By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Sunday, April 24, 1994
SOWETO—With rousing gusto, Nelson Mandela and some 60,000 frenzied supporters celebrated the approaching end of a bitter journey yesterday here in the place where their freedom quest began nearly 20 years ago.
They did the toyi-toyi, the dance of celebration. They sang songs, waved placards, set off fireworks and hoisted a coffin bearing the words, “Farewell Apartheid.”
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Sunday, April 24, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—After living much of her life with the perverse indignities of apartheid, voting in South Africa’s historic first all-race elections this week comes down to one thing for Louisa Rakale:
“I’ll vote if somebody comes to take me to the polling station,” the 85-year-old Soweto grandmother said.
By the reckoning of racial separation laws that governed their lives, Rakale and her sisters Jeanie Khali, 86, and Alsie Makgamele, 87, were born “colored” to a white (Scottish) man and a black (Xhosa) woman.
By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Friday, April 15, 1994
DURBAN, South Africa—In what was unimaginable just four years ago, a black man and a white man seeking to lead this country into democracy appeared on the same stage last night and asked South Africans for color-blind support.
The two candidates—Nobel Prize winners Nelson Mandela and President F.W. de Klerk—went at each other like the clubhouse pros they are, but at the end of this nation’s first legitimate presidential debate, they shook hand and appealed for national conciliation.
“I am proud to hold your hand—for us to go forward together,” Mandela, leader of the African National Congress Party, told de Klerk. “Let us work together to end division and suspicion . . . Let us work together for reconciliation and nation-building.”
“The whole world is waiting for us to succeed,” said de Klerk, leader of the National Party.
By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Monday, April 25, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—A 200-pound car bomb ripped through downtown Johannesburg yesterday, killing nine and terrorizing South Africans two days before the first all-race elections.
“I thought I was dead,” said Tina Dhumess, 42, after doctors patched her head cuts. “I was praying that my soul was going to heaven.”
There was no warning and no one claimed responsibility for the city’s worst terrorist bomb that also wounded 100 people.
But suspicion fell on white extremists—the last holdouts to the election that would usher in black-majority rule.
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Wednesday, April 27, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—Filled with indescribable emotions, South Africa’s liberation hero, Nelson Mandela, will vote today for the first time in his remarkable life.
Mandela, the former political prisoner poised to become the first president of the new South Africa, is set to vote in a school founded by one of the men who preceded him as leader of the once-banned African National Congress.
“There are certain feelings one cannot express in words. . . . What I feel is beyond words,” he said yesterday while meeting with a world press corps here to witness the death and rebirth of a nation.
The United States Supreme Court illegitimately installed George W. Bush as president of the United States after the 2000 elections. Boy George was going to while away his time in office, rewarding friends in politics and the oil and defense industries with rich contracts.
That was why Dick Cheney held those meetings with energy interests behind closed doors. It was as evil a cabal as you could get. They were corrupt and lazy, to boot.
Then, history intervened.
Whatever you believed about the origins and the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the events propelled our nation on a path that altered the course of our history. Every step along the way, when our nation’s leaders had opportunities to chose paths that would strengthen or imperil our nation, they chose wrong.
They chose torture, rather than follow the rule of law. They belittled and denigrated international laws and institutions, rather than harness the goodwill of the community of nations.
The new administration, a legitimately elected president, Barack Obama, bearing a mandate from the people of this country, has begun trying to repair the damage wrought by the last administration. They won’t always make the right decisions. Their steps might be, at times, unsure. But they have one thing George W. Bush never had. Legitimacy.
UPDATE: A special prosecutor should decide the fates of John Yoo, Jay C. Bybee and other memo writers. They should suffer the consequences for violations of international laws that their memos aided and abetted.
All lower level soldiers punished for following orders should have their punishment reduced (because we now know they did not torture on a whim but were, in fact, following orders).
Gen. Geoffrey Miller should be tried for War Crimes.
