SA Cardinal Remembers PW Botha's Psychological War with Catholic Church
Nov 08, 2006
Former South African President PW Botha, who has died at the age of 90, “created enormous difficulties for the church” when he led South Africa from 1978 to 1989, according to Cardinal Wilfrid F. Napier of Durban.
(The Universe, November 08, 2006) “I have so many memories of his harshness and hard-headedness,” Cardinal Napier said.
Pieter Willem Botha, commonly known as PW or the Groot Krokodil (Big Crocodile) for his uncompromising stance on white rule, wagged his finger in warning at the late Cardinal Owen McCann of Cape Town in 1986, Cardinal Napier said.
In a meeting with representatives of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Botha “told Cardinal McCann, who was questioning him, to get out of the room if he didn’t like what he was hearing,” Cardinal Napier said.
“I think he (Botha) felt that he had the whole Afrikaner nation behind him so he could take on anyone,” he said, noting that Botha was “notoriously difficult to talk to.”
Earlier that year, Cardinal Napier, Fr Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, then general secretary of the bishops’ conference, the late Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban and Bishop Mansuet Biyase of Eshowe had been to Zambia to visit leaders of the banned African National Congress, which was waging an armed struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s strict system of racial segregation.
The clandestine visit, forbidden in terms of emergency rule imposed by Botha in 1985, was made “to discuss our concerns about the armed struggle’s impact on civilians,” Cardinal Napier said.
Botha remained defiant in his retirement and refused to recognise the authority of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which probed human rights abuses during the apartheid era, from 1948 when the National Party came into power until the country’s first all-race elections in April 1994.
At commission hearings in Johannesburg in 1996, police applying for amnesty said they tried to kill Fr Mkhatshwa while he was general secretary of the bishops’ conference because of his involvement in the liberation struggle and “incitement of the youth.”
Fr Mkhatshwa, now an African National Congress mayor of Tshwane, was imprisoned and tortured during Botha’s rule. Many other priests were harassed by apartheid-era police, some were deported, and many were imprisoned without trial or placed under house arrest.
A 1984 document handed to the truth commission identified the Catholic Church as a target of the security apparatus of the apartheid regime.
The Report on Covert Strategic Communications Projects gave details of efforts to discredit and undermine opponents of the apartheid government, including a “psychological operation” to counter the “revolutionary and political theology of the Roman Catholic Church.”
SA Cardinal Remembers PW Botha's Psychological War with Catholic Church