SOUTH AFRICA: The death of PW Botha brought back vivid memories of the day he stood reluctantly before a court, unapologetic, angry and insistent he had done no wrong, writes Lynne Duke
Pieter W Botha sputtered and bellowed, mad, sweating; his bald, waxen-looking head glistening in the glare of a South African courtroom.
"Die groot krokodil" (Afrikaans for "the great crocodile") had been trapped by the laws of a country he never wished to see. He'd spent his entire life, like generations of his people before him, with his proverbial boot on the neck of South Africa's black majority. But that day in 1998, he faced a black judge, in a land ruled by a black president, Nelson Mandela.
Botha, a man frozen in amber, still pining for the days of apartheid and white minority rule, was beside himself with rage.
With his death on Tuesday at the age of 90, the memory of that day comes flooding back. The former South African leader, among the hardest of the hardliners, was being held accountable, even in some small way, for the apartheid era. Sure, I had to endure the droplets of spit that kept flying from Botha's mouth and landing on my notepad and hands as he ranted, but that was a petty inconvenience in a moment of such import.
A throng of reporters gathered before him. Though his charge was a minor one - contempt of court for defying a subpoena from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission - he became the only apartheid-era political leader to be prosecuted after apartheid's end.
And all because Botha would not explain himself. That's all the commission wanted. As part of the negotiated settlement to end apartheid and hold the first all-races election in 1994, the new government had opted to reconcile with the bitter past, rather than stage Nuremberg-style trials.
All that the new South Africa wanted of Botha was his explanation - and, if it was lucky, his confession - for things that his government did.
So the commission asked Botha to appear. He refused. The commission subpoenaed him. He thumbed his nose, calling the process a "witch hunt". Retired Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, the commission's leader, personally appealed to Botha to co-operate, to help the nation heal the wounds of the past. But Botha, then 82, held firm.
Prime minister and then president from 1978 to 1989, Botha refused to discuss his rule that day in court. He refused to acknowledge that he'd ordered any of the violence that was a hallmark of that era: the thousands of people massacred, assassinated, disappeared, bombed, tortured or detained without trial, by order of a state that had adopted what it called a "total strategy" to thwart black protest.
But since its first public hearings in 1996, the commission, which offered amnesty to perpetrators in exchange for full and verifiable confessions, had heard several apartheid-era figures implicate Botha. Senior law enforcement officials told the commission that Botha had ordered them to bomb the offices of apartheid opponents, which they had dutifully done.
They hit the headquarters of a church group and a trade union federation.
South Africa's most infamous hit man, Eugene "Prime Evil" de Kock, told how Botha conferred upon him a medal of appreciation for the bombing of an anti-apartheid office in London.
And documents gathered by the commission showed how Botha's State Security Council had a policy to "remove" and "eliminate" its adversaries (though some apartheid-era officials denied those terms meant murder).
The laying of blame had been a contentious and tortuous process since the commission's inception, with few apartheid-era officials willing to co-operate.
Even Frederik W de Klerk, the reformer who was the last president of the apartheid era and who released Mandela from political imprisonment, ended up at odds with the commission.
Finally Botha's day in court arrived. Police erected a forest of razor wire around the tiny courthouse in the lovely Indian Ocean town of George.
Some of Botha's far-right supporters among South Africa's Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch and French settlers, had decried the trial as persecution, and police feared some right-wing armed faction could attack. They also feared some radical black faction might cause trouble.
Inside, Botha admitted nothing. He regretted nothing. He hit out at the commission, at the government, at the whole process that had landed him in court. Time, for him, had not passed. His old battle against the "swart gevaar", or "black peril", seemed still to be in full tilt.
"I am not prepared to apologise," he bellowed to the press that day.
True to his reputation from the 1980s, he wagged his finger as he preached: "I only apologise for my sins before God . . . I stand with all those who executed lawful commands from my government in our struggle against the revolutionary communist onslaught against our country."
That's what he'd called them, back in the 1980s, when Mandela's colleagues and followers were fighting and agitating for their freedom.
Black rule, Botha had believed, would ruin South Africa. And he believed it still.
But Botha, the man who had struck fear into the hearts, not only of black South Africans but of whites in the anti-apartheid fight and people across the southern African region, that day in court was reduced to a sad shadow of the past as he shouted: "I'm still concerned about the onslaught! What I prophesied came true!" And so unfolded Botha's last hurrah on the international stage.
He was ultimately convicted of contempt, given a year's suspended sentence, and then had his conviction thrown out on appeal on a technicality.
No matter.
I will always remember his bellowing that day in the courthouse. Though I had relished the drama of it, the scene actually was sad: a once-powerful figure rendered small, even tragic, unable to grasp the lessons of history, unable to seize or even to recognise a chance perhaps to refashion his legacy. Botha: a man lost in time.
Lynne Duke was Johannesburg bureau chief for the Washington Post from 1995 to 1999.