16-09-2023, 03:24 PM
Chris McGreal
Sat 16 Sep 2023 07.00 BST
As a warlord, Mangosuthu Buthelezi was naturally quick to take offence. The Zulu prince and former chief minister of the apartheid-era KwaZulu black homeland, who has died at the age of 95 and will be buried today, became so upset at my line of questioning about the bloody handiwork of his Inkatha Freedom party in the run-up to South Africa’s first free election in 1994 that he turned his chair around, sat facing the other way and refused to talk. On another occasion he threw me out of his car in the middle of his KwaZulu fiefdom for a similar transgression.
As a foreign reporter, I got off easy. Many of those closer to home who challenged Buthelezi were subject to a campaign of terror and murder.
......
Buthelezi’s power base was the KwaZulu black homeland carved out by the apartheid government in 1977.
......
He then used KwaZulu’s semi-autonomous status to build a political movement and a private army from among its rural and often poorly educated residents.
......
Buthelezi founded Inkatha a couple of years earlier, ostensibly as a cultural movement allied with the ANC.
......
Pretoria funded a KwaZulu homeland police force, while the white regime’s security forces trained and armed a militia within Inkatha. Over a decade from the mid-1980s, the two organisations targeted ANC activists and terrorised the broader population by slaughtering thousands of suspected supporters and burning them out of their homes.
......
None of this seemed to bother political leaders in London or Washington, where Buthelezi knew which buttons to press by denouncing communism and sanctions. He was embraced by Thatcher, who opposed sanctions and the ANC with a lot more vigour than she resisted apartheid.
......
Reagan lavished praise on Buthelezi at the White House while Nelson Mandela sat on the US list of international terrorists, where he remained until 2008.
Much better to read full article at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...ca-warlord
Sat 16 Sep 2023 07.00 BST
As a warlord, Mangosuthu Buthelezi was naturally quick to take offence. The Zulu prince and former chief minister of the apartheid-era KwaZulu black homeland, who has died at the age of 95 and will be buried today, became so upset at my line of questioning about the bloody handiwork of his Inkatha Freedom party in the run-up to South Africa’s first free election in 1994 that he turned his chair around, sat facing the other way and refused to talk. On another occasion he threw me out of his car in the middle of his KwaZulu fiefdom for a similar transgression.
As a foreign reporter, I got off easy. Many of those closer to home who challenged Buthelezi were subject to a campaign of terror and murder.
......
Buthelezi’s power base was the KwaZulu black homeland carved out by the apartheid government in 1977.
......
He then used KwaZulu’s semi-autonomous status to build a political movement and a private army from among its rural and often poorly educated residents.
......
Buthelezi founded Inkatha a couple of years earlier, ostensibly as a cultural movement allied with the ANC.
......
Pretoria funded a KwaZulu homeland police force, while the white regime’s security forces trained and armed a militia within Inkatha. Over a decade from the mid-1980s, the two organisations targeted ANC activists and terrorised the broader population by slaughtering thousands of suspected supporters and burning them out of their homes.
......
None of this seemed to bother political leaders in London or Washington, where Buthelezi knew which buttons to press by denouncing communism and sanctions. He was embraced by Thatcher, who opposed sanctions and the ANC with a lot more vigour than she resisted apartheid.
......
Reagan lavished praise on Buthelezi at the White House while Nelson Mandela sat on the US list of international terrorists, where he remained until 2008.
Much better to read full article at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...ca-warlord