Apartheid minister backs ANC
By Norm DixonThe apartheid regime's longest serving foreign minister, Pik Botha, travelled the world defending the racist system and its dirty wars against Angola and Mozambique and its terrorist attacks against African National Congress activists throughout southern Africa and as far away as Paris. Now Botha has applied to join the ANC.
Botha, a member of the semi-clandestine State Security Committee, a body that approved the assassination of dozens of ANC activists and ordered cross-border raids on the Frontline states, told Johannesburg's City Press that Afrikaners should join the ANC and that South Africa needed a healthy political regroupment and restructuring.
I think I can associate myself with the ANC's fundamental principles. The Afrikaner can also feel at home with the ANC's policies of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the protection of private property ... If there are things in the ANC that bother you, you must try to rectify them from within the ANC, he said.
We welcome [Botha], ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama told the January 22 Washington Post. By accepting into our fold someone who was part and parcel of that system that once oppressed us, we believe that demonstrates that the ANC's policies are pushing this nation forward.