Bishop Tutu calls for dismantling of apartheid system, beginning of dialogue with blacks.

Bishop Tutu calls for dismantling of apartheid system, beginning of dialogue with blacks

Bishop Desmond Tutu on 28 October called on South Africa to end emergency rule, dismantle apartheid, release political prisoners and allow the return of political exiles, and begin dialogue with the authentic representatives of black South Africans.

In a statement before the Special Political Committee, the Anglican Bishop of Johannesburg and 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner also asked that bank loans to South Africa be renegotiated so that credit would not be extended to that country. Bishop Tutu, addressing the Committee as it concluded hearings on Pretoria's apartheid policy, said he supported the plan of Commonwealth leaders, approved on 20 October at their meeting in the Bahamas, to impose mild sanctions against South Africa immediately and tougher ones in six months if Pretoria failed to make progress. The world owed it to future generations to end apartheid. Blacks, he stressed, would remember who helped them to be free.

South Africa had been regarded by some in the developed world as the last bastion of democracy in southern African, he went on. Some had accepted the regime's repression in order to keep out communism. That was an "exceptionally high price to pay', he said. The world had not listened to the "whimper of children with extended tummies' in the bantustans, to the anguish of those who had to suffer through solitary confinement, and to the last cries of those who had died mysteriously in detention.

"Apartheid can not be reformed', he said. "It must be dismantled. You don't reform a Frankenstein, you destroy it.' It was quite remarkable that the black people of South Africa had remained peace-loving, almost to a fault. The response of the authorities to peaceful demonstrations had been escalating violence and repression.

The African National Congress of South Africa and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania had called for violent struggle only after being outlawed. Many Western countries had won their independence only after violent struggle, he pointed out.

Those countries that supported the struggle against apartheid with words and actions were friends of the black people. "The enemies of our enemies are our friends', he said. Tose whites who opposed apartheid in South Africa should be "praised to the skies'.

The international community should be part of the "exhilarating enterprise' of freeing South Africa from apartheid so that blacks and whites together could be free, Bishop Tutu concluded.

Blacks in South Africa, he stated, had fought in World War II for a new world in which all would live in freedom. It was ironic that some rulers in today's South Africa were among the most vocal opponents of that war effort, he said. The black people had believed that their dreams would be fulfilled once the free would had defeated the Nazis. "What a rude awakening awaited us', he said. Was it that the blacks of South Africa were expendable and would there be more concern if the casualties of the violence in that country were while people? he asked.