Rabble-Rouser for Peace by John Allen

Author:John Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

By congressional standards, Tutu was given as effusive a welcome when he appeared on the morning the article was published at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Africa in the Rayburn House Office Building. The Democratic chairman, Howard Wolpe of Michigan, said that the committee was deeply honored to have him. The ranking minority member, Gerald Solomon of New York, noted that it was unusual to have so many members at a meeting on Africa. Tutu said it was ironical that he was not able to address a comparable body in his own country: “Here I am, a bishop in the church of God, fifty-three years of age, who some might even be ready to risk calling reasonably responsible, and yet I cannot vote in my motherland; whereas, a child of eighteen years of age, because she is white, and only very recently Coloured and Indian, can vote.” He told of how he had to postpone his sabbatical in New York because of the outbreak of violence in the Vaal triangle, of P. W. Botha’s refusal to meet church leaders, of the woman in the East Rand whose grandson was shot by the police. He also told them of the killing of black South Africans during a general strike that had brought South Africa’s industrial heartland to a standstill the previous month:

Twenty-four blacks were killed during that two-day strike in November. Six thousand were sacked from their jobs. There was not a squeak of protest from the government of this country. When a priest in Poland went missing, and then his body was found, there was an outrage…and the media quite rightly gave it extensive coverage. *…I believe we are being told that this administration is not being soft on apartheid. Heaven help us when they do decide to be soft. Would the reaction and the silence have been so deafening if the casualties had been white…if the casualties had for instance been Jewish?

Constructive engagement has worsened our situation under apartheid…. It is giving democracy a bad name, just as apartheid has given free enterprise a bad name. Mr Chairman, we are talking about a moral issue. You are either for or against apartheid, and not by rhetoric. You are either in favor of evil or you are in favor of good. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You cannot be neutral…. Apartheid is an evil as immoral and unchristian in my view as Nazism, and in my view, the Reagan administration’s support and collaboration with it is equally immoral, evil, and totally unchristian, without remainder.

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