Despite the overwhelming mandate that whites gave President F. W. de Klerk to end their monopoly on political power, South Africa has a distance to travel before blacks inherit the vote and other basic rights flowing from it.
The ringing approval of 68.7 percent of the whites who voted in Tuesday's referendum left little doubt that Mr. de Klerk has their support to negotiate power sharing with blacks.
"The referendum result is close to being unique in the annals of politics," Hermann Giliomee, a political scientist at the University of Cape Town, wrote in The Cape Times newspaper today. "Here the South African whites, who have become a byword in the world for myopic bigotry, endorse a process which is most likely to reduce their political representation in a year or two to a minority in an elected legislature."
"To make it even more exceptional," Professor Giliomee said, "whites have done this from a position of relative strength and in the absence of any sense of imminent defeat."
Source: New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment