EXTENSION OF SECURITY OF TENURE ACT 62 OF 1997
Commencement Date of Act: 28 November 1997
Date Modified by Sabinet: 20071023
Category: Property, Land and Environment - Land
Note: Decided Cases updated
Description: To provide for measures with State assistance to facilitate long-term security of land tenure; to regulate the conditions of residence on certain land; to regulate the conditions on and circumstances under which the right of persons to reside on land may be terminated; and to regulate the conditions and circumstances under which persons, whose right of residence has been terminated, may be evicted from land; and to provide for matters connected therewith
Database: Netlaw: SA Legislation
To provide for measures with State assistance to facilitate long-term security of land tenure; to regulate the conditions of residence on certain land; to regulate the conditions on and circumstances under which the right of persons to reside on land may be terminated; and to regulate the conditions and circumstances under which persons, whose right of residence has been terminated, may be evicted from land; and to provide for matters connected therewith.
WHEREAS many South Africans do not have secure tenure of their homes and the land which they use and are therefore vulnerable to unfair eviction;
WHEREAS unfair evictions lead to great hardship, conflict and social instability;
WHEREAS this situation is in part the result of past discriminatory laws and practices;
AND WHEREAS it is desirable - that the law should promote the achievement of long-term security of tenure for occupiers of land, where possible through the joint efforts of occupiers, land owners, and government bodies; that the law should extend the rights of occupiers, while giving due recognition to the rights, duties and legitimate interests of owners; that the law should regulate the eviction of vulnerable occupiers from land in a fair manner, while recognising the right of land owners to apply to court for an eviction order in appropriate circumstances; to ensure that occupiers are not further prejudiced;
A copy of the Act can be found here.
Friday, November 28, 1997
Sunday, September 21, 1997
Oliver Stone Doesn't Want to Start an Argument
Labor Day weekend couldn't have begun better for Oliver Stone. On the day of its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in the Colorado mountains, ''U-Turn,'' his 13th film as a director, was reviewed glowingly by both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. In Variety, Todd McCarthy wrote, ''Few, if any, directors with as many films under his belt as Stone has, are displaying this kind of stylistic urgency and restlessness, without the slightest speck of Hollywood complacency in evidence.''
The opening credits of ''U-Turn,'' which will be re-leased in early October, bill it as ''an Oliver Stone movie,'' as opposed to the weightier ''films'' of the last decade. After years of facing down attacks for his controversial subject matter, Stone has for once spun an old-fashioned yarn, entirely devoid of political or social agenda.
But few things ever go easily for Stone, and over the weekend, festivalgoers' responses to his vicious, star-studded, neo-noir black comedy set in the Arizona desert were decidedly mixed. Saturday afternoon, following a mostly deferential Q. and A. session between Stone and a group of college students, Salvador Litvak, a redheaded graduate of U.C.L.A.'s film program, approached the 50-year-old film maker privately.
''Did you all discuss the film among yourselves?'' Stone asked him. ''What did they think?''
''Well, to be frank,'' Litvak said, ''about half didn't like it. They're wondering: 'He's Oliver Stone. He can do anything he wants. And when he has that kind of opportunity, why does he do . . . this? Why isn't he making a righteous film?' '' After Litvak had gone, Stone sighed. ''I can't escape the image,'' he said. ''Because I'm 'Oliver Stone,' they expect a certain thing.''
Among the film directors who achieve fame enough for their names to register with the general public, Oliver Stone is the rarity who has escaped the bounds of his profession. A self-styled iconoclast, adventurer and revisionist historian, he has increasingly aspired over the years to the status of celebrity thinker, becoming a passionately contentious participant in public debate on the issues engaged by his films. But he has been so passionate, and so insistent, that the messenger has often overwhelmed the message, allowing his detractors to paint him as a crude, polemical celebrity ranter. Last winter, the initial critical acclaim that greeted ''The People vs. Larry Flynt'' -- which Stone produced but did not direct -- was quickly drowned out by vociferous denunciations from Gloria Steinem and others who objected to its sympathetic portrayal of the controversial Hustler publisher. The film subsequently sputtered at the box office, and its failure to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture was also seen as part of the backlash.
''The media make you into a god, and then they kill you,'' says Richard Rutowski, Stone's best friend and frequent collaborator. ''And Oliver has been experiencing a difficult death.''
In recognition of the easy target Stone has made of himself, mounted on a column in an open area of his offices is a large likeness of his face painted on a dartboard, a gift from an agent. ''They got me,'' Stone says. ''I feel like, as far as my career is concerned, I have to prove myself all over again. How do I show people that I'm not a cartoon?''
After the disappointing indifference of audiences to ''Nixon'' and ''Heaven and Earth,'' and the public-relations nightmare of ''Natural Born Killers,'' Stone, a three-time Academy Award winner who rarely seems to lack bluster or self-assurance, found himself at an uncertain crossroads. Studios were reluctant to bankroll politically volatile material like ''Memphis,'' a version of the Martin Luther King Jr. story that would question the guilt of James Earl Ray in King's assassination. When he chose to direct ''U-Turn,'' his co-producer, Dan Halsted, viewed it as a necessary move, explaining, ''I wanted Oliver to make a movie that wasn't going to be reviewed on the op-ed pages.''
Stone's work has always inspired strong responses. In 1991, when Pauline Kael retired as film critic for The New Yorker, she quipped, ''The prospect of having to sit through another Oliver Stone movie is too much.'' To this day, however, the film maker still clearly suffers most from the success of ''J.F.K.,'' whose enormous worldwide popularity served only to intensify the virulence of critics, pundits and historians who misconstrued or objected to his dramatic method, his heroic depiction of the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison or the various paranoid solutions the film proposed to the Kennedy assassination. No film purporting to portray American history has been so much discussed, or reviled, since ''Birth of a Nation,'' D.W. Griffith's epic mash note to the Ku Klux Klan.
Stone's participation in the fray only made it worse. ''He didn't have to go everywhere screaming his head off that it was all true,'' notes Don Murphy, who produced ''Natural Born Killers.'' ''The film makes a really cogent argument that the official version of Kennedy's death is bull, and he should have just stopped there. But he wanted you to accept his version, which wasn't very cogent.'' A Hollywood executive who does not know Stone personally says: ''He's a genius director, but what's frustrating is, he's not a genius. His movies don't make arguments -- they spew. If he made half as many movies in the same amout of time, he would make great films for the ages.''
In one of the more striking coincidences of the art-life continuum, ''Nothing Sacred,'' a 1937 film written by Ben Hecht, features a bullheaded, hypersensitive newspaper editor named Oliver Stone. Asked to describe him, Fredric March, who plays his star reporter, says: ''He's like a cross between a Ferris wheel and a werewolf. But with a lovable streak -- if you care to blast for it.'' It is a characterization that until recently might just as easily have applied to the real Oliver Stone. Restlessly energetic, an inveterate partier and womanizer, capable of extraordinary charm and eloquence, Stone could also be unpleasantly confrontational, short-tempered and obstreperous. But the past year and a half has been a time of self-doubt and re-examination for Stone. His professional quandary and a mellower private life have led to an evident softening.
''The biggest internal movement I recognize,'' his friend Rutowski says, ''is humility. It's hard to see. He has a lot of crazy energy that comes from his imbalances. But he's tasted it.'' The birth of a daughter, Tara, by his Korean girlfriend, Chong Son Chong, while not pushing Stone to monogamy, has signaled a serious new personal commitment, as has his increasing involvement in Tibetan Buddhism. ''I'm readjusting the balances in my life,'' he says. ''I had a lot of demons, and they expressed themselves in the work. But there is a lightening of the load.''
