Dalai Lama's visa delay to South Africa 'unlawful'

South Africa's government acted unlawfully in failing to give the Dalai Lama a visa in time for a planned visit last year, a court has ruled.

Tibet's spiritual leader was forced to cancel plans to attend Archbishop Desmond Tutu's 80th birthday celebrations in October 2011.

The Supreme Court of Appeal said the former home affairs minister had "unreasonably delayed her decision".

The government denied it had bowed to pressure from China to block the trip.

Stalling tactics

The Supreme Court of Appeal was hearing an appeal application by two opposition parties - the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the Congress of the People (Cope) - about the issue. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said the failure to grant the Dalai Lama a visa was a disgrace

Earlier, the Western Cape High Court had dismissed the case, the South Africa Press Association reports. Archbishop Tutu was furious about the visa delay for his fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner and accused the government of behaving "worse than the apartheid government".

According to the AFP news agency, the Supreme Court of Appeal found no evidence that the government had actually made a decision not to grant a visa, but did detect stalling tactics.

"What is justified by the evidence is an inference that the matter was deliberately delayed so as to avoid a decision," the news agency quotes the judgment as saying.

The court said that former Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma "was not entitled to deliberately procrastinate", South Africa's City Press newspaper reports.

Ms Dlamini-Zuma, who is President Jacob Zuma's ex-wife, now heads the Africa Union.

The Dalai Lama eventually delivered a lecture at Archbishop Tutu's birthday celebrations via a video link.

Source: BBC News

Blair speaks amid protest

Amid the gathering of a "small" group of protesters outside the Sandton Convention Centre, former British prime minister Tony Blair said that the most successful countries in the world are those with open-minded people who accept innovation. "Those countries who are open to people who are different, those who are open to nations who are different, those who are open to ideas and innovation create successful economies and societies," he said at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg.

"This globalised world offers huge opportunities if people are open-minded. I feel that right now that it is very important in terms of leadership... you have to take responsibility for difficult and often profound long-term decisions." Blair joked about Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu's decision to pull out of the summit in protest at his attendance. "It's amazing how nice people are to you when you stop being prime minister -- except archbishops of course," he said. "He [Tutu] is perfectly entitled to do what he wants to do. The essence of democracy is that sometimes you are faced with very difficult positions."

Tutu withdrew from the conference because of Blair's decision to back the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blair said removing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power had been difficult. "We are faced with the same types of decisions now with Syria. Do we intervene or not intervene? With Iran, do we allow them to get nuclear capability? Are we prepared to intervene and stop them?"

Tutu's office said earlier in the week that the summit had leadership as its theme, and this could not be separated from ideas of morality. Tutu believed Blair's support of the US's military invasion was morally indefensible. Blair fielded questions from the audience about his decision to invade Iraq. "I took the decision in good faith... I knew it was a highly controversial and difficult thing, but I believed it was right. "The one thing that I have learnt about leadership is that in the end, that is my responsibility. I have to stand by that [decision]. In the end that is what you will elect leaders to do. I will never regret removing a brutal dictatorship."

Blair, flanked by bodyguards, spoke about the attempts that had been made to place him under citizen's arrest for crimes against humanity. "Why don't they actually go protest against the people doing the killing and the bombing and the suicide attacks?" He said the threat of Islamic fundamentalism was still an important issue the world had to overcome.

"Extremism is still there, but we are not going to [see it end]... until we tackle it for what it is. It is based on a perversion of religion and it has to be stood up to," Blair said. "They [extremists] are funded and financed by people with a very warped view of the world and who will take away a lot of the freedoms that we have."

Protest

A member of the audience heckled Blair during his speech. "Thank you... a little bit of protest to make me feel at home," he said. The heckler was escorted out of the hall. He heckler told Talk Radio 702 he had said: "Tony Blair, you are a war criminal and I'd rather listen to Tutu". Meanwhile, outside the convention centre protesters gathered because of his role in the deployment of soldiers in Iraq in 2003. .

