And finally, there was a white man who was crippled in an attack by black anti-apartheid guerrillas.However, the first testimony seemed to make the biggest impact, both on the people in East London and on those throughout the country, watching or listening to the live broadcasts.Nohle Mohapi was calm, as she talked about the death in detention of her husband Mapetla in 1976, the year student riots swept the country. Journalists from around the world, a few prominent South Africans and many ordinary citizens packed the ornate colonial building for the historic event. They came to hear three women and one man – all of them victims of apartheid – bare their pain at the first public session of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
After lighting a candle as both a symbol of peace and to remember those who died in the struggle against apartheid, the body’s chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, reminded everyone why they were there.”We are charged to unearth the truth about our dark past; to lay the ghosts of that past so that they will not return to haunt us; and that we will thereby contribute to the healing of a traumatised and wounded people – for all of us in South Africa are wounded people – and in this manner to promote national unity and reconciliation.”It was the only attempt at eloquence on a day which really belonged to the first people to testify. But after their victory, the peasants appear to have the bit between their teeth.Demanding justice for the victims of the shooting, they have vowed “to fight on” until the state government of Morelos resigns The Golf War may yet become the Golf Revolution..

South Africa’s official journey into its past, to try to heal the wounds of its conscience and come to terms with the brutality of its history, began yesterday amid a media circus in a crowded city hall in East London, in the Eastern Cape. At the weekend, saying the violence had undermined investors’ confidence, the developers ceded to the locals and called off the golf project. “The conditions no longer exist that would guarantee our investment,” said a spokesman for the Grupo KS investment company. “But the land is legally ours and we will not give it up, although we don’t know what we will finally do with it.”That suggested the conflict may not be finally over. Six policemen have been charged with murder, 54 others with abuse of authority.A 62-year-old Tepoztlan resident called Marcos Olmedo was killed in the gunfire but his fellow-protesters now bill him as a martyr who did not die in vain. An amateur video confirmed, however, that the police were armed and opened fire – demonstrating that Mr Zedillo still has some way to go in his pledge to improve his nation’s human rights record.

After news of a clash emerged, not for the first time in Mexico, the police insisted they had been unarmed and that the gunfire must have come from the peasants. Local media billed the stand-off as the Golf War.To prevent the protesters reaching the president, policemen were dispatched to block their path at the town of Tlaltizapan. But the peasants had not gone to listen.They had gone to protest against plans to build a golf course and tourism complex around Tepoztlan, one of Mexico’s most picturesque Indian villages, which they said would ruin the landscape, endanger wildlife, use up scarce water supplies and desecrate pre-Columbian burial sites.They had occupied the town of 13,000 since last September, erecting barbed wire barricades and taking over the town hall, after the developers began bulldozing the golf course to be designed by Jack Nicklaus’s Golden Bear Course Management company. But the incident resulted in a peasant victory over big business of which the great moustachioed revolutionary would have been proud.
The peasants were residents of Tepoztlan, a small town 35 miles south of Mexico City and a stone’s throw from Zapata’s birthplace.