Part of Stone's stock-taking includes the October publication, alongside the release of ''U-Turn,'' of ''A Child's Night Dream,'' a novel he wrote at age 19 between dropping out of Yale and enlisting to go to Vietnam. A stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows an alienated young man named ''Oliver'' from New York, across Asia and into Mexico, the book displays a rage and naive ambition that while disarmingly revealing will almost certainly expose the film maker to further derogation. Yet if Stone is frustrated by mainstream hostility to his desire to explore what he calls the ''dark side'' or ''shadow areas'' of life, he can usually count on a sympathetic reception from one group: in the absence of a meaningful contemporary counterculture, young people find his independent, antiestablishment stance uncommonly attractive.
At American University in Washington, undergraduates flock to a history course taught by Peter Kuznick titled ''Oliver Stone's America.'' (Garry Wills, who recently wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly proclaiming Stone a 20th-century Dostoyevsky, offered a similar class at Northwestern.) Last fall, when Stone visited as a guest lecturer, he stood at the podium, black reading glasses pushed down on the bridge of his nose, projecting a relaxed, benevolent professorial authority. The lecture hall overflowed with excited students, including a cheerful sophomore named Kristen Young, who wore a tight, white T-shirt pulled up to expose her navel. The Vietnam War fascinates her, she said. Her father served in 1968 and came back a changed man. ''He can't really talk about it.''
Asked if she is swayed by any of the conspiratorial possibilities laid out in ''J.F.K.,'' she responded enthusiastically. ''Oh, yeah. It was L.B.J. L.B.J. didn't want to end the war. It was a power trip.''
When another student brought up the subject in the Q. and A. session, Stone made it clear that his film never claims that Johnson murdered Kennedy, reprising his litany on the artist's right to provocative ambiguity. ''You have a responsibility to read a book,'' he told the class. ''You're not going to sit through a three-hour movie and say, 'That's that.' I'm brainwashing the young? I don't have that agenda.''
In large part, what students respond to and what grown-ups distrust is Stone's sheer pyrotechnical virtuosity. As a film maker, Stone has evolved a powerful, kaleidoscopic style, deploying the textures of disparate film formats and stocks, mixing black-and-white with color, interjecting associative, or dissociative, imagery within a scene to shift back and forth between perspectives or to suddenly dissolve the boundary between sober exposition and grotesque expressionism.
Stone is eager to discuss the effect of form on content. ''I've always appreciated the dream state,'' he explains, ''and to be honest, I've questioned reality. Especially when you get to people like Nixon, or the J.F.K. murder. I'm all for facts, but there's so much dispute about the facts that the Kennedy murder to me borders on dream, or nightmare. And the nightmare state that took over the country traumatized it. Whatever they say, something happened that day. His head was blown off at high noon, I believe, for specific reasons.
''Anyway, that nightmare leads somehow to Vietnam and to Watergate and up into the Reagan era, and it really is almost like the dream state possessed the country. So, what do film makers do? We inhabit the dream state. And movies that are good are vivid dreams, in a sense. I never remember plot points. I always remember the mood of a movie and the feeling of a movie. And I suppose that in approaching it, in approaching reality as dream, I have offended certain literal-minded people. Because they think history exists with predetermined borders. I'm not so sure it does.''
In Hollywood, anyone whose films provoke the intense reactions that Stone's do is a valuable commodity. For all the fire he has drawn, Stone remains an incontrovertible A-list director in the eyes of the studios, and his turn away from politics has only whetted their hope that he will forsake his edgy material for their own, more commercial projects. Prior to shooting ''U-Turn,'' his friend the producer and director Lili Zanuck reports, he ''literally read everything in town.'' Dreamworks SKG, the new studio owned by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, offered him their inaugural movie, ''The Peacemaker,'' a political thriller, but Stone's ambivalence prevailed, and he turned it down. Lisa Moiselle, a producer who once worked in Stone's office, remembers him repeatedly warning his script readers and interns, ''Don't go Hollywood on me!'' But among the films he is now considering are a drama about life in the N.F.L. and, at the behest of Tom Cruise, who has wanted to work with Stone again since ''Born on the Fourth of July,'' a sequel to ''Mission Impossible,'' the ultimate in big-screen Hollywood entertainment.
''The major thing he's doing,'' theorizes Variety's editor in chief, Peter Bart, ''is he has to re-establish his credentials as someone who can make a more conventional, accessible, popular picture. You can't be thought of as a guy who's a one-trick pony. Many of us would love to see him sustain his momentum, and it is some concern to us -- we're rooting for him.''
In Telluride, Stone complained that the college students who felt let down by the lack of substance in ''U-Turn'' don't understand the degree of hostility and resistance he currently faces. ''I can't live for students,'' he said. ''They're too high-minded.'' They may be cheered to know, however, that no matter what genre Stone chooses to work in, he's never far from his obsessions. Discussing his concept for ''Mission Impossible,'' he describes it as ''a vehicle to say something about the state of corporate culture and technology and global politics in the 21st century. It's a big commercial picture, and Tom Cruise is a movie star, and in a sense, that gives me some camouflage. I can't always be out there leading with my chin.''
Blockbusters aside, it would be a mistake to think that Stone was making more than a temporary withdrawal from the overtly political. Among the projects in his development pipeline are several that are certain to raise hackles, including not only the Martin Luther King Jr. film but also scripts about the Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. ''The important thing is to feel you're going forward,'' Stone says, ''instead of into obfuscation, drunkenness, druggedness. There are examples of film makers who have taken downturns. I don't feel I've taken a downturn in the last 11 years.''
Last December, when I visited the set of ''U-Turn'' in Arizona, Stone seemed unusually composed, even in the amped-up milieu in which he prefers to shoot. Without the pressure of making a high-profile movie, Stone had decided to return to the guerrilla-style conditions under which he made his first films, trying to complete ''U-Turn'' in six weeks for approximately $20 million, or less than half the time and expense of his previous films. An impressive cast, including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Clare Danes, Joaquin Phoenix and Billy Bob Thornton, was signed up for the ride.
On the dusty main street of Superior, a sleepy town stuck in the 50's, Stone was an inspiring commander, engaged and accessible, taking suggestions from cast and crew alike. The smaller scale did not impinge on the numerous camera setups required by Stone's fragmented style: rarely venturing beyond six or seven takes per setup, he still shot more than 25 times as much film as he used, a ratio more appropriate to a film with a schedule two or three times as long. Between setups, rather than retire to his trailer, he would stay to confer about further details or head down the street with an assistant director to plan the next one. Over the course of several hours on a sunny afternoon, he managed to cover a conversation between Sean Penn and Jon Voight from some 20 different angles.
Later, for a short hallucinatory sequence meant to emanate from Penn's subconscious, Penn wandered into town while, from the opposite direction, the grips ran at top speed, pushing a dolly bearing Robert Richardson, the cinematographer -- who was wielding a silent-era hand-cranked camera -- down almost the entire length of the bumpy street, careening wildly from side to side and sliding to a final stop just in front of Penn, who stared unblinkingly into the lens. The shot was repeated several times, and on each take Stone ran alongside the camera, urging them on, all the way down the street.
''In Tibetan Buddhism,'' according to Stone, ''they allow for wrathful deities -- they protect you from forces of destruction.'' Smiling, he continued: ''I'm working on that. Because I have a lot of people who just don't like me, who have never met me, who don't know me. They just sort of have an image of me. You want to be liked -- we all do -- you want to be loved as a person, and it doesn't happen that way, because you make certain films that you think are honest, but they really tick people off. And you pay the price in your life. Sometimes I walk into a restaurant or something, and I just feel a lot of the vibes coming out.''
The following night on the set, a Saturday, thinking his job done for the weekend, Penn's makeup man went AWOL, causing a nearly two-hour delay, while the second cameraman inadvertently overexposed the brief scene that Stone and Richardson had delegated to him. The director, however, maintained his calm, continuing without public outburst or interruption.