The Society of the Protection of our Constitution is seeking a warrant of arrest for Blair. The society's secretary Muhammed Vawda says they've filed a 'crimes against the state' complaint with the police, who've opened a docket. He says the case will now go to the National Director of Public Prosecutions for a decision. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal - an alternative to the International Criminal Court with no UN recognition or authority - found Blair and former US President George W. Bush guilty in absentia last year of crimes against humanity and genocide in the 2003 Iraq war.

Muslim political party Al Jama-ah earlier said it plans to affect a citizen’s arrest on Blair outside the convention centre. "We hope that Mr Blair will do the right thing and try and clear his name at the International Court of Justice in the Haque. However, our dossier indicates that there is overwhelming evidence that he is guilty of crimes against humanity," said party leader, Ganief Hendricks."

He said in spite of the heavy security at the conference - which led to the conference being delayed - the party had hoped that "one of the delegates will get to Mr Blair so he realizes the charges against him will never be buried and be top of mind until he has his day in court. When this happens, it is then up to the law enforcement authorities to take the matter forward."

The police had cornered off the area and closely monitoring the situation where protesters could be seen carrying poster that read "Tony u phony" and "Blair is a war criminal". Among them was the national secretary of the Young Communist league (YCL) Buti Manamela who also addressed the protestors. The protest was broken up shortly after Blair's address. VOC/AGENCIES

Source: The Voice of the Cape

Tutu withdraws from leadership summit

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has withdrawn from participating in a leadership summit in Johannesburg to protest the presence of Tony Blair.

Tutu's decision forms a protest against Blair's decision to back the United States war in Iraq.

"The archbishop has spent considerable time over the past few days wrestling with his conscience and taking counsel from trusted advisers with respect to his attendance at the event," the archbishop's office wrote to the event organisers on Tuesday.

"Ultimately, the archbishop is of the view that Mr Blair's decision to support the United States' military invasion of Iraq, on the basis of unproven allegations of the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, was morally indefensible.

"The Discovery Invest Leadership Summit has leadership as its theme. Morality and leadership are indivisible. In this context, it would be inappropriate and untenable for the archbishop to share a platform with Mr Blair.

"The archbishop greatly regrets inconveniencing and disappointing the organisers and participants of the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit."

Following Tutu's decision, Blair released a statement.

"Obviously [Tony Blair] is sorry that the archbishop has decided to pull out now from an event that has been fixed for months and where he and the Archbishop were never actually sharing a platform.

"As far as Iraq is concerned they have always disagreed about removing Saddam by force – such disagreement is part of a healthy democracy.

"As for the morality of that decision we have recently had both the memorial of the Halabja massacre where thousands of people were murdered in one day by Saddam's use of chemical weapons; and that of the Iran-Iraq war where casualties numbered up to a million including many killed by chemical weapons.

"So these decisions are never easy morally or politically".

Anger grows

A group of Durban-based organisations want to arrest Blair on charges of war crimes when he arrives in South Africa.

"Various Muslim organisations are in talks about possible actions that will be carried out should Tony Blair visit South Africa," said Mustafa Darsot, a member of the South African Muslim Network executive committee.

"This includes protest marches outside the summit venue, possible sit-ins and legal action against Mr Blair. We have also asked various legal professionals to look at the feasibility of having a warrant of arrest issued against him."

Blair will join several big names, including chess master Garry Kasparov and Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan at the annual event, which will take place in Sandton on August 30.

Darsot said the network and several other organisations had written to Discovery Group founder and chief executive officer Adrian Gore urging him to withdraw the invitation to Blair. They did not believe he was "fit to lecture on leadership" because of his key role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Mr Blair is complicit in the murder of thousands of people in Iraq and should be tried for war crimes," Darsot said. "He violated the trust and responsibility of his office and it was his cosy and illegitimate relationship with the [Rupert] Murdoch press that prevented much of the truth about his role in the invasion of Iraq and murder of its citizens from being revealed in the press."

