Botha left the the house to his 5 children from his marriage to his first wife (Elize). The nickname "Great Crocodile" was hard-earned.Pieter Willem Botha was born in Bethlehem in the Orange Free State, where his father, a "bitter-ender" who had fought the British to the last gasp of the Boer war, was a horse farmer.
Botha died at his home on Tuesday.
Botha, the iron-fisted former South African president, arrives at a court in George, South Africa, in this August 1998 file photo. He was a very bitter man. This cherished promotion precipitated a lifelong love of the military, including acts of war and covert operations at home and abroad.When Vorster was kicked upstairs as non-executive state president in 1978 in the wake of the "Muldergate" corruption scandal, the NP felt the same need for a strong man as it had when Verwoerd died.
He quit university in 1935 to become a National Party organizer.During World War II, Botha joined the Ossewabrandwag (Ox Wagon Fire Guard), a group that was sympathetic to the Nazis and opposed South Africa’s participation on the Allied side.As head of the white-minority government in 1978, Botha repeatedly stressed the paramount importance of national security. I am not prepared to apologise for actions which I took to remove (sic) racial discrimination in this country [or] for lawful actions of my government in its struggle to curb the violent onslaught. As prime minister from 1978 to 1984, and then state president until 1989, he was also chairman of the State Security Council, and made remarks "in its meetings and recommendations that were highly ambiguous and were interpreted as authorising the killing of people".According to the commission, he took no action against government agents who carried out atrocities, and supported covert operations "destabilising the governments of neighbouring countries". Not now, not tomorrow, not after tomorrow,",Five months after Elize's death PW Botha got engaged to,PW Botha's first wife Elize dies from a heart attack,"In August 1985 President PW Botha had delivered what has become known as his Rubicon Speech in.The National Party wins a majority of the seats in the 1989 South African General Election (South Africa's last race-based election).PW Botha resigns after suffering a stroke and is succeeded later that year by Frederik Willem (FW) de Klerk (like.PW Botha gives the Sharpeville 6 a reprieve from the death sentence.The National Party wins a majority of the seats in the 1987 South African General Election. He also ordered police to blow up the Johannesburg offices of anti-apartheid groups. Dan van der Vat Thursday November 2, 2006.
After 1990, he quit the National Party.Botha’s foremost loyalties were to his fellow Afrikaners, yet his moves to extend limited political power to nonwhites prompted a mass defection of hard-line segregationists from the National Party in 1982.Beeld, an Afrikaans-language daily that supported Botha for many years, said, “The last image that will linger ... is that of a blind Samson who with his last strength tried to overturn the pillars of his party on himself and his own companions.”.P.W. In 1983, under loudly trumpeted constitutional reform proposals, the coloured and Asian minorities were given their own separate chambers in parliament. Any changes Botha makes, however, will over the long run alter the South African political dynamic. PW Botha becomes President. He announced in a live worldwide broadcast that he was "crossing the Rubicon".In fact, after a short attempt at walking on water, he returned to where he had started. In a statement, the ANC wished Botha's family "strength and comfort at this difficult time".Although PW Botha's security forces killed over 2,000 people and about 25,000 people were detained without trial and often tortured, he refused to apologise for apartheid and denied he had known about the torture and assassinations (and declined to appear when summoned by the state-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission which in its final report in 2003 blamed him for much of the horror of the last decade of white rule). Botha was forced under US pressure to concede independence to Namibia amid military setbacks in Angola and growing economic problems.The manifest intellectual bankruptcy of his last few years should not obscure the political cunning and manipulative successes of his heyday. "Most blacks are happy, except those who have had other ideas pushed into their ears. He always told me he would release,A hoax email starting doing the rounds advertising a,"He was very irritable, bad-tempered … He was not enormously intelligent ... but he had enough sense to realise that change would have to come because the black resistance was gearing up considerably and the opposition of the international community was growing very strong.
P. W. Botha Quotes. "Circumstances forced him to be a reformer.
A politician all his adult life, Botha was already active in the Afrikaner National Party (NP).