While it was still daylight, walking toward the storefront where the next scene was to be shot, Richardson gently mocked the new, user-friendly Oliver Stone. ''It's an old story, isn't it?'' he asked. ''Monster goes Zen. No explosions on the set, no one has anything bad to say.'' His eyes grew wide, and with exaggerated urgency he wondered, ''Where did the monster go?''
As Richardson finished speaking, Richard Rutowski's Jeep appeared in the intersection before us, skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust. And in one of those moments that all of a sudden seem charged with significance, Rutowski leaned out the window, accidentally offering an answer to the cinematographer's rhetorical query.
''Bob,'' he said, ''Bob.''
Richardson looked over at him.
''Some things,'' Rutowski intoned, ''never change.''
Later, they shot an easy setup, Richardson holding the camera on his shoulder, following Penn from behind as he walked down a side street. After the first take, Penn turned around and called back to Stone, ''Oliver, I'm not going to do this shot again unless you skip toward the camera with me.'' Stone laughed, but Penn wasn't kidding. With some cajoling, the director walked over to the actor, joined hands with him and, after a signal from Penn for Richardson to roll film, together they swung their arms forward, and, for a moment, two of Hollywood's most famously surly, enormously talented, easily misunderstood figures went skipping along the asphalt, smiling, to the delighted disbelief of the assembled crew.
Source: New York Times
The opening credits of ''U-Turn,'' which will be re-leased in early October, bill it as ''an Oliver Stone movie,'' as opposed to the weightier ''films'' of the last decade. After years of facing down attacks for his controversial subject matter, Stone has for once spun an old-fashioned yarn, entirely devoid of political or social agenda.
But few things ever go easily for Stone, and over the weekend, festivalgoers' responses to his vicious, star-studded, neo-noir black comedy set in the Arizona desert were decidedly mixed. Saturday afternoon, following a mostly deferential Q. and A. session between Stone and a group of college students, Salvador Litvak, a redheaded graduate of U.C.L.A.'s film program, approached the 50-year-old film maker privately.
''Did you all discuss the film among yourselves?'' Stone asked him. ''What did they think?''
''Well, to be frank,'' Litvak said, ''about half didn't like it. They're wondering: 'He's Oliver Stone. He can do anything he wants. And when he has that kind of opportunity, why does he do . . . this? Why isn't he making a righteous film?' '' After Litvak had gone, Stone sighed. ''I can't escape the image,'' he said. ''Because I'm 'Oliver Stone,' they expect a certain thing.''
Among the film directors who achieve fame enough for their names to register with the general public, Oliver Stone is the rarity who has escaped the bounds of his profession. A self-styled iconoclast, adventurer and revisionist historian, he has increasingly aspired over the years to the status of celebrity thinker, becoming a passionately contentious participant in public debate on the issues engaged by his films. But he has been so passionate, and so insistent, that the messenger has often overwhelmed the message, allowing his detractors to paint him as a crude, polemical celebrity ranter. Last winter, the initial critical acclaim that greeted ''The People vs. Larry Flynt'' -- which Stone produced but did not direct -- was quickly drowned out by vociferous denunciations from Gloria Steinem and others who objected to its sympathetic portrayal of the controversial Hustler publisher. The film subsequently sputtered at the box office, and its failure to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture was also seen as part of the backlash.
''The media make you into a god, and then they kill you,'' says Richard Rutowski, Stone's best friend and frequent collaborator. ''And Oliver has been experiencing a difficult death.''
In recognition of the easy target Stone has made of himself, mounted on a column in an open area of his offices is a large likeness of his face painted on a dartboard, a gift from an agent. ''They got me,'' Stone says. ''I feel like, as far as my career is concerned, I have to prove myself all over again. How do I show people that I'm not a cartoon?''
After the disappointing indifference of audiences to ''Nixon'' and ''Heaven and Earth,'' and the public-relations nightmare of ''Natural Born Killers,'' Stone, a three-time Academy Award winner who rarely seems to lack bluster or self-assurance, found himself at an uncertain crossroads. Studios were reluctant to bankroll politically volatile material like ''Memphis,'' a version of the Martin Luther King Jr. story that would question the guilt of James Earl Ray in King's assassination. When he chose to direct ''U-Turn,'' his co-producer, Dan Halsted, viewed it as a necessary move, explaining, ''I wanted Oliver to make a movie that wasn't going to be reviewed on the op-ed pages.''
Stone's work has always inspired strong responses. In 1991, when Pauline Kael retired as film critic for The New Yorker, she quipped, ''The prospect of having to sit through another Oliver Stone movie is too much.'' To this day, however, the film maker still clearly suffers most from the success of ''J.F.K.,'' whose enormous worldwide popularity served only to intensify the virulence of critics, pundits and historians who misconstrued or objected to his dramatic method, his heroic depiction of the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison or the various paranoid solutions the film proposed to the Kennedy assassination. No film purporting to portray American history has been so much discussed, or reviled, since ''Birth of a Nation,'' D.W. Griffith's epic mash note to the Ku Klux Klan.
Stone's participation in the fray only made it worse. ''He didn't have to go everywhere screaming his head off that it was all true,'' notes Don Murphy, who produced ''Natural Born Killers.'' ''The film makes a really cogent argument that the official version of Kennedy's death is bull, and he should have just stopped there. But he wanted you to accept his version, which wasn't very cogent.'' A Hollywood executive who does not know Stone personally says: ''He's a genius director, but what's frustrating is, he's not a genius. His movies don't make arguments -- they spew. If he made half as many movies in the same amout of time, he would make great films for the ages.''
In one of the more striking coincidences of the art-life continuum, ''Nothing Sacred,'' a 1937 film written by Ben Hecht, features a bullheaded, hypersensitive newspaper editor named Oliver Stone. Asked to describe him, Fredric March, who plays his star reporter, says: ''He's like a cross between a Ferris wheel and a werewolf. But with a lovable streak -- if you care to blast for it.'' It is a characterization that until recently might just as easily have applied to the real Oliver Stone. Restlessly energetic, an inveterate partier and womanizer, capable of extraordinary charm and eloquence, Stone could also be unpleasantly confrontational, short-tempered and obstreperous. But the past year and a half has been a time of self-doubt and re-examination for Stone. His professional quandary and a mellower private life have led to an evident softening.
''The biggest internal movement I recognize,'' his friend Rutowski says, ''is humility. It's hard to see. He has a lot of crazy energy that comes from his imbalances. But he's tasted it.'' The birth of a daughter, Tara, by his Korean girlfriend, Chong Son Chong, while not pushing Stone to monogamy, has signaled a serious new personal commitment, as has his increasing involvement in Tibetan Buddhism. ''I'm readjusting the balances in my life,'' he says. ''I had a lot of demons, and they expressed themselves in the work. But there is a lightening of the load.''
Part of Stone's stock-taking includes the October publication, alongside the release of ''U-Turn,'' of ''A Child's Night Dream,'' a novel he wrote at age 19 between dropping out of Yale and enlisting to go to Vietnam. A stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows an alienated young man named ''Oliver'' from New York, across Asia and into Mexico, the book displays a rage and naive ambition that while disarmingly revealing will almost certainly expose the film maker to further derogation. Yet if Stone is frustrated by mainstream hostility to his desire to explore what he calls the ''dark side'' or ''shadow areas'' of life, he can usually count on a sympathetic reception from one group: in the absence of a meaningful contemporary counterculture, young people find his independent, antiestablishment stance uncommonly attractive.
