MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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May 05
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FEAR STALKS THE LAND_‘Whole country has gone mad’

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers, Wednesday | April 6, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—The looming national election has laid a new carpet of fear across this already traumatized and hyper-vigilant society.

With three weeks to go, gun stores and food stores are running out of weapons and non-perishable food, and many whites are bailing out—for the duration of the campaign and its uncertain aftermath, if not for good.

“The whole country has gone mad,” said the owner of a gun store in the seemingly non-violent suburb of Birnam, as he busied himself with customers unhappy to learn that his stock of weapons was practically depleted.

“All I’ve got left are some old M-1 rifles,” he said, as he showed an elderly white man how to load a shotgun the man had brought to the store. “The demand has outstripped my supply. It’s the same all over.”

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May 04
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VISIT TO SOWETO_INSIDE THE NECKLACE Pointless deaths but real victims

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers, Wednesday | April 6, 1994

SOWETO—He was an unidentified man, a weekly newspaper reported, and lucky for him that the police and paramedics came along when they did.

He was walking past the Dube Hostel, a decrepit barracks-like encampment where the so-called Zulu royalists live, when a man from the hostel came up and shot him in the face as the day sank toward night.

“Bastards!” he screamed, through his fractured jaw.

But the shooter and some other Zulu royalists were not finished. They wrapped the man in plastic, put him in a cardboard box, doused the box with gasoline and set it afire.

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May 03
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VISIT TO SOWETO_A tormented past, uncertain future Poverty, violence crowd out hopes

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, April 10, 1994

SOWETO—Seeing this famous black township brings to mind ruins of war, of battle just done.

On nighttime approach—home to the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and Tswana tribes—the flames of random trash fires send millions of sparks into an eerie sky heavy with the stench of rotting animals.

This is Soweto—land of misery, despair, and heartbreak, of senseless deaths, crushing poverty, frightening crime and urban squalor.

Funeral parlor owners have the most lucrative business, the most beautiful homes and affluence that rival that of Johannesburg’s wealth white suburbs.

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May 02
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Afrikaner Memorial gets new owners

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Wednesday, April 13, 1994

PRETORIA—The prospect of black majority rule has resulted in the privatization of this country’s most famous monument.

In a move akin to turning the Statute of Liberty over to the Manhattan Institute, the departing white minority government has transferred ownership of the Voortrekker Monument to a conservative citizens group.

The monument, a huge stone monolith atop a hill overlooking this capital city, celebrates the Afrikaners—whites of Dutch, German and French descent who “trekked” into the interior and defeated black Zulus 150 years ago.

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May 02
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Blacks live in N.Y.—that’s no put on

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Monday, April 11, 1994

  • JOHANNESBURG—This is a time and a city for keeping a journal:

Yes, Princess, New York is in the U.S.A. and black people live there.

Most black South Africans have had little contact with American blacks, so little that Princess Mgwebi, a security officer at a hospital in the black township of Soweto, was astonished last week when a black reporter from New York introduced himself.

“I didn’t know there are black people in New York,” she said.

Told that indeed black people live in New York and all over the U.S., her jaw dropped. “New York is part of the United States?” she said, wrinkling the vertical facial scars that indicated she was of the Ndebele tribe.

“Yes, and many blacks live there.

“Well,” Mgwebi said, not entirely sure she was not being put on. “I know there are blacks in the United States because that is where Michael Jackson is from, and I know he is black.” Read More

May 01
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The killing fields of Zululand

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 17, 1994

DURBAN—Andy Cox wept for South Africa last week.

He cried when his frantic search through the lush green bush of Zululand came to its dreadful end, and he wept again when he faced the relatives of the missing men. Two days ago, the horror was still so close he could not describe what he saw without breaking down twice more.

“How can we ever have peace when people are this way?” he said. “This was so savage.”

The dead were poor young Zulus. They were day laborers for Cox, a young white businessman hired by the government to distribute non-partisan pamphlets about the upcoming election — which has created a figurative Mason-Dixon line of killing hate in KwaZulu, the Zulu homeland surrounding this seaside city.

Last Monday, they wandered over the wrong side of the line—into an area controlled by KwaZula’s chief minister, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who sent mediator Henry Kissinger packing later in the week by demanding the impossible, the postponent of the nation’s first non-racial election.

