Talk:Boipatong massacre

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Essay[edit]

I have removed the following uncited essay from the article:

The massacre marked probably THE seminal turning point in the negotiation process as it provided the ANC with an opportunity to walk away from talks that were leading no where. When the negotiation process restarted, it did so on terms that were heavily dictated in the ANC's favour. This opened the way to force material concessions from the apartheid government while also throwing the spotlight on Third Force activity by the regime. Until Boipatong, the ANC's claims that the government had a hand in many of the massacres taking place around the country were brushed off by the regime as political grandstanding, simply another chip on the negotiating table. Although the existence of covert hit squads funded and operating by the state was later confirmed in Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings after democratic elections in 1994, at the time, only a few courageous newspapers had investigated their existence. But as long as this could be denied, without any concrete substantiation, the National Party was able to play up to the international gallery and postpone any real likelihood of a breakthrough occurring. Playing for time weighed heavily in the government's favour, because the longer the negotiation process dragged on, the greater grew the danger of mass disillusionment with the ANC setting in. In effect, TRC hearings confirmed, elements in the De Klerk government were waging a war of terror against their own people in an attempt to sap the energies of its arch-foe while also portraying the ANC as a violent and unreliable negotiating partner that was one of the chief protagonists in the violence.
The international audience was a vitally important one. The United States had maintained since the Reagan administration years a policy of "constuctive engangement" with the apartheid regime. Britain had also refused to fully support sanctions against Pretoria. By switching from oppression to negotiations with the ANC, the National Party had already won important concessions from the international community, in particular the relaxing of key sanctions that were reflected in the country's participation in the 1992 Cricket World Cup. As long as the government was able to tie the ANC to fruitless negotiations, it would be able to wring important concessions from the international community and conceivably eventually force the ANC into backtracking on many of its seminal demands for full democratic rights based on a constitutional model that entrenched a non-racial, one-person-one-vote system for the entire country.
The ANC could not afford to isolate itself from the international audience as international pressure was undoubtedly one of the strongest legs supporting its campaign for full democratic rights for all. It could not conceivably return to exile and expect to resurrect the global anti-apartheid campaign to the same heights that existed before the release of its leaders and the unbanning of resistance movements in 1990. It was therefore tied to a process that was going no where and was threatening to alienate many of its supporters from its cause.
However, the popular backlash against the severity of the Boipatong atrocity and the mass exposure it got in the international media presented a watershed opportunity to the ANC. It was able to pull out of the negotiation process with its legitimacy intact and without losing international support. The severity of the massacre meant it no longer had to prove the National Party had a direct hand in the killings; all it had to do was point out that the government was not doing enough to prevent them.
The restart of the negotiations process after the Bisho massacre - which had merely underlined the ANC's position post-Boipatong - saw a re-energised ANC at the table in a position to at last force major and material concessions from Pretoria that opened the way to full democratic elections in 1994.

Parts of this can be salvaged if they are properly cited. Zaian (talk) 07:10, 12 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Further controversy[edit]

I added the heading "further controversy" in an attempt to separate the more general history from the more specific stuff. The Peens incident and the Waddington report are but items that were reported on during the history of the investigations, and do not represent the final outcome of the investigations. I believe that including the Peens story here biases the article towards the idea that the police were involved, but Peens' story was only one of many reports, and ultimately it was found by subsequent investigations that his story is not "final proof" that the police were involved. I myself have no opinion on all of this -- if the police were involved, it deserves reporting. -- leuce (talk) 18:22, 16 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The 28 June 2011 Order Paper[edit]

Some of the text that I had removed seems to have come from a draft resolution from http://www.parliament.gov.za/live/commonrepository/Processed/20110628/349643_1.pdf Parliamentary paper. However, the paper is simply that member of parliament's opinion. For example, she thought that the Boipatong massacre was called "Operation Marion". She also believed that the UN resolution urged investigation into the incident. -- leuce (talk) 18:31, 16 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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