At American University in Washington, undergraduates flock to a history course taught by Peter Kuznick titled ''Oliver Stone's America.'' (Garry Wills, who recently wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly proclaiming Stone a 20th-century Dostoyevsky, offered a similar class at Northwestern.) Last fall, when Stone visited as a guest lecturer, he stood at the podium, black reading glasses pushed down on the bridge of his nose, projecting a relaxed, benevolent professorial authority. The lecture hall overflowed with excited students, including a cheerful sophomore named Kristen Young, who wore a tight, white T-shirt pulled up to expose her navel. The Vietnam War fascinates her, she said. Her father served in 1968 and came back a changed man. ''He can't really talk about it.''
Asked if she is swayed by any of the conspiratorial possibilities laid out in ''J.F.K.,'' she responded enthusiastically. ''Oh, yeah. It was L.B.J. L.B.J. didn't want to end the war. It was a power trip.''
When another student brought up the subject in the Q. and A. session, Stone made it clear that his film never claims that Johnson murdered Kennedy, reprising his litany on the artist's right to provocative ambiguity. ''You have a responsibility to read a book,'' he told the class. ''You're not going to sit through a three-hour movie and say, 'That's that.' I'm brainwashing the young? I don't have that agenda.''
In large part, what students respond to and what grown-ups distrust is Stone's sheer pyrotechnical virtuosity. As a film maker, Stone has evolved a powerful, kaleidoscopic style, deploying the textures of disparate film formats and stocks, mixing black-and-white with color, interjecting associative, or dissociative, imagery within a scene to shift back and forth between perspectives or to suddenly dissolve the boundary between sober exposition and grotesque expressionism.
Stone is eager to discuss the effect of form on content. ''I've always appreciated the dream state,'' he explains, ''and to be honest, I've questioned reality. Especially when you get to people like Nixon, or the J.F.K. murder. I'm all for facts, but there's so much dispute about the facts that the Kennedy murder to me borders on dream, or nightmare. And the nightmare state that took over the country traumatized it. Whatever they say, something happened that day. His head was blown off at high noon, I believe, for specific reasons.
''Anyway, that nightmare leads somehow to Vietnam and to Watergate and up into the Reagan era, and it really is almost like the dream state possessed the country. So, what do film makers do? We inhabit the dream state. And movies that are good are vivid dreams, in a sense. I never remember plot points. I always remember the mood of a movie and the feeling of a movie. And I suppose that in approaching it, in approaching reality as dream, I have offended certain literal-minded people. Because they think history exists with predetermined borders. I'm not so sure it does.''
In Hollywood, anyone whose films provoke the intense reactions that Stone's do is a valuable commodity. For all the fire he has drawn, Stone remains an incontrovertible A-list director in the eyes of the studios, and his turn away from politics has only whetted their hope that he will forsake his edgy material for their own, more commercial projects. Prior to shooting ''U-Turn,'' his friend the producer and director Lili Zanuck reports, he ''literally read everything in town.'' Dreamworks SKG, the new studio owned by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, offered him their inaugural movie, ''The Peacemaker,'' a political thriller, but Stone's ambivalence prevailed, and he turned it down. Lisa Moiselle, a producer who once worked in Stone's office, remembers him repeatedly warning his script readers and interns, ''Don't go Hollywood on me!'' But among the films he is now considering are a drama about life in the N.F.L. and, at the behest of Tom Cruise, who has wanted to work with Stone again since ''Born on the Fourth of July,'' a sequel to ''Mission Impossible,'' the ultimate in big-screen Hollywood entertainment.
''The major thing he's doing,'' theorizes Variety's editor in chief, Peter Bart, ''is he has to re-establish his credentials as someone who can make a more conventional, accessible, popular picture. You can't be thought of as a guy who's a one-trick pony. Many of us would love to see him sustain his momentum, and it is some concern to us -- we're rooting for him.''
In Telluride, Stone complained that the college students who felt let down by the lack of substance in ''U-Turn'' don't understand the degree of hostility and resistance he currently faces. ''I can't live for students,'' he said. ''They're too high-minded.'' They may be cheered to know, however, that no matter what genre Stone chooses to work in, he's never far from his obsessions. Discussing his concept for ''Mission Impossible,'' he describes it as ''a vehicle to say something about the state of corporate culture and technology and global politics in the 21st century. It's a big commercial picture, and Tom Cruise is a movie star, and in a sense, that gives me some camouflage. I can't always be out there leading with my chin.''
Blockbusters aside, it would be a mistake to think that Stone was making more than a temporary withdrawal from the overtly political. Among the projects in his development pipeline are several that are certain to raise hackles, including not only the Martin Luther King Jr. film but also scripts about the Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. ''The important thing is to feel you're going forward,'' Stone says, ''instead of into obfuscation, drunkenness, druggedness. There are examples of film makers who have taken downturns. I don't feel I've taken a downturn in the last 11 years.''
Last December, when I visited the set of ''U-Turn'' in Arizona, Stone seemed unusually composed, even in the amped-up milieu in which he prefers to shoot. Without the pressure of making a high-profile movie, Stone had decided to return to the guerrilla-style conditions under which he made his first films, trying to complete ''U-Turn'' in six weeks for approximately $20 million, or less than half the time and expense of his previous films. An impressive cast, including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Lopez, Jon Voight, Clare Danes, Joaquin Phoenix and Billy Bob Thornton, was signed up for the ride.
On the dusty main street of Superior, a sleepy town stuck in the 50's, Stone was an inspiring commander, engaged and accessible, taking suggestions from cast and crew alike. The smaller scale did not impinge on the numerous camera setups required by Stone's fragmented style: rarely venturing beyond six or seven takes per setup, he still shot more than 25 times as much film as he used, a ratio more appropriate to a film with a schedule two or three times as long. Between setups, rather than retire to his trailer, he would stay to confer about further details or head down the street with an assistant director to plan the next one. Over the course of several hours on a sunny afternoon, he managed to cover a conversation between Sean Penn and Jon Voight from some 20 different angles.
Later, for a short hallucinatory sequence meant to emanate from Penn's subconscious, Penn wandered into town while, from the opposite direction, the grips ran at top speed, pushing a dolly bearing Robert Richardson, the cinematographer -- who was wielding a silent-era hand-cranked camera -- down almost the entire length of the bumpy street, careening wildly from side to side and sliding to a final stop just in front of Penn, who stared unblinkingly into the lens. The shot was repeated several times, and on each take Stone ran alongside the camera, urging them on, all the way down the street.
''In Tibetan Buddhism,'' according to Stone, ''they allow for wrathful deities -- they protect you from forces of destruction.'' Smiling, he continued: ''I'm working on that. Because I have a lot of people who just don't like me, who have never met me, who don't know me. They just sort of have an image of me. You want to be liked -- we all do -- you want to be loved as a person, and it doesn't happen that way, because you make certain films that you think are honest, but they really tick people off. And you pay the price in your life. Sometimes I walk into a restaurant or something, and I just feel a lot of the vibes coming out.''
The following night on the set, a Saturday, thinking his job done for the weekend, Penn's makeup man went AWOL, causing a nearly two-hour delay, while the second cameraman inadvertently overexposed the brief scene that Stone and Richardson had delegated to him. The director, however, maintained his calm, continuing without public outburst or interruption.
While it was still daylight, walking toward the storefront where the next scene was to be shot, Richardson gently mocked the new, user-friendly Oliver Stone. ''It's an old story, isn't it?'' he asked. ''Monster goes Zen. No explosions on the set, no one has anything bad to say.'' His eyes grew wide, and with exaggerated urgency he wondered, ''Where did the monster go?''
As Richardson finished speaking, Richard Rutowski's Jeep appeared in the intersection before us, skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust. And in one of those moments that all of a sudden seem charged with significance, Rutowski leaned out the window, accidentally offering an answer to the cinematographer's rhetorical query.
