Former President F.W. de Klerk, the pragmatic reformer who negotiated the end to apartheid, resigned today as head of his troubled National Party and quit politics. De Klerk announced his resignation after a meeting of the former ruling party’s executive committee, the Federal Council, saying new leadership would invigorate the former ruling party in advance of 1999 elections. I am retiring because I am convinced it is in the best interest of the party and the country, de Klerk, 61, told a packed news conference. Party officials said de Klerk would stay on until a new leader is chosen on Sept. 9. President Nelson Mandela, who shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with de Klerk for ending white rule, said today he hoped South Africans would remember how de Klerk helped bring about the peaceful transformation of the country. Whatever mistakes he may have made, and it is possible that he has made very fundamental mistakes as many of us have.
Meanwhile, The two main systems for producing oxygen on the Mir Space Station broke down Monday, presenting its three-man crew with a fresh setback just days after the crippled space station appeared to be on the road to recovery. NASA described the situation as “serious” but said the crew still had enough oxygen to last several days, during which they would try to repair the systems. But failure to restore the flow of oxygen could force the evacuation of the space station and deal a major blow to the impoverished Russian space program. As the Mir’s crew slept before tackling the problem this morning, few U.S. or Russian officials wanted to dwell on that unhappy option.
“It is certainly serious, but also likely fixable,” said Eileen Hawley, a spokeswoman at the NASA space center in Houston. The Russian mission control center, for its part, made no public mention of the breakdown, in the apparent hope that it might be fixed before it was highlighted as the latest in the Mir’s series of tribulations.
And finally, Chinese authorities pressing ahead with a campaign against crime executed at least 4,367 people in 1996, Amnesty International said in a report released today. The figures were the highest since 1983, when a similar crackdown resulted in thousands of executions in less than three months. They far surpassed executions in Ukraine, which Amnesty said recorded the second highest figure for 1996: 167. There were 45 executions in the United States that year. The London-based human rights group said it had recorded 6,100 death sentences in China, of which 4,367 were known to have been carried out.
Actual figures are thought to be higher. As part of its “Strike Hard” anti-crime campaign, the Communist leadership has urged courts to apply the death penalty more often. China executed twice as many people in 1996 as in 1995, when Amnesty recorded 2,190 executions and 3,110 death sentences.
And while news of F.W. DeKlerk’s stepping down continued to spread and make headlines, that’s just a little of what happened on this August 26, 1997 as presented by the BBC World Service program Newsdesk.