Offence

But Iona Maclean, head of Discovery Life and Discovery Invest Marketing, said the invitation to Blair would not be withdrawn.

"The Discovery Invest Leadership Summit brings together a range of leaders to debate the challenges that face the world's economy, business, government and society," she said.

"The event is not intended to reflect a political view or cause offence. Discovery Invest selected the speakers based on their experience as leaders from various spheres of society and we will not be withdrawing our invitation to any of the speakers."

Patrick Bond, director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said there was no question that Blair could be prosecuted for a "crime of aggression".

"The website arrestblair.org spells out Blair's role in recent mass murder from the Middle East to Central Asia," he said.

"Since Pretoria politicians justifiably complain that the International Criminal Court mainly prosecutes African tyrants, leaving European and American war criminals to travel the world gathering huge speaking fees, some action by Foreign Minister Maite Nkoane-Mashabane would reduce the talk left, walk right accusation against South Africa. She might simply follow the recent lead of Malawian President Joyce Banda, who warned Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to stay away from Lilongwe on threat of arrest."

Bond said if Nkoane-Mashabane did not intervene, South Africans who viewed Blair as a war criminal could attempt a citizen's arrest.

Source: Mail & Guardian

South Africa 1960 – 1994

a) Political, economic and social factors contributing to the end of apartheid

The policy of total strategy or counter-revolution as it became known did not stop the anti-apartheid groups such as the ANC, PAC and UDF (United Democratic Front) from protesting for political and social equality for all races in South Africa. Poverty for blacks continued in the townships and homelands. Unemployment was on the rise due to sanctions, and education and housing were still of a third world standard.

The state of emergency failed to make South Africa safer for whites. Many whites were suffering loss of liberties under the censorship and rigid laws of the military state. Moreover, the ANC in exile continued to attack ‘soft targets’ in South Africa including shopping centres and post offices. Many whites were becoming disillusioned with apartheid and feeling the rejection of their society and culture by the rest of the world. Many Coloureds and Indians were becoming openly defiant of the white state demanding nothing short of full democracy for South Africa.

The United Democratic Front (UDF)

In 1983 a multi-racial party, the United Democratic Front was formed with the aim of uniting all resistance groups in the fight against apartheid. The UDF was highly successful because its members became a uniting force and it had many high profile members, including church leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The UDF supporters also include ANC members such as Winnie Mandela. By 1985 the UDF gained over two million members and was a powerful force in demanding the immediate end to apartheid.

The gradual reforms of the Botha government, delivered no real change in South Africa, only cosmetic changes. South Africa could not change and embrace the modern world while apartheid existed. Many white South Africans and politicians began to feel that apartheid was like ‘living on the back of a tiger and they needed to find a way off without being eaten’.1

b) International factors contributing to the end of apartheid

By 1988 the cost of running the military state was staggering and the economic performance of South Africa was poor. Sanctions had driven the economy into recession; ‘sanction busting’ was failing to fix the problem. South Africa was unable to obtain foreign loans or foreign investment. 2

The impact of the Free Mandela Campaign, sporting sanctions, severe international criticism, military and technical equipment embargos and isolation by other African nations in the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) was crippling South Africa. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 removed the Communist threat which underpinned the existence of apartheid since the end of the Second World War. Festering social, political and economic grievances in all sectors of the South African population left the preservation of apartheid completely untenable by the start of 1990s.

c) Problems facing the National Party and the ANC in the transition to democracy in South Africa

In 1984 during townships riots, P.W. Botha declared, ‘I’m giving you a final warning; one man, one vote in this country is out-that is never!”.3 In 1989 after a mild stroke and the failure of Total Strategy, he resigned as President of South Africa. Botha was replaced by F.W.de Klerk.

