Percy Yutar, the South African prosecutor who in 1964 won convictions and lifetime prison terms for Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress leaders for crimes against the white minority-ruled state, died July 13. He was 90.
In 1995, Mr. Mandela, released from prison and elected president of South Africa's new democratic government, invited Mr. Yutar for lunch at the presidential mansion. Mr. Mandela, also a lawyer, said that he was trying to demonstrate the full reconciliation that his country so badly needed. The pair chatted for an hour, ''like old lawyers tend to do,'' as Mr. Mandela later put it. After the lunch, Mr. Yutar, who once accused Mr. Mandela of being a Communist stooge plotting a bloody revolution, pronounced the president ''a saintly man.''
According to many South African historians and writers, Mr. Yutar's vigorous persecution of blacks in the 1960's was linked to his Jewish background. Glenn Frankel, the author of ''Rivonia's Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa,'' said that Mr. Yutar saw the trial as a patriotic opportunity, especially because some of Mr. Mandela's co-defendants were Jews. ''Who better to prosecute Jewish traitors than a loyal Jew?'' Mr. Frankel wrote, describing Mr. Yutar's thinking. ''Who better than he to put things right and prove that not all Jews were radicals hell-bent upon overthrowing the government?''
Mr. Yutar, one of eight children in a family of Lithuanian immigrants, was born in Cape Town on July 29, 1911. As a young man, his left hand was caught in an electric mincing machine when he was working in his father's butcher shop, leaving his hand badly mangled. He attended the University of Cape Town on a scholarship and was awarded a doctorate in law. Jews, however, were not welcome in the higher echelons of South Africa's civil service, and Mr. Yutar settled for a job tracing defaulting telephone subscribers for the postal service. Still he persisted in his legal career and slowly moved up the ladder to junior law clerk and junior prosecutor. Eventually, he became deputy attorney general for the Transvaal Province and gained a reputation as an especially ambitious and energetic prosecutor.
The trial of Mr. Mandela came after a 1963 government raid on the secret headquarters of the A.N.C. in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg. The trial became known as the Rivonia trial, and Mr. Yutar was the appointed prosecutor. Early in the case, Mr. Yutar had to decide whether to charge the defendants with treason or sabotage. He opted for sabotage, a charge widely believed to be easier to prove, but the trial nonetheless centered on seditious crimes against the state.
Mr. Yutar portrayed the defendants as Communist-inspired terrorists who were planning to overthrow the government with the help of foreign countries. He also argued that they did not represent the overwhelming majority of South Africa's blacks. ''Although they represented scarcely 1 percent of the Bantu population, they took it upon themselves to tell the world that the Africans in South Africa are suppressed, oppressed and depressed,'' Mr. Yutar said at the trial.
In Mr. Mandela's autobiography, ''Long Walk to Freedom'' (1995, Little, Brown & Co.), he described Mr. Yutar as a ''small, bald, dapper fellow whose voice squeaked when he became angry or emotional. ''He had a flair for the dramatic and for high-flown if imprecise language.'' After the conviction on the sabotage charge, the judge in the case, Quartus de Wet, said the crime was ''in essence high treason,'' but decided against imposing the death penalty. The defendants were sentenced to life in prison and sent to the notorious Robben Island.
With the successful prosecution, Mr. Yutar's career soared. He was named attorney general, first of the Orange Free State and later of the Transvaal. He was the first Jew to serve as attorney general in South Africa. He retired from government service in 1976. As white minority rule crumbled and Mr. Mandela was released from prison, Mr. Yutar tried to rehabilitate his image. He even argued that he had actually been Mr. Mandela's savior by pursuing the sabotage charge rather than the charge of high treason, which certainly would have led to the death penalty.
After the lunch in 1995 with Mr. Mandela, Mr. Yutar told the press: ''When I was assigned this prosecution, I was urged to charge the accused with treason. I exercised my discretion and charged them only with sabotage because, at the back of my mind I felt, they do not deserve the death penalty.'' Asked about his vigorous prosecution of the case, he said, ''I just did my duty.''
Mr. Yutar remained active in Jewish groups all his life. For more than a decade, he was the president of Johannesburg's largest Orthodox synagogue. He is survived by his wife, Cecilia, and a son, David.
Source: New York Times
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