he bellowed to the press that day.

True to his reputation from the 1980s, he wagged his finger as he preached: "I only apologise for my sins before God. I stand with all those who executed lawful commands from my government in our struggle against the revolutionary communist onslaught against our country."

That's what he had called them, back in the 1980s, when Mandela's colleagues and followers were fighting and agitating for their freedom.

Black rule, Botha had believed, would ruin South Africa. And he believed it still.

Botha that day in court was reduced to a sad shadow of the past as he shouted: "I'm still concerned about the onslaught! What I prophesied came true!"

He was ultimately convicted of contempt, then had his conviction thrown out on appeal on a technicality.

Though I had relished the drama of it, the scene actually was sad: a once-powerful figure rendered small, even tragic, unable to grasp the lessons of history, unable to seize or even to recognise a chance perhaps to refashion his legacy. Botha, a man lost in time.

Lynne Duke was Johannesburg bureau chief for The Washington Post from 1995 to 1999.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/a-brutal-man-lost-in-time/2006/11/01/1162339915601.html?page=2