On 2 February 1990, de Klerk opened Parliament, and in his maiden speech as President began dismantling the apartheid state. He rescinded the ban on the ANC, the PAC, the South African Communist Party and thirty other political organizations. He freed political prisoners and suspended the death sentence. On the 11 of November de Klerk released Nelson Mandela from prison4. South Africa would have one man one vote.

The transition to democracy was a challenging task. Some historians have called it a ‘miracle’. Both the National Party and the ANC struggled to keep South Africa from sliding into civil war in the early 1990s. Meetings were held to lay out South Africa’s new Democracy entitled A Convention for Democratic South Africa (CODESSA). It was in the CODESSA meetings, that the National Party and the ANC debated their differing visions of democracy. CODESSA 1 ended when the ANC walked out of negotiations5. Finally CODESSA II was able to pave the way for a new constitution and a national election.

Problems facing the National Party

• The traditional rulers of South Africa wanted to hold to power as long as possible. They wanted ‘one man, one vote’ to eventuate slowly to protect the white minority.
  
  
• Right Wing extremists’ elements including the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging) vowed to prevent free elections and assassinate Nelson Mandela. They also wanted to create an Afrikaner homeland.
  
  
• Other white extremists were also letting off bombs and interrupting official democracy meetings such as CODESSA.

Problems facing the ANC

The ANC faced a number of difficulties:

• First in dealing with the National Party and with other anti-apartheid parties, especially Inkatha (a political organisation made up of Zulus from the Natal Province)
  
  
• The ANC wanted one person, one vote multiracial democracy immediately, and many of its members were understandably anxious to embrace democracy for the first time.
  
  
• In Natal/KwaZulu Province Chief Buthelezi of Inkatha refused to have anything to do with constitutional negotiations and savage violence between ANC members and Inkatha broke out. This included the assassination of Chris Hani, a national hero of the ANC and member of the South Africa Communist Party. Only a prompt appeal to the nation by Mandela averted a massive reaction.

• The ANC seemed to be losing control of its political base. Many feared that extremist whites were supplying Inkatha with weapons and instigating the fighting between rival black political groups, to prevent South Africa’s march towards democracy.

South Africa’s first democratic Election 27th April 1994

South Africans of all races turned out determined to vote in their first non-racial election on the 27th of April 1994. People lined up in long queues which stretched for miles to cast their historic ballot. The ANC won the election and Nelson Mandela, after spending almost three decades in jail, became President of a free South Africa, F.W. de Klerk became the Deputy President.

At his inauguration as President on the vast lawn of the Union Building in Pretoria Mandela said:

‘Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another… The sun will never set on so glorious a human achievement. Let freedom reign. God bless Africa’.6

Source: NSW HSC Online http://hsc.csu.edu.au © NSW Department of Education and Communities, and Charles Sturt University, 2011

South Africa Slips From the Moral High Ground

Whether under its erstwhile white rulers or since then, South Africa has never liked to see itself in any way as run-of-the-mill, preferring to cast itself as aloof from the corruption, strife and misrule so often associated with the continent to its north. And, after the country’s fully democratic election in 1994, the towering presence of Nelson Mandela shed a glow of moral superiority: not only had Mr. Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his beliefs, but, finally, the continent could now look forward to what Thabo Mbeki, his successor, called an African Renaissance.

In more recent times, South Africans have come to a different, almost heretical conclusion: under its newest coterie of the powerful around President Jacob Zuma, their land has lost its claim to the moral high ground. Rarely has that conclusion been expressed more forcefully than in recent days when Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, a Nobel Peace laureate once at the forefront of the fight against apartheid, issued his sharpest yet denunciation of the government, comparing it pejoratively with its apartheid predecessor.

