They deployed local and international monitors in teams who worked together an average of five months per monitor in 1994, the year of the elections. These time periods included preparation and debriefing at the beginning and the end of the mission.(3) The mandate of the EMPSA monitors included monitoring of politically motivated violence investigating its causes and, if possible, preventing it from breaking out monitoring and reporting on the negotiation process and monitoring and reporting on the election process in its entirety.Īnother larger monitoring program was set up by the Network of Independent Monitors (NIM), a South African umbrella organisation of some 40 NGOs. Three types of monitors were used: an Eminent Persons Group that was supposed to stay up to one week a group of experts that stayed up to two weeks and field monitors who served in small teams of two to four persons(2) for a period of six weeks. It ran from 1992 to 1994, with a total of 443 participants, about two thirds of them operating in the year of the elections. The NGO mission with the largest number of monitors was the Ecumenical Monitoring Programme (EMPSA)(1) organised by the South African Catholic Bishops Conference and South African Council of Churches with the World Council of Churches. This development provided the impetus for another monitoring project.ĭuring the elections in 1994 both NGOs and intergovernmental organisations sent civilian monitors. After the elections violence continued, specifically in KwaZulu/Natal where followers of the ANC and Inkatha were fighting each other, leading to the postponement of local elections in that province from November 1995 to the end of June 1996. The period before the elections was marked by much violence in different regions of the country.
#Pemsa printing free
The process of transition from the racist apartheid regime to a multiethnic and democratic South Africa led up to the first non-racist and free elections in 1994.