Around noon, shortly after their driver telephoned Cox’s office and said they were thinking of leaving because the area seemed tense, the victims were kidnapped, tortured, shot, hacked and set afire. As different points along the frenzied bloodletting, the driver and two others managed to escape.

“I lay on the ground and pretended I was dead,” said one of the survivors, a teenager named Lucky Mkhwanazi. “Then I ran.”

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Apr 30
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They pray for beloved country By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

Monday, April 18, 1994

DURBAN—Slowly, Teressa Nxumalo rose to her feet. Eleanor Sidiya was next. And then, around the giant stadium, others began to follow.

“Let all those who’ve lost loved ones to political violence please rise,” the preacher said again. Dozens more people began standing.

The preacher led a prayer, and then others in the crowd of 20,000 put their arms around the bereaved. For today at least, in this city at least, South Africa was peaceful.

The rally was orchestrated by a group of churches. The purpose was to steel the faithful against the winds of civil war building in rural areas surrounding this city in the nation’s most troubled province of Natal. Violence has continued to rise in anticipation of the first all-race elections April 26-28.

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Apr 29
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Deal to Bring Zulus into Election Nears

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, April 19, 1994

JOHANNESBURG—South African leaders appear to be the on the brink of a breakthrough agreement that would bring the Inkatha Freedom Party into next week’s historic election.

During talks in Pretoria involving Inkatha leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, President F. W. de Klerk and African National Congress officials, Buthelezi dropped his demand for an election delay, a government source said. The Zulu leader conceded that a postponement was impossible because of opposition from the ANC and government.

Buthelezi and de Klerk were to discuss the proposal today with ANC leader Nelson Mandela.

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Apr 28
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Pact in South Africa Zulu Party to Take Part in Election

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Wednesday, April 20, 1994

PRETORIA—In a last-minute about-face that won him little more than he was offered 10 days and dozens of political killings ago, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi yesterday agreed to take part in next week’s first all-race election.

With Buthelezi and his Zulu-based party on board, the biggest obstacles to a free and fair election across the country—and the threat of civil war among 8 million Zulus—appear to have fallen by the wayside.

“It is my deepest hope this agreement will bring an end to violence,” President F.W. de Klerk said during a dramatic joint press conference here.

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Apr 28
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In a dark place

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No School For You, Girl

For girls, attending school in Pakistan’s northwestern region has become a life threatening prospect. Since 2007, at least 168 schools have been blown up by local Taliban militia in their campaign to enforce their extremist interpretation of Sharia law which forbids girls from going to school.

In 1960, Rockwell painted a picture called “The Problem We All Live With,” showing kindergartner Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to attend an all-white school in the South, being escorted to school by US Marshals. In Pakistan, if the Taliban gets its way, girls will be marched away from school.

Apr 28
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The Taliban threat

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Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari and the Taliban

Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari and the Taliban

Last week the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, signed off on a truce made in February with the Taliban in the Swat valley, which appears to have only emboldened them and increased their threat in the region.

On PBS NewsHour last night, Margaret Warner moderated a short segment about the Taliban in Pakistan. She interviewed Wendy Chamberlain, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Husain Haqqani, the current Pakstani ambassador in Washington.

Ms. Chamberlain was a career foreign service officer who now heads the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to teach America about the Middle East and vice versa. Neither she nor her organization seems partial to hysterical rants, but her description of the Taliban in Pakistan is frightening: “Their goal is to topple the democratic government of Pakistan and they have a strategy that’s proved to be working, a strategy where they go into a district, go into a town, terrorize the local authorities, the civil society, the aid workers, women, barbers, and impose their law …”

To read the transcript of the NewsHour segment, go here.

Apr 27
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SEARCH FOR MEANING IN SLAY

By Homepage, New York Daily News, South Africa: The Freedom Vote No Comments

By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 24, 1994

CAPE TOWN—The trial is in its sixth tedious month, but residents of the area anxious whites call the Ring of Fire still come into town to cheer the young comrades accused of murdering Amy Biehl.

From the courtroom balcony, they mouth encouraging words to the alleged killers and mock witnesses who testify about the young American who came to South Africa to help blacks learn about democracy.

“We come because they didn’t do it,” a man in the cheering section snaps at day’s end, before heading back to Guguletu, one of the ring of squalid black townships on the fringes of this otherwise beautiful city.

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