“Mr. Zuma, you and your government don’t represent me,” he told a news conference, protesting the authorities’ failure to issue a visa to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan religious leader, whom the archbishop had invited to his 80th birthday party. “You represent your own interests. I am warning you out of love, one day we will start praying for the defeat of the A.N.C. government,” he said, referring by its initials to the governing African National Congress, which casts itself as the custodian of the nation’s moral aspirations as much as the core its political legitimacy.

The archbishop’s remarks provoked some sharp reactions. “In the scheme of things, who is Bishop Tutu? A prelate who was won honors because he raised his voice against apartheid? Who did not?” said Thula Bopela, a veteran of the A.N.C.’s military struggle against apartheid. But the exchange reflected a more insidious malaise. The authorities’ delay in issuing a visa for the Dalai Lama, which forced him to cancel the birthday visit, was broadly interpreted as a genuflection to the power of China, South Africa’s biggest trading partner, with whom it struck a $2.5 billion investment deal even as the Dalai Lama’s visa application was — in theory at least — under consideration.

South Africa, moreover, has joined the relatively new economic and political grouping Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and now South Africa), preferring to align itself with emergent powers rather what are seen as declining established powers in the West.

“Let me state categorically that our foreign policy is independent and decisions are informed by the national interest,” Mr. Zuma said Thursday in a foreign policy address. “We look at what is of benefit to the South African people, and what will advance our domestic priorities at that given time. We are not dictated to by other countries, individuals or lobby group interests within our own country.”

But, for a land that cast itself as moral beacon against tyranny, South Africa has adopted a particular prism for its foreign policy, blending its debts to those who supported it in the liberation struggle, a suspicion of Western influence and a hard-nosed pragmatism. “It must be noted that there is a way that the way in which the A.N.C. regime resembles the one it succeeded, by deciding to take sides with the oppressor, in this case China,” Dr. R. Simangaliso Kumalo, the head of the School of Religion and Theology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, listing a catalog of occasions when Pretoria seemed to side with dictators like President Robert G. Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya.

As Libyans rose up against Colonel Qaddafi, for instance, South Africa initially supported a U.N. resolution authorizing NATO intervention, but Mr. Zuma later promoted a parallel and unsuccessful African effort to create some kind of compromise, shielding the Libyan strongman in what, to some, looked like payback for generous financial support in the past from Tripoli.

On Thursday, Mr. Zuma complained that the initiative “was not given space to implement its road map and to ensure an African solution to the Libyan question.” South Africa’s foreign policy, he insisted, “is an extension of our domestic policy and our value system.” But others had already come to a different conclusion. “It is clear to me that we do not have a moral foreign policy,” the political analyst Eusebius McKaiser said in a lecture in August, discussing South Africa’s role in the Libya conflict. “There is little indication that our foreign policy is consistently and genuinely informed by a thorough commitment to project our domestic constitutional principles onto the international arena.”

Indeed, those principles — or the threats to them — lie at the center of the debate. Two years after their first free election in 1994, South Africans created a new constitution guaranteeing rights that much of Africa had shunned, ignored or undermined and seeming to lock the land onto the moral coordinates of its struggle for democracy. But the ground has shifted. Corruption and patronage have replaced principle and promised transparency. “Nothing anybody says or does can be taken at face value any longer, because we suspect this can only be explained if one understands what the doer or speaker wants to achieve in terms of his or her factional interest,” said Max du Preez, a journalist and author.

South Africa’s revolution, wrote the author Njabulo S. Ndebele, “may itself have become corrupted by the attractions of instant wealth,” reflecting “a potentially catastrophic collapse in the once cohesive understanding of the post-apartheid project as embodied in our constitution.” The A.N.C., he said, “functions as a state within the state, and it thinks it is the state” — hardly the stuff of an exception, let alone a renaissance.

Source: New York Times

ANC's China visit falls on back of Dalai Lama debacle

High-ranking officials of the African National Congress (ANC) visited China this week, local media reported on Sunday, in what could be seen as the party's unreserved support for Beijing. ANC officials were not immediately available to confirm reports in two newspapers -- the City Press and Sunday Independent -- that party representatives went to China.

