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CNN witnesses Central African Republic violence
More French troops have just arrived in Central African Republic in an attempt to disarm militias, and it was announced Monday that the U.S. military would fly African Union troops to the country.
CNN’s Nima Elbagir is on the ground in Bossangoa and witnessed the violence over the past week.
Click above to see her report from C.A.R., and her conversation with Christiane Amanpour.
American ambassador in South Africa describes his teenage fight against apartheid
By Mick Krever, CNN
The anti-apartheid movement was not just a South African struggle.
For the U.S. ambassador in South Africa, Patrick Gaspard, the anti-apartheid struggle he was involved in as a teenager felt like “Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday.
“It wasn’t clear whether our actions would really make a difference,” he told Amanpour in Johannesburg.
Americans joined activists the world over in pushing their countries to levy sanctions on the apartheid government in South Africa.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan was against those sanctions, even using his veto at one point to block them.
“We you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, and the president of the United States is saying this is the way we ought to go, it’s hard to be clear that you could be successful,” Gaspard said.
Mandela saved South Africa from bloodbath, says fellow former prisoner
By Mick Krever, CNN
South Africa could have been “reduced to ashes” and suffered “a bloodbath” had it not been for Nelson Mandela’s negotiations with the apartheid government, Mac Maharaj, who was imprisoned with Mandela on Robben Island, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
He was responding to the criticism by some that Mandela gave up too much in the talks that brought down hundreds of years of minority white rule.
“Rwanda would have been child’s play if we had a race war here,” Maharaj said. “And there were times that we were on the brink of that.”
Maharaj would serve in Mandela’s cabinet, and is now spokesman for President Jacob Zuma. When he was released from prison in 1976, Maharaj smuggled out a draft of the manuscript that would become Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
“We had dreamt of an insurrection, and an insurrection movement was possible,” he said. “But it was the leadership of Mandela and the ANC, which said, ‘No,’ keep your eyes trained on the negotiation.”
Mandela’s closest confidant: He taught us to be ‘a forgiving nation’
By Mick Krever, CNN
In his first interview since Nelson Mandela’s death, Cyril Ramaphosa – the late president’s closest confidant during the negotiations that brought an end to apartheid – said that the man known by his clan name of Madiba was “nearly everything to many South Africans.”
“He's been a father of the nation, the builder of the South African new nation,” he said. “And he has been a mentor, a comrade, a friend, a reconciler.”
Ramaphosa is now deputy leader of the African National Congress. It is no secret that he was Mandela’s preferred successor when he left office in 1999, and Ramaphosa may yet become president of South Africa one day.
When Mandela was still in prison, during the 27 years that he would eventually serve, the future president decided to reach out unilaterally to the apartheid government.
“Whilst he was in prison, he saw the conflict rising and rising on an annual basis between the oppressor and the oppressed,” Ramaphosa said.
The only way the cycle could be ended, Mandela decided, was through negotiations with the hated regime.
Mandela articulated cause with ‘exquisite dignity’ but wasn’t just ‘Mister Nice Guy,’ says fellow anti-apartheid fighter
By Mick Krever, CNN
Nelson Mandela did not “create the culture” that ended apartheid, a fellow freedom fighter told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Friday, but he carried the cause to success than anyone else could have.
“People somehow make it sound that he was ‘Mister Nice Guy’ who brought us all together and got rid of hatred in our hearts and led our country to freedom,” Albie Sachs said. “It just wasn’t like that at all.”
“He was at the crest of a popular wave; something very deep in our society,” he said. “And he articulated more beautifully – with more exquisite dignity and precision and a mixture of great gravitas with lots of humor – something that we were all aching of, and ultimately we achieved in our new constitution.”
Sachs was in the 1960s one of the many white South Africans who not hated apartheid, but struggled against it, often at great cost.
Satirical newspaper sums up Mandela sentiment with tongue-in-cheek headline
The satirical American newspaper "The Onion" has pretty well summed up world sentiment about the death of Nelson Mandela with its tongue-in-cheek headline, "Nelson Mandela Becomes First Politician To Be Missed," says Christiane Amanpour.
"Following the death of former South African president and civil rights leader Nelson Mandela today at the age of 95," the post says, "sources confirmed that the revered humanitarian has become the first politician in recorded history to actually be missed."
One year later, brutal rape has affected ‘every aspect of Indian society’
By Mick Krever and Sumnima Udas, CNN
Last December, India was shaken to its social foundations by the brutal gang rape and killing of a 23-year-old woman on a bus ride home from the movies.
The four men who raped her were sentenced to hang; CNN’s Sumnima Udas spoke with the victim’s mother, father and the doctor who examined her, who said she suffered the most atrocious injuries he had ever seen.
The case has affected “every aspect of Indian society,” Kiran Bedi, India's first high-ranking female police officer and now a social activist told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
“It's made the criminal justice system move – whether it's the policing, whether it's the prosecution, whether the judiciary, even the legislature.”
Whenever there is an instance of sexual abuse in India – no matter how far flung the locale – the media is doing a better job of promoting awareness.
“The questions are asked: What is the political system doing or…how is the criminal justice system responding,” she said. They are “all on notice.”
F.W. de Klerk talks about Mandela's passing
F.W. de Klerk was the last leader of white South Africa, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela for helping to end apartheid.
He mourned Mandela in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Thursday, just after Mandela's death was announced.
Click above to watch Amanpour's interview with de Klerk.
Egyptian Father says his jailed daughter was ‘raised to speak her mind freely’
By Mick Krever, CNN
Few cases exemplify the state of Egypt today like the arrest of Ola Ezzat.
She and 20 other young women and girls – seven of them underage – were at a peaceful, pro-Muslim Brotherhood protest in Alexandria when they were picked up the police.
They were sentenced to 11 years plus one month in prison.
On Thursday, CNN’s Christiane Amanour spoke with Ola’s father, Alaa Eldin Ezzat, from Cairo.
“She is strong,” Ezzat said, whose wife visited their daughter earlier in the day. “She sent a message saying that ‘I will continue what I am doing and I am proud of it.’”
Egyptian state attempting to stifle all activism and protest, says Human Rights Watch
By Mick Krever, CNN
The arrest and sentencing to 11 years in prison of 21 young women at a Muslim Brotherhood protest was designed to send a single message, says Human Rights Watch: “stop protesting.”
“These women were peacefully protesting and have been sentenced to this disproportionately high and crazy sentence,” Heba Morayef, director of the Middle East and North Africa Division for Human Rights Watch, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday.
“To put it into perspective, one of the only police officers sentenced for killing protesters was given three years,” she said. “The message there is that it doesn't matter if they're women; it doesn't matter if they are young – we will sentence protesters.”
Egyptian prosecutors on Thursday laid their first charges under new laws outlawing protest “resisting authorities,” against leading political activist Ahmed Maher.
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