We'll see, but one can only expect polite diplomacy.
The US only removed the ANC from its terrorist list in 2008, and I bet that when Mandela dies they're not going to mention that either.
Thatcher called the ANC "terrorists" in the 1980s, yet when she met Mandela after his release they had such a long meeting that the people outside
humorously started shouting "Free Mandela"!
When Thatcher died the ANC did send condolences, although individual pro-ANC ideologues looked back more critically in the press.
www.guardian.co.uk...
Incidentally, the above article also mentions that Cameron met Mandela in 2006, and he had then already stated that his previous attitudes were
wrong:
In 2006, David Cameron met Mandela and admitted the Conservatives had been wrong.
But many people are no longer ideologically the same as during the Cold War.
The former apartheid minister, Pik Botha, for example, is now a member of the ANC.
Conversely, some former liberals and ANC supporters are now fierce critics, or have quietly left the country.
Actually the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is widely regarded as problematic in SA.
It smelt of a shady deal that focused culpability on the conscripted and mind-controlled foot-soldiers of apartheid, while the grand leaders got away
free, without any real confessions.
They all claimed to know nothing.
One can well suspect that a deal was made behind the scenes for indemnity, possibly already during the late 1980s.
PW Botha gave the whole show an unapologetic finger, although he got a state funeral.
Similarly, ANC crimes got collective amnesty, and they never really took responsibility for their local struggle based on necklacing, intimidation,
disrupting the available education of youngsters, war with the rival black political group Inkatha, and gulags like Quatro (where they executed or
kept their own soldiers for minor infractions for years, always in much worse conditions than Robben Island, to say the least).
None of the international companies that kept apartheid running was held responsible.
There is such a movement, notably by the Khulumani Support Group, which received no backing from Mbeki when the TRC report was brought to Parliament
in 2003.
www.thoughtleader.co.za...
Nevertheless, despite a lot of fabricated and propagandist history, Mandela himself changed during his imprisonment.
Some would like to see him as an entity apart from the ANC, or at least what it has become.
His presidency was probably the best ever.
I felt kind of sorry for him, and the way he became property of the ANC and his apparently gold-digging family.
I felt sorry that his son Makgatho Mandela died of AIDS in 2005, and I admired the fact that he admitted this when his successor, Thabo Mbeki pushed
AIDS denialism.
en.wikipedia.org...
His own party was not beyond his criticism after his presidency, and to me that really took courage, because they don't take very kindly to
criticism.
I'm also he glad he found a loving marriage with Graca Machel at 80, without the eventually thuggish image of Winnie haunting him.
I won't grieve too much when the inevitable happens.
I think the Mandela story has been written, and already had every drop of sentimentalism squeezed from it.
But I won't pop the champagne either.
As far as Presidents go, he wasn't perfect, but he was pretty darn good.
So that's the magic period I'll remember: 1994-1999.
edit on 25-6-2013 by halfoldman because: (no reason given)