The visit came after South Africa delayed a visa application for the Dalai Lama, who was to visit the country to celebrate Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu's birthday. ANC supporters, leading newspapers and Tutu said the move was symbolic of the failings of the party that helped end apartheid but was now failing to live up to the ideals of the liberation movement it had once been.

China has labelled the Dalai Lama a dangerous separatist and analysts said Pretoria bowed to pressure from its largest trading partner to bar the Tibetan spiritual leader from visiting, damaging its reputation in the process. Two weeks ago, China pledged to invest $2.5-billion in South Africa during a visit to Beijing by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe. The City Press said ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe, high-ranking official Jessie Duarte, deputy economic development minister Enoch Godongwana and other party officials had spent the week in China on an exchange programme with the Chinese Communist Party. ANC Gauteng Chairperson Paul Mashatile was quoted in the City Press as saying the Chinese governing party had offered to "teach the ANC about politics".

In a video link with Cape Town, the Dalai Lama on Saturday said China's officials were hypocrites whose regime was built on lies.

Source: Mail & Guardian

South Africa: Truth and Reconciliation

Winnie Mandela accuses Nelson of 'betraying' the blacks of South Africa

Nelson Mandela has been accused by his former wife of betraying South Africa's black population. In a savage attack, Winnie Mandela said he had done nothing for the poor and should not have accepted the Nobel peace prize with the man who jailed him, FW de Klerk. The 73-year-old said her ex-husband had become a 'corporate foundation' who was 'wheeled out' only to raise money for the ANC party he once led. She said Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a cretin and claimed the sacrifices of Steve Biko and others in the fight against apartheid were being overlooked. The comments were made in an interview yesterday with Nadira Naipaul, the wife of novelist V S Naipaul.

Mrs Mandela became notorious in 1991 when she was jailed for six years for the kidnap of Stompie Moeketsi - a sentence later cut to a fine. Stompie, 14, had been murdered three years earlier by members of Mrs Mandela's bodyguard, the Mandela United Football Club. She also caused outrage by endorsing the punishment of apartheid collaborators with ' necklacing' - putting burning tyres around their necks. Yesterday she said: 'This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family. 'You all must realise that Mandela was not the only man who suffered. There were many others, hundreds who languished in prison and died. 'Mandela did go to prison and he went in there as a young revolutionary but look what came out. 'Mandela let us down. He agreed to a bad deal for the blacks. Economically we are still on the outside. The economy is very much "white". 'I cannot forgive him for going to receive the Nobel with his jailer de Klerk. Hand in hand they went. Do you think de Klerk released him from the goodness of his heart? 'He had to. The times dictated it, the world had changed.'

The Mandelas, who divorced in 1996, were married for 38 years - although together for only five. Mrs Mandela criticised her country's Truth and Reconciliation Committee - which she appeared before in 1997 and which implicated her in gross violations of human rights. She said: 'What good does the truth do? How does it help to anyone to know where and how their loved ones are killed or buried? 'That Bishop Tutu who turned it all into a religious circus came here. He had a cheek to tell me to appear. 'I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting there because of our struggle and me. Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has no control or say any more. 'They put that huge statue of him right in the middle of the most affluent white area of Johannesburg. Not here [in Soweto] where we spilled our blood. 'Mandela is now like a corporate foundation. He is wheeled out globally to collect the money.'

She said her daughters, Zenani, 51, and Zindzi, 50, had to struggle through red tape to speak to their 91-year-old father, who led South Africa from 1994 to 1999.

Source: Daily Mail

Simelane appointment is 'aberration'

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu on Monday called on President Jacob Zuma to reverse the appointment of national prosecutions boss Menzi Simelane, describing it as an "aberration". "The appointment of advocate Menzi Simelane as National Director of Public Prosecutions is a setback for the integrity of South Africa's post-apartheid legal system," Tutu said in a statement. "Simelane's integrity has been questioned from within his own political party and by his profession."

