The Hindu : International : Apartheid party merges with ANC

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 09, 2004

International

International

Apartheid party merges with ANC

Johannesburg: The party that built apartheid and turned South Africa into an outcast state completed its march into oblivion on Saturday by deciding to merge with its one-time nemesis, the African National Congress. The New National Party, heir of a movement that jailed Nelson Mandela and built nuclear bombs, said its shrunken membership would dissolve and fight future elections under the banner of the black ruling party. A meeting of the NNP's federal council proposed that members join the ANC, a bitterly ironic twist for a party founded almost a century ago to promote the interests of white Afrikaners and keep blacks from power. Officials are to retain their party membership and parliamentary and local government seats as a transitional arrangement until September 2005. Just a decade ago such a development would have been dismissed as an impossibility, but the NNP is so enfeebled from successive electoral batterings that the wonder was how it managed to last so long since dismantling apartheid. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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