''Bob,'' he said, ''Bob.''
Richardson looked over at him.
''Some things,'' Rutowski intoned, ''never change.''
Later, they shot an easy setup, Richardson holding the camera on his shoulder, following Penn from behind as he walked down a side street. After the first take, Penn turned around and called back to Stone, ''Oliver, I'm not going to do this shot again unless you skip toward the camera with me.'' Stone laughed, but Penn wasn't kidding. With some cajoling, the director walked over to the actor, joined hands with him and, after a signal from Penn for Richardson to roll film, together they swung their arms forward, and, for a moment, two of Hollywood's most famously surly, enormously talented, easily misunderstood figures went skipping along the asphalt, smiling, to the delighted disbelief of the assembled crew.
Source: New York Times
Friday, July 25, 1997
Winner Named in Liberia
Charles Taylor was declared the victor today in Liberia's elections, completing his conversion from rebel leader to President. The elections, held last Saturday, ended a civil war that Mr. Taylor set off in December 1989.
Mr. Taylor promised at party headquarters: ''I will not be a wicked President. But I have no intention of being a weak President.''
Mr. Taylor and his National Patriotic Party won 75 percent of valid votes tabulated up to today. The Unity Party, led by Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, was second, with 9.6 percent.
Source: New York Times
Mr. Taylor promised at party headquarters: ''I will not be a wicked President. But I have no intention of being a weak President.''
Mr. Taylor and his National Patriotic Party won 75 percent of valid votes tabulated up to today. The Unity Party, led by Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, was second, with 9.6 percent.
Source: New York Times
Thursday, July 24, 1997
Liberia's Ambiguous Election
Liberia's American-influenced past and its Nigerian-influenced present were both evident in Sunday's presidential elections. The overwhelming winner, Charles Taylor, studied in Massachusetts and was later jailed there for embezzlement at the request of a former Liberian Government. His closest rival, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, graduated from Harvard and later worked as a Citibank executive.
That is the American connection. Real power, however, remains in the hands of Victor Malu, the Nigerian general in charge of the West African force that imposed enough stability on Liberia for these elections to take place. If General Malu means what he says about staying in charge for the foreseeable future, the elections will turn out to be a victory for order, not democracy. An abrupt withdrawal of the West Africans could set off renewed fighting. But preparations for their departure must begin promptly.
Mr. Taylor's landslide victory requires explaining, since tens of thousands of Liberian families lost relatives to his undisciplined rebel troops during an eight-year civil war that took 150,000 lives. Further, despite a professed conversion to peace and democracy, Mr. Taylor has a well-deserved reputation for violence and indifference to human rights. His candidacy benefited from a widespread belief that only a warlord could stop the anarchy. Even some who suffered personally at the hands of his troops voted for him. His campaign war chest was swelled with captured booty, while the underfinanced Johnson-Sirleaf effort was late in starting. Finally, many Liberians felt that Mr. Taylor's rivals represented the discredited old American-Liberian elite that ran the country at the expense of the indigenous majority for more than a century.
Given Mr. Taylor's history, his performance must be carefully monitored by the international community. American assistance, for now, should be limited to privately distributed humanitarian aid and independently run police training programs. For his part, General Malu has earned gratitude from Liberians for finally halting the murderous conflict. But his statements belittling Mr. Taylor's authority suggest that he considers the elections a minor detail and that he is in no hurry to end the Nigerian-led occupation.
That would be a mistake. Liberia's people will not accept prolonged Nigerian tutelage. They have elected Mr. Taylor President in a free and fair election. He should be accountable to them, not a foreign general.
Source: New York Times
That is the American connection. Real power, however, remains in the hands of Victor Malu, the Nigerian general in charge of the West African force that imposed enough stability on Liberia for these elections to take place. If General Malu means what he says about staying in charge for the foreseeable future, the elections will turn out to be a victory for order, not democracy. An abrupt withdrawal of the West Africans could set off renewed fighting. But preparations for their departure must begin promptly.
Mr. Taylor's landslide victory requires explaining, since tens of thousands of Liberian families lost relatives to his undisciplined rebel troops during an eight-year civil war that took 150,000 lives. Further, despite a professed conversion to peace and democracy, Mr. Taylor has a well-deserved reputation for violence and indifference to human rights. His candidacy benefited from a widespread belief that only a warlord could stop the anarchy. Even some who suffered personally at the hands of his troops voted for him. His campaign war chest was swelled with captured booty, while the underfinanced Johnson-Sirleaf effort was late in starting. Finally, many Liberians felt that Mr. Taylor's rivals represented the discredited old American-Liberian elite that ran the country at the expense of the indigenous majority for more than a century.
Given Mr. Taylor's history, his performance must be carefully monitored by the international community. American assistance, for now, should be limited to privately distributed humanitarian aid and independently run police training programs. For his part, General Malu has earned gratitude from Liberians for finally halting the murderous conflict. But his statements belittling Mr. Taylor's authority suggest that he considers the elections a minor detail and that he is in no hurry to end the Nigerian-led occupation.
That would be a mistake. Liberia's people will not accept prolonged Nigerian tutelage. They have elected Mr. Taylor President in a free and fair election. He should be accountable to them, not a foreign general.
Source: New York Times
Wednesday, July 9, 1997
CHURCHES WERE USED TO OPPRESS BLACKS, SAYS AMNESTY APPLICANT
Churches were used as instruments of oppression by the white minority, one of four men seeking amnesty for the 1993 St James Church massacre told the Truth Commission's amnesty committee on Wednesday.
Bassie Mkhumbuzi was a member of the Azanian People's Liberation Army unit that killed 11 people and wounded 58 others in a automatic rifle and handgrenade attack on the church's congregants in Cape Town on July 25, 1993. "Whites used churches to oppress blacks. They took our country using churches and bibles. We know and we have read from books they are the ones who have taken the land from us," Mkhumbuzi said. Truth Commission lawyer Robin Brink said Mkumbuzi and his comrades perpetrated a "mindless barbarity" on defenceless people praying in a house of worship. Was it a revenge attack?" he asked Mkhumbuzi. "No," Mkhumbuzi replied, "we just wanted our land to be brought back to us, not because we were revenging the actions of the church."
Mkhumbuzi, who was 17 years old at the time of the incident, said he had not been told beforehand by unit leader Sichumiso Nonxuba that a church was the target. Nevertheless, "I felt that whites were using churches to oppress blacks". There was confusion at the start of Wednesday's amnesty hearing in Cape Town when it emerged that one of the amnesty applicants - former Apla operations director Letlapa Mphahele - had failed to turn up. The whereabouts of Mphahlele were not known, lawyer Norman Arendse told the amnesty committee chaired by Judge Hassen Mall. Arendse said he represented Mphahlele's co-applicants Mkhumbuzi, Thobela Mlambisa and Gcinikhaya Makoma. Makoma was found guilty on 11 counts of murder and 58 counts of attempted murder in March 1995 and sentenced to 23 years' imprisonment.
Mkhumbuzi, a member of the SA National Defence Force, and Mlambisa are on trial facing similar charges relating to the attack. "We don't know where he (Mphahlele) is," Arendse said. "He has not given us any instructions. We can't understand and we don't have any reasons why he is not here. We ask that his application be withdrawn at this stage." Ian Bremridge, the lawyer for two of the victims opposing the amnesty applications, said Mphahlele's absence could be problematic as the other applicants intended testifying that he ordered the attack. The applications are being opposed by Dawie Ackermann, whose wife was killed, Lorenzo Smith and Ukranian sailor Dmitry Makogon, who lost both legs and an arm in the incident. Mkhumbuzi said while he sought forgiveness from the victims, "we could not stop what was happening at the time". "We were fighting for our country and for democracy. It was difficult at the time to stop such incidents. The purpose of Apla at that time was to fight until the land was brought back to its owners." Bremridge: "Do you thing the attack achieved anything?" Mkhumbusi: "Yes. Today We are in this country. We are living together. We are not fighting together."
