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PAGE 14
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JUNE 24, 1986'
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because Prime Minister Mulroney pledged to the United Nations last ·year
that Canada would break all diplomatic ties with Pretoria and impose
comprehensive economic sanctions if a diplomatic solution on South Africa
could not be found.
Non-Commonwealth members Denmark and Norway are
moving closer to cutting virtually all trade ties with Pretoria.
To all of this pressure, President P.W. Botha said grimly the other
evening: •we do not desire it and we do not seek it, but if we are forced
to go it alone, then so be it.•
In resigning South Africa to
international sanctions,
Mr.
Botha
.
said he did not underestimate the
sacrifices and problems that sanctions would bring. •But South Africa
will not crawl before anyone to prevent it.... Committed as we are to
peace and normal international relations, the world must take note and
never forget that we are not a nation of weaklings.•
Earlier, in another televised speech,
Mr.
Botha denounced outsiders for
meddling in his nation's affairs. The swirling.South African controversy
reminds one of the passage in Zechariah 12 concerning Jerusalem--that it
would be •a very heavy stone for all peoples: all who would heave it away
would surely be cut in pieces, though all nations are gathered against
it.•
Mr.
Botha, too, bears his own heavy burden. His National Party, though it
has gained support from many moderate-to-liberal English-speaking whites
since reforms began in 1978, is losing equal numbers of Afrikaner voters
to the right.
The strength of the two NP breakaway parties, the HNP
(Reformed National Party) and the CP (Conservative Party), is growing. So
is the unofficial opposition represented by the AWB--the Afrikaner
Weerstandsbeweging, or Afrikaner Resistance Movement. Followers of the
AWB, led by the charismatic Eugene Terre Blanche, recently disrupted a
National Party meeting in the Transvaal, preventing Foreign Minister •Pik•
Botha from speaking.
The incident, which involved fighting and some
bloodshed, marked •a sea change in South Africa's political history,• said
the SUNDAY TIMES of Johannesburg.
The belief among many Afrikaners--1 in 4·, a recent poll estimated--is that
the National Party is losing its grips on power.
It has already lost
Northern Transvaal to the forces of the right. Afrikanerdom seems split
for good. The HNP, CP and AWB all charge, to one degree or another, that
Mr.
Botha's policies are leading the country to doom, that no matter what
reforms are implemented, the outside world will not accept them anyway.
The AWB's
Mr.
Terre Blanche is certainly one to watch. He is labeled
•neo-fascist• by his critics. His movement's swastika-like banner--three
connected black •sevens• inside a white circle on a red flag--doesn't help
his image. But he insists the symbolism is from the Bible--777 as opposed
to the beast's 666. •It is the only flag or political emblem which exists
anywhere today that is based anywhere on the Bible," he says.
-
· ·
Terre Blanche and his followers hearken back to the spirit of the Great
·
Trek of the 1830s. They don't want rule over all of South Africa, they
� claim. In fact they don't want to rule anyone but themselves, in a pocket
of northern South Africa recreating the original Boer republics of
Transvaal, the Orange Free State plus northern Natal--areas their
forefathers trekked into. •I will get my land back and I will restore the