Tutu said a statutory commission, headed by senior African National Congress stalwart Frene Ginwala, deemed him unfit for the job. Tutu was referring to the Ginwala commission of inquiry into whether Simelane's predecessor, Vusi Pikoli, was fit to hold office.In her findings, Ginwala said it seemed that Simelane had tried to interfere in the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) decision to arrest ex-top cop Jackie Selebi for corruption. She came to this conclusion after Simelane testified at the hearings. But Justice Minister Jeff Radebe last week said Simelane was never given the opportunity to respond to Ginwala's accusations.

However, Tutu said the government's ignoring of Ginwala's finding "besmirches the office of the NDPP [National Director of Public Prosecutions]." "The appointment of one whose ready willingness to act on political instructions has been questioned by a statutory commission does nothing for people's confidence in the law," said Tutu.

The Pretoria Bar Council is currently investigating a complaint against Simelane, related to his appointed as NDPP despite the Ginwala commission findings. Tutu said: "To witness the professional body of South African advocates - Simelane's peers - considering disbarring him is a national embarrassment. This distresses me deeply." He said he had raised his objections with Radebe and Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe while Zuma was out of the country. "I now appeal to President Zuma to do the right thing. Since his appointment, he has done much to restore the confidence of South Africans in government. But the appointment of advocate Simelane is an aberration. "The appointment should be reversed," said Tutu.

Source: IoL

'I keep Mamphela's vision'

Titus Makgela does not have legs, only two short stumps that protrude through his shorts. This has not stopped the 59-year-old Limpopo man from running his own vegetable garden on the grounds of a disused clinic and selling the produce in Lenyenye near Tzaneen. His inspiration was none other than managing director responsible for human development at the World Bank, Dr Mamphela Ramphele.

When Ramphele was banished to Lenyenye in 1977 by the apartheid government because of her involvement with the Black Consciousness movement, she built the first clinic in the area.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu officially opened it in 1981 and Titus was one of Ramphele's first employees. "She was a wonderful woman," he says. "Even though I was a disabled man, she had faith in me and gave me a job. She taught me about self-reliance and to believe in myself and my ability to change my living conditions."

Today "Mamphela's clinic", as it is known in the township, has been closed because of a lack of donor funds but Titus refuses to abandon it. He is determined to carry on the vision Ramphele had. Every day he crawls to the disused clinic to tend to his vegetable garden and to keep the yard clean. "I'll never abandon the clinic. Dr. Ramphele's dream will never die," says Makgela.

Source: News 24

HRW Welcomes Release of South African Truth Report

Human Rights Watch welcomed the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) draft report as an important step in establishing the truth about past human rights abuses committed in South Africa.

It is disturbing to see South Africa's political leadership undermine the vitally important work of the truth commission," said Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. "The draft report offers all South Africans and the world at large the opportunity to learn from South Africa's suffering during apartheid. We call upon those responsible for the abuses committed by all sides to rise to this historical occasion and acknowledge their role in human rights abuses. Such acknowledgment is an essential step in reconciliation."

At a ceremony in Pretoria today, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the chairperson of the Commission, handed over the five-volume report to President Nelson Mandela. The report documents the widespread human rights abuses committed during the apartheid era in South Africa, implicating many apartheid government officials as well as the ANC and other liberation organizations.

Human Rights Watch expressed disappointment with the TRC's decision to excise findings from their draft report implicating the last president of the apartheid era, F.W. De Klerk. Human Rights Watch urged the TRC to take the necessary steps to ensure that all those proved responsible for abuses would be named in its final report.