On the day of the attack he had remained in the getaway vehicle while Nonxuba - who was killed in a car accident last Novemmber - and Makoma entered the church armed with R4 rifles and M26 handgrenades, which he had fetched earlier from Apla high command in Umtata. "I was told that I would be the security, Mlambisa the driver. Nonxuba and Makoma were going inside. After they came out of the building, I was to use the petrol bombs to throw them inside. "I heard a grenade and gunshots and then saw a red car stopping in front of us, apparently to block us. "I got out of the car and threw a petrol bomb at the car and Mlambisa shot at the car causing it to speed away." He said it was only later that night, while watching a television broadcast by CNN, that he saw for the first time what had happened inside the church. Mlambisa testified later that he was an Apla unit commissar based in Transkei when he was ordered to travel to Cape Town to take part in the operation. He only realised the target was a church when the team drove up to the target in Kenilworth, Cape Town. "I deeply regret the loss of lives and causing so many people to be injured," he said.
Source: South African Press Association
Bassie Mkhumbuzi was a member of the Azanian People's Liberation Army unit that killed 11 people and wounded 58 others in a automatic rifle and handgrenade attack on the church's congregants in Cape Town on July 25, 1993. "Whites used churches to oppress blacks. They took our country using churches and bibles. We know and we have read from books they are the ones who have taken the land from us," Mkhumbuzi said. Truth Commission lawyer Robin Brink said Mkumbuzi and his comrades perpetrated a "mindless barbarity" on defenceless people praying in a house of worship. Was it a revenge attack?" he asked Mkhumbuzi. "No," Mkhumbuzi replied, "we just wanted our land to be brought back to us, not because we were revenging the actions of the church."
Mkhumbuzi, who was 17 years old at the time of the incident, said he had not been told beforehand by unit leader Sichumiso Nonxuba that a church was the target. Nevertheless, "I felt that whites were using churches to oppress blacks". There was confusion at the start of Wednesday's amnesty hearing in Cape Town when it emerged that one of the amnesty applicants - former Apla operations director Letlapa Mphahele - had failed to turn up. The whereabouts of Mphahlele were not known, lawyer Norman Arendse told the amnesty committee chaired by Judge Hassen Mall. Arendse said he represented Mphahlele's co-applicants Mkhumbuzi, Thobela Mlambisa and Gcinikhaya Makoma. Makoma was found guilty on 11 counts of murder and 58 counts of attempted murder in March 1995 and sentenced to 23 years' imprisonment.
Mkhumbuzi, a member of the SA National Defence Force, and Mlambisa are on trial facing similar charges relating to the attack. "We don't know where he (Mphahlele) is," Arendse said. "He has not given us any instructions. We can't understand and we don't have any reasons why he is not here. We ask that his application be withdrawn at this stage." Ian Bremridge, the lawyer for two of the victims opposing the amnesty applications, said Mphahlele's absence could be problematic as the other applicants intended testifying that he ordered the attack. The applications are being opposed by Dawie Ackermann, whose wife was killed, Lorenzo Smith and Ukranian sailor Dmitry Makogon, who lost both legs and an arm in the incident. Mkhumbuzi said while he sought forgiveness from the victims, "we could not stop what was happening at the time". "We were fighting for our country and for democracy. It was difficult at the time to stop such incidents. The purpose of Apla at that time was to fight until the land was brought back to its owners." Bremridge: "Do you thing the attack achieved anything?" Mkhumbusi: "Yes. Today We are in this country. We are living together. We are not fighting together."
On the day of the attack he had remained in the getaway vehicle while Nonxuba - who was killed in a car accident last Novemmber - and Makoma entered the church armed with R4 rifles and M26 handgrenades, which he had fetched earlier from Apla high command in Umtata. "I was told that I would be the security, Mlambisa the driver. Nonxuba and Makoma were going inside. After they came out of the building, I was to use the petrol bombs to throw them inside. "I heard a grenade and gunshots and then saw a red car stopping in front of us, apparently to block us. "I got out of the car and threw a petrol bomb at the car and Mlambisa shot at the car causing it to speed away." He said it was only later that night, while watching a television broadcast by CNN, that he saw for the first time what had happened inside the church. Mlambisa testified later that he was an Apla unit commissar based in Transkei when he was ordered to travel to Cape Town to take part in the operation. He only realised the target was a church when the team drove up to the target in Kenilworth, Cape Town. "I deeply regret the loss of lives and causing so many people to be injured," he said.
Source: South African Press Association
Saturday, May 17, 1997
MOBUTU GIVES UP, LEAVING KINSHASA AND CEDING POWER
Ending nearly 32 years of rule in Africa's third-largest country, President Mobutu Sese Seko yielded power on Friday. He quietly slipped out of this besieged capital aboard a flight to his northern hometown, which diplomats described as a brief stopover en route to permanent exile. By early evening, there were unconfirmed reports here that Mr. Mobutu, 66, had already left his hometown, Gbadolite, presumably for Morocco, where the President maintains one of many luxurious palaces. Moroccan officials acknowledged that Mr. Mobutu's plane had been given landing rights, but would not confirm whether Mr. Mobutu was on his way there.
Mr. Mobutu's departure came as rebels who have fought a stunningly successful seven-month war against the Government drew within five miles of Kinshasa's international airport at the city's edge, Western diplomats said, and readied themselves to take over control of the capital. Mr. Mobutu, who had resisted entreaties to hand over power, finally did so after his top generals warned him in a series of nighttime meetings that they could neither defend him or the city of Kinshasa any longer.
Diplomats said on Friday that Zaire's generals were trying to make contact with leaders of the rebellion to arrange their peaceful entry into the city so as to avoid destructive fighting or a repeat of the devastating pillaging the capital has already seen twice this decade. Late Friday, however, reports reached here from the de facto rebel capital, Lubumbashi, that the rebel foreign minister, Bizima Karaha, had demanded the unconditional surrender of Zaire's military before hostilities are called off. In the first possible sign of an unraveling of the remnants of Zaire's Army, Zairian security officials reported Friday night that Gen. Mahele Lioko, the Deputy Prime Minister and Chief of Staff, had been killed by officers opposed to talks with the rebels. Diplomats said they could only confirm that General Mahele had been detained at a military camp at the edge of town, where gunfire was heard Friday evening.
Zairian security officers said that on hearing the news, the Prime Minister, Gen. Likulia Bolongo, took refuge in the French Embassy. Late Friday evening, General Likulia's family was seen arriving at the Inter-Continental Hotel. Early this morning, a Western military analyst said that a rebel company traveling along the railroad tracks had entered central Kinshasa. ''Things are coming to a climax very quickly,'' he said. ''The situation is very dangerous now, but I expect it will all be over shortly.'' Mr. Mobutu delivered no message to a nation he has dominated almost since independence from Belgium in 1960. Instead, the first word that people here heard of the news came in foreign radio broadcasts.
Reading a Government statement before a hastily gathered assembly of journalists in Kinshasa on Friday afternoon, the Information Minister, Kin Kiey Mulumba, said that Mr. Mobutu acknowledged that negotiations with the rebels had failed. As a result, he said, the President had ''ceased to intervene in the conduct of the affairs of state.'' Mr. Mulumba said that Mr. Mobutu had not formally resigned from office and could not directly hand over power to the rebel leader, Laurent Kabila, because the country's laws forbade such a transition. People close to Mr. Mobutu said that the deliberate ambiguity allowed a famously vainglorious leader to depart believing that he had fulfilled an oft-repeated vow that he would never be known as the former President, but only as the late President. Given the advanced prostate cancer that has visibly weakened him in recent weeks, many foreign diplomats say that they expect Mr. Mobutu's health will soon fail him.