A Truth & Reconciliation Commission (senior members of the judiciary and the U.S. Congress; governed by strictures of Congressional testimony) should get sworn testimonies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, and Colin Powell. Their testimonies will be immunized if they tell the truth. Liars should be prosecuted for the wholesale violations of international laws (conventions against torture and the Geneva conventions) that occurred.
All will be consigned to history’s judgment.
By GENE MUSTAIN and MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writers | Tuesday, April 26, 1994
GERMISTON—Dennis Makubela will vote. Someone almost killed him yesterday, but he will vote.
Mavis Phungula will vote. Someone almost killed her too, when a bomb—the worst of many that exploded across the country yesterday—destroyed a crowded taxi stand in this mining town near Johannesburg. But she will vote.
It is not known if Poppy Skosana will vote. She was too distraught to talk, for the bomb had severed her son Dickson in two and thrown the top half of him, still in the bucket seat of his taxi, 50 yards down Hudson Street.
But Philemon Maseko will vote. He was standing on Hudson Street when half of Dickson Skosana in the bucket seat landed on top of him. He was taken to the same hospital as the others, and he will vote.
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Thursday, April 28, 1994
JOHANNESBURG—Their freedom finally at hand, millions upon jubilant millions of blacks voted for the first time yesterday and began sending the last colonial outpost on the Africa continent into the history books.
On an epic day of stirring images across South Africa, the newly enfranchised experienced the joy of democracy—and discovered that democracy is not always easy or pretty.
The turnout was so great the nation’s election machinery—assembled only four months ago—broke down at numerous points, prompting much controversy and raising the chances of a disputed outcome and renewed strife.
Most of the breakdowns occurred in the distribution of ballots—not enough in urban areas, too many in the countryside—and election officials began printing 5 million more ballots for today’s last day of voting.
Trying to defuse the crisis and assure everyone the opportunity to vote, officials declared today another national holiday and vowed to keep the polls as long as voters are in line.
“Every effort is being made,” President F. W. de Klerk said. “This election is the most historical event in the history of South Africa. We must make it a success.”
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Thursday, April 28, 1994
SOWETO—As dusk turned to dawn on the historic day, Wilson Gwala forgot about his bad heart and his recent kidney problems, and refused to wait.
Someone was supposed to come take him to the polls later in the day, so Gwala — an apartheid lifetime of arrrets and detentions now behind him — could vote in an election in South Africa for the first time. But sunlight streaming through his tiny home was a symbol too powerful to ignore.
“It seemed like it was the first time the sun rose over Soweto,” the 70-year-old grandfather said, “like I was seeing the sun for the first time, like someone peeled the scales off my eyes, like I was born again.”
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writers | Thursday, April 28, 1994
SOWETO—The preacher from Harlem paid no mind when the president from Pretoria made a surprise visit to a church here yesterday.
While dozens of people, including some of his fellow American preachers, crowded around South African President F. W. de Klerk and even shook his hand, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker of the Canaan Baptist Church stayed to the side.
“How can you shake that man’s hand?” Walker asked members of the group here with him to observe the first election in this country in which blacks have been able to vote.
By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Friday, April 29, 1994
RUSTENBURG—I was not afraid. I wanted to see them when they attacked me.
“Kaffir, you have to leave; you are not wanted here,” one said.
“Kaffir” is South Africa’s ugliest racial epithet, like its U.S. equivalent, “nigger.”
“Wait a minute, you invited us,” I said.
The first punch landed on my neck. Another kicked me on the left hip. One man grabbed me in a strangle-hold. I wriggled free and stretched out my arms to ward off blows as arms from everywhere grabbed at and punch me and people yelled words at me in Afrikaans.
I just thought, “Wow, what the hell is going on here?”
By GENE MUSTAIN, Daily News Staff Writer | Friday, April 29, 1994
RUSTENBURG—The first whiff of the hate in store came when we turned off the two-lane blacktop onto a dusty rutted road and a group of Boer commandos by a parked car glared at us.
One of them, a huge pot-bellied man with a bushy mustache and a pistol in his waistband, shouted some insult we couldn’t hear.
“They think black people are the devil,” said Michele Baird, our black interpreter.