Human Rights Watch condemned the attempt by the ruling ANC to prevent the release of the draft report, and urged its leadership to take responsibility for the abuses committed during its liberation struggle. ANC Secretary-General Kgalema Motlanthe attempted to block the release of the TRC report through a court application which was rejected early today. In the application, the ANC accused the TRC of "criminalizing the struggle for the liberation of the people of South Africa," and argued that if the ANC had to be bound by the requirements of the laws of war, South Africa's liberation struggle might have failed.

Human Rights Watch emphatically rejects the view advanced by the ANC that it should be held to a lower standard of scrutiny because it was fighting a just war against an oppressive system. The abuses committed by the ANC during its liberation struggle, including the targeting of innocent civilians in bombing campaigns and the torture and summary executions of suspected collaborators at ANC camps, cannot be justified by reference to the justice of its struggle. The objectives of any military or political campaign do not affect the obligations of all parties to respect the rules of war and the principles of international humanitarian law.

"The argument advanced by the ANC that they should not be held accountable for their abuses because they were committed in the furtherance of a legitimate struggle are directly contrary to the principles of international law," said Peter Takirambudde, Executive Director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. "We urge the ANC to take responsibility for the abuses committed by its forces during the apartheid era, and to stop hiding behind the legitimacy of its struggle against apartheid."

Human Rights Watch strongly supports the call by the TRC to prosecute individuals who committed gross human rights violations and did not seek amnesty. Calls for a blanket amnesty should be rejected, as all individuals had the opportunity to seek amnesty from the TRC.

Source: Human Rights Watch

South Africa Bans New Anti-Apartheid Group

The South African Government today banned a new church-led anti-apartheid movement headed by Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu. The authorities also banned its first meeting, which was to have been held Sunday on a university campus near Cape Town. Several thousand people had been expected to attend.

A Government decree prohibits the committee from engaging in ''any activities whatsoever.'' Speaking 12 hours after the decree was published in the official Government newspaper, the archbishop announced that a prayer service would be held in St. George's Anglican Cathedral at the same time the banned meeting had been scheduled for Sunday afternoon. ''It is clear to us as it must be to everyone in the world that we are dealing here with a Government that is virtually totalitarian and determined to bludgeon God's people into submission,'' Archbishop Tutu said at a press conference.

Archbishop Stephen Naidoo, a Roman Catholic, said at the same conference that churches were now the only place where legal protest meetings could take place. The new movement, known as the Committee for the Defense of Democracy, was formed in Cape Town this week to continue the work of the United Democratic Front, the major anti-apartheid umbrella group, and 16 other groups effectively banned Feb. 24 from engaging in political activities.

Archbishop Tutu emphasized that the church service was not intended to replace the banned meeting and said there would be no attempt to form a new committee. But he added, ''We will get someone representing the community to speak.'' A nationwide crackdown on Feb. 24 effectively outlawed any organized anti-apartheid dissent except that expressed in places of worship.

Archbishop Tutu and the Reverend Allan A. Boesak, a patron of the United Democratic Front, were among 150 churchmen briefly arrested last month for protesting the bannings. Sunday is National Detainees Day, the day on which anti-apartheid groups usually organize meetings to pay respect to an estimated 25,000 people, about 10,000 of them children, who have been in detention without trial under a 21-month-old state of emergency. But the Detainees' Parents Support Committee, the group that organizes such protests, was banned last month along with 16 other anti-apartheid organizations and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the major black trade union federation. The union federation and three of the anti-apartheid groups restricted in the crackdown have begun legal proceedings to challenge it in the courts.

Four church services to be held in other centers to mark National Detainees Day were not banned today. The most prominent of these was to be held in Regina Mundi Roman Catholic Church in Soweto, the sprawling black urban complex outside Johannesburg. Archbishop Tutu asked today what more proof President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher needed before they realized that they were dealing with a Government that ''will tolerate no opposition to its evil and immoral policies.'' ''We refuse to be treated as a doormat for people to wipe their jackboots on,'' he said. ''We refuse to be manipulated into a position of oppression.''

Source: New York Times