Mr. Mulumba added that the Government would continue discussions with the rebels over new political arrangements for the country, and said that the Constitution empowered the newly elected head of the National Assembly, Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo, to lead future negotiations. Even as Mr. Mobutu sought to put a good face on his departure, his army commanders made it clear Friday that they had no intention of fighting the rebels any longer. 'It is not military means that we lack,'' said a Defense Ministry official. ''But General Mahele does not want to sacrifice a whole people because of a battle for the power of a single man. That's finished.'' Besides being Chief of Staff and Deputy Prime Minister, General Mahele also served as Defense Minister. He was one of three top officers, including the Prime Minister, General Likulia , who visited Mr. Mobutu on Thursday evening to inform him that they could no longer defend the city or protect him. Western diplomats said the officers, also including Gen. Nzimbi Ngbale, the commander of Mr. Mobutu's feared Presidential Guard, then urged the President to leave the country. Zairian security sources said Friday night that General Nzimbi had crossed the Congo River to the Republic of Congo.
A member of Mr. Mobutu's entourage said the President sent the three generals away in fury when they first approached him about ending the war effort and leaving the country. A second meeting was held at midnight, this associate of the President said. Mr. Mobutu then said he needed time to reflect. At 4 A.M. Friday, Mr. Mobutu again summoned his generals and told them of his decision to leave the country. ''He left Kinshasa a very angry man,'' the presidential associate said. ''A man who could still not believe it was all over, and felt abandoned.'' On Friday, Western diplomats said that Zaire's top generals had already begun to make contact with the rebellion and were preparing ''to open the city'' to Mr. Kabila's forces.
News of Mr. Mobutu's departure spread slowly in Kinshasa on Friday, and for the most part life in the capital was virtually normal through most of the day. By late afternoon, however, there were isolated reports of soldiers firing off their weapons, intimidating people and stealing vehicles. In many districts of this city of five million people, neighborhood welcoming committees freely rehearsed songs and put the finishing touches on banners to greet the rebels. Meanwhile, the elite that had sprouted around Mr. Mobutu made haste to the exits. All day, private speedboats carrying the rich and until now powerful jetted across the Congo River to Brazzaville, the capital of Congo. Many carried with them whatever precious possessions they could, anticipating they may never return.
The end of Mr. Mobutu's rule opened a period of deep uncertainty for Zaire, first in a transition period that will now begin, and eventually, it is almost universally assumed here, under the rule of Mr. Kabila. Mr. Kabila has proved himself a deft political operator who succeeded in riding a localized ethnic rebellion in the country's eastern border region all the way to national power, but little is known of his intentions or abilities as a head of state. Diplomats who have met him recently say that the 56-year-old rebel leader, who has fought against Mr. Mobutu intermittently since the country's early independence period, speaks almost nostalgically of the kind of collectivized agricultural ventures and huge state projects that were in vogue in his Marxist youth.
More troubling, Western diplomats say, has been Mr. Kabila's human-rights record at the head of rebel forces that massacred Rwandan Hutu refugees. Similarly, Mr. Kabila has made a long string of contradictory public statements about the future of democracy in Zaire, ranging from warnings that opposition parties will be suspended to pledges that a consensus government will be formed with other anti-Mobutu parties. ''Kabila is like a jack-in-the-box on the question of democracy and elections,'' said a senior Western diplomat here. ''Now that he has arrived, we are all waiting to see which Kabila is going to pop out.'' The form that future negotiations with the rebels will take is equally in doubt. Mr. Kabila has repeatedly said that he will not accord any role to Archbishop Monsengwo, the head of the National Assembly, and will refuse to work with any politicians who have been allies of Mr. Mobutu.
Before the South African-led talks between Mr. Mobutu and Mr. Kabila broke down, diplomats had hoped to get both sides to accept a South African proposal for the formation of a new Government, led by Mr. Kabila, but allowing for broad representation of other political parties. Mr. Mobutu's quiet departure reflected the pain of a man who since early adulthood has known little but undisputed rule. Some diplomats and members of the President's entourage said that in recent weeks the Zairian leader had been angling for a ''dignified way'' out of power that would avoid the humiliation Mr. Kabila has publicly thirsted to give his enemy of three decades. The idea of an exit with dignity was tarnished by the news on Friday that a Swiss court had already placed a lien on one of the President's mansions, in Savigny, after a request by the public prosecutor of the rebel-held city of Lubumbashi.
Mr. Mobutu escaped Zaire with his family intact -- his wife, her twin sister, who is also his concubine, and their children -- but for the remainder of his life he will almost certainly be hounded by efforts by Zaire and private creditors to reclaim whatever is left of the estimated $5 billion fortune that he once accumulated. With help from neighboring countries, the insurgency of Laurent Kabila took only seven months to seize control of virtually the entire country and oust the longtime Zairian dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Timeline
Dec. 4, 1996 A month after the town of Goma became the rebels' first significant conquest, the area of rebel control has spread to other towns along Zaire's eastern border.
March 15, 1997 Kisangani, a key city at the head of navigation on the Congo River, falls to the rebels. Tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees are captured by the rebels, many of whom have scores to settle with the refugees. April 9, 1997 The rebels capture Lubumbashi, the country's second city, consolidating their control over Zaire's diamond, cobalt and copper mines. The Mobutu Government is deprived of its major source of income.
May 7, 1997 Driving toward Kinshasa, the rebel offensive takes Kenge, 120 miles from the capital. Thoughout the campaign, Government forces put up little resistance, fleeing rather than fighting.
May 16, 1997 With rebel forces in control of the entire country except for Kinshasa and Mobutu's hometown, Gbadolite, Mobutu flees the capital and gives up power.
Source: New York Times
Mr. Mobutu's departure came as rebels who have fought a stunningly successful seven-month war against the Government drew within five miles of Kinshasa's international airport at the city's edge, Western diplomats said, and readied themselves to take over control of the capital. Mr. Mobutu, who had resisted entreaties to hand over power, finally did so after his top generals warned him in a series of nighttime meetings that they could neither defend him or the city of Kinshasa any longer.
Diplomats said on Friday that Zaire's generals were trying to make contact with leaders of the rebellion to arrange their peaceful entry into the city so as to avoid destructive fighting or a repeat of the devastating pillaging the capital has already seen twice this decade. Late Friday, however, reports reached here from the de facto rebel capital, Lubumbashi, that the rebel foreign minister, Bizima Karaha, had demanded the unconditional surrender of Zaire's military before hostilities are called off. In the first possible sign of an unraveling of the remnants of Zaire's Army, Zairian security officials reported Friday night that Gen. Mahele Lioko, the Deputy Prime Minister and Chief of Staff, had been killed by officers opposed to talks with the rebels. Diplomats said they could only confirm that General Mahele had been detained at a military camp at the edge of town, where gunfire was heard Friday evening.
Zairian security officers said that on hearing the news, the Prime Minister, Gen. Likulia Bolongo, took refuge in the French Embassy. Late Friday evening, General Likulia's family was seen arriving at the Inter-Continental Hotel. Early this morning, a Western military analyst said that a rebel company traveling along the railroad tracks had entered central Kinshasa. ''Things are coming to a climax very quickly,'' he said. ''The situation is very dangerous now, but I expect it will all be over shortly.'' Mr. Mobutu delivered no message to a nation he has dominated almost since independence from Belgium in 1960. Instead, the first word that people here heard of the news came in foreign radio broadcasts.
