THEPOLITICALTRANSITION
events. First, on April 10, an AWB member shot and killed Chris Hani, the
popular and able young general secretary of the Communist party, outside
his home in a Johannesburg
suburb. Mandela stopped that event from
triggering riots serious enough to destroy the peace process by making a
dignified appeal for calm on national television. He pointed out that the
assassin was a Polish immigrant and the eyewitness who made the report
that led to his arrest was an Afrikaner woman. In that crisis it was Man-
dela, not de Klerk, who had shown himself to be the real leader of South
Africa.4 8 The second episode was bizarre. On June 25, hundreds of AWB
men, led by Eugene TerreBlanche, drove an armored car through the glass
windows of the World Trade Centre while the Multiparty Forum was in
session. They shouted abuse at the delegates, assaulted them, occupied
their seats, and urinated on the floor.t?
In spite of those distractions, the Multiparty Forum delegates toiled
slowly but surely to create the interim constitution. Delegates and advisers
of the small Democratic party-the
party led by well-educated liberal
white professionals-played
a major part in the drafting process. On June
3, 1993, the Forum set a date-April
27, 1994-for
the election of the