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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (32893)	6/25/2002 5:12:28 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 281500

"The whites negotiated it away when they felt they could get a reasonable deal." This is a slight rewrite of history. There was never a letup in ANC terror right up to the point at which negotiations began. After negotiations began, the terror abated, but not before. In other words, the whites negotiated when they saw that the trend was not in their favor, and that they could negotiate a better surrender now than they could at some time in the future. Its not a rewrite of history, and most it is spin and not entirely inaccurate spin. The whites where of course responding to the threat from the ANC and other groups but if they thought they would not be able to trust the people they where negotiating with then they would not have given up power. If this trust did not exist, either the whites would still be in power or they would have lost power in a large bloodbath with whites and blacks dieing in great numbers. As long as they think that they are winning the war against terrorism (i.e. terrorism is decreasing), the Israelis will never surrender much in the way of land. This is only human nature. In fact the Israelis continued colonizing the occupied territories throughout the recent peace accords. People don't surrender when they think they're winning, and neither the Israelis nor the South Africans are exceptions. The Israelis have made offers to give up land, or have actually given up land a number of times when they had the upper hand and things where not getting worse for them, but they had a greater level of trust for Saddat then they did for Arafat even before the violence of the last few years. People don't surrender when they are winning (unless this is the Earth Minbari war...) but they do make concessions when things are not falling apart. Even as the Israelis where colonizing the West Bank during the negotiations, they where making offers that would have resulted in some of their colonies being uprooted. As far as your repeated comments that "all South Africans considered themselves one people", this is patently untrue I didn't say that they considered themselves one people. I said that they all considered themselves South Africans and they considered South Africa to be there country. Some of them would have liked to subjugate, kick out, or kill some of the other peoples within that country but the idea of South Africa being or potentially being a number of countries (rather then a country with a number of peoples, and not just White and Black, but Boer/Afrikaner, English, Xhosa, Zulu ect.), while it was tried, never really had any traction. Tim