Reading a Government statement before a hastily gathered assembly of journalists in Kinshasa on Friday afternoon, the Information Minister, Kin Kiey Mulumba, said that Mr. Mobutu acknowledged that negotiations with the rebels had failed. As a result, he said, the President had ''ceased to intervene in the conduct of the affairs of state.'' Mr. Mulumba said that Mr. Mobutu had not formally resigned from office and could not directly hand over power to the rebel leader, Laurent Kabila, because the country's laws forbade such a transition. People close to Mr. Mobutu said that the deliberate ambiguity allowed a famously vainglorious leader to depart believing that he had fulfilled an oft-repeated vow that he would never be known as the former President, but only as the late President. Given the advanced prostate cancer that has visibly weakened him in recent weeks, many foreign diplomats say that they expect Mr. Mobutu's health will soon fail him.
Mr. Mulumba added that the Government would continue discussions with the rebels over new political arrangements for the country, and said that the Constitution empowered the newly elected head of the National Assembly, Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo, to lead future negotiations. Even as Mr. Mobutu sought to put a good face on his departure, his army commanders made it clear Friday that they had no intention of fighting the rebels any longer. 'It is not military means that we lack,'' said a Defense Ministry official. ''But General Mahele does not want to sacrifice a whole people because of a battle for the power of a single man. That's finished.'' Besides being Chief of Staff and Deputy Prime Minister, General Mahele also served as Defense Minister. He was one of three top officers, including the Prime Minister, General Likulia , who visited Mr. Mobutu on Thursday evening to inform him that they could no longer defend the city or protect him. Western diplomats said the officers, also including Gen. Nzimbi Ngbale, the commander of Mr. Mobutu's feared Presidential Guard, then urged the President to leave the country. Zairian security sources said Friday night that General Nzimbi had crossed the Congo River to the Republic of Congo.
A member of Mr. Mobutu's entourage said the President sent the three generals away in fury when they first approached him about ending the war effort and leaving the country. A second meeting was held at midnight, this associate of the President said. Mr. Mobutu then said he needed time to reflect. At 4 A.M. Friday, Mr. Mobutu again summoned his generals and told them of his decision to leave the country. ''He left Kinshasa a very angry man,'' the presidential associate said. ''A man who could still not believe it was all over, and felt abandoned.'' On Friday, Western diplomats said that Zaire's top generals had already begun to make contact with the rebellion and were preparing ''to open the city'' to Mr. Kabila's forces.
News of Mr. Mobutu's departure spread slowly in Kinshasa on Friday, and for the most part life in the capital was virtually normal through most of the day. By late afternoon, however, there were isolated reports of soldiers firing off their weapons, intimidating people and stealing vehicles. In many districts of this city of five million people, neighborhood welcoming committees freely rehearsed songs and put the finishing touches on banners to greet the rebels. Meanwhile, the elite that had sprouted around Mr. Mobutu made haste to the exits. All day, private speedboats carrying the rich and until now powerful jetted across the Congo River to Brazzaville, the capital of Congo. Many carried with them whatever precious possessions they could, anticipating they may never return.
The end of Mr. Mobutu's rule opened a period of deep uncertainty for Zaire, first in a transition period that will now begin, and eventually, it is almost universally assumed here, under the rule of Mr. Kabila. Mr. Kabila has proved himself a deft political operator who succeeded in riding a localized ethnic rebellion in the country's eastern border region all the way to national power, but little is known of his intentions or abilities as a head of state. Diplomats who have met him recently say that the 56-year-old rebel leader, who has fought against Mr. Mobutu intermittently since the country's early independence period, speaks almost nostalgically of the kind of collectivized agricultural ventures and huge state projects that were in vogue in his Marxist youth.
More troubling, Western diplomats say, has been Mr. Kabila's human-rights record at the head of rebel forces that massacred Rwandan Hutu refugees. Similarly, Mr. Kabila has made a long string of contradictory public statements about the future of democracy in Zaire, ranging from warnings that opposition parties will be suspended to pledges that a consensus government will be formed with other anti-Mobutu parties. ''Kabila is like a jack-in-the-box on the question of democracy and elections,'' said a senior Western diplomat here. ''Now that he has arrived, we are all waiting to see which Kabila is going to pop out.'' The form that future negotiations with the rebels will take is equally in doubt. Mr. Kabila has repeatedly said that he will not accord any role to Archbishop Monsengwo, the head of the National Assembly, and will refuse to work with any politicians who have been allies of Mr. Mobutu.
Before the South African-led talks between Mr. Mobutu and Mr. Kabila broke down, diplomats had hoped to get both sides to accept a South African proposal for the formation of a new Government, led by Mr. Kabila, but allowing for broad representation of other political parties. Mr. Mobutu's quiet departure reflected the pain of a man who since early adulthood has known little but undisputed rule. Some diplomats and members of the President's entourage said that in recent weeks the Zairian leader had been angling for a ''dignified way'' out of power that would avoid the humiliation Mr. Kabila has publicly thirsted to give his enemy of three decades. The idea of an exit with dignity was tarnished by the news on Friday that a Swiss court had already placed a lien on one of the President's mansions, in Savigny, after a request by the public prosecutor of the rebel-held city of Lubumbashi.
Mr. Mobutu escaped Zaire with his family intact -- his wife, her twin sister, who is also his concubine, and their children -- but for the remainder of his life he will almost certainly be hounded by efforts by Zaire and private creditors to reclaim whatever is left of the estimated $5 billion fortune that he once accumulated. With help from neighboring countries, the insurgency of Laurent Kabila took only seven months to seize control of virtually the entire country and oust the longtime Zairian dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
Timeline
Dec. 4, 1996 A month after the town of Goma became the rebels' first significant conquest, the area of rebel control has spread to other towns along Zaire's eastern border.
March 15, 1997 Kisangani, a key city at the head of navigation on the Congo River, falls to the rebels. Tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees are captured by the rebels, many of whom have scores to settle with the refugees. April 9, 1997 The rebels capture Lubumbashi, the country's second city, consolidating their control over Zaire's diamond, cobalt and copper mines. The Mobutu Government is deprived of its major source of income.
May 7, 1997 Driving toward Kinshasa, the rebel offensive takes Kenge, 120 miles from the capital. Thoughout the campaign, Government forces put up little resistance, fleeing rather than fighting.
May 16, 1997 With rebel forces in control of the entire country except for Kinshasa and Mobutu's hometown, Gbadolite, Mobutu flees the capital and gives up power.
Source: New York Times
Tuesday, February 4, 1997
CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA
The Constitutional Court was established in 1994 by South Africa's first democratic constitution - the interim constitution of 1993. The Court, the key institution of our constitutional democracy, continues to function under the final Constitution of 1996.
There have been sixteen amendments to the Constitution of 1996. A copy can be found here.
Source: Constitutional Court of South Africa
There have been sixteen amendments to the Constitution of 1996. A copy can be found here.
Source: Constitutional Court of South Africa
CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1996
The purpose of the CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA ACT is to introduce a new Constitution for the Republic of South Africa and to provide for matters incidental thereto.
Preamble
We, the people of South Africa,
We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as to -
May God protect our people.
Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso.
God seën Suid-Afrika. God bless South Africa.
Mudzimu fhatutshedza Afurika. Hosi katekisa Afrika.
Source: SABINET
Preamble
We, the people of South Africa,
- Recognise the injustices of our past;
- Honour those who suffered for justice and freedom in our land;
- Respect those who have worked to build and develop our country; and
- Believe that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity.
We therefore, through our freely elected representatives, adopt this Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic so as to -
- Heal the divisions of the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights;
- Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law;
- Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person; and
- Build a united and democratic South Africa able to take its rightful place as a sovereign state in the family of nations.
May God protect our people.
Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso.
God seën Suid-Afrika. God bless South Africa.
Mudzimu fhatutshedza Afurika. Hosi katekisa Afrika.
Source: SABINET
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