Mandela taken off US terror list

http://news. bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/americas/ 7484517.stm

Mandela taken off US terror list
Tuesday, 1 July 2008



US President George W Bush has signed a bill removing Nelson Mandela and South African leaders from the US terror watch list, officials say. Mr Mandela and ANC party members will now be able to visit the US without a waiver from the secretary of state.

The African National Congress (ANC) was designated as a terrorist organisation by South Africa's old apartheid regime. A US senator said the new legislation was a step towards removing the "shame of dishonouring this great leader".

'Rather embarrassing'

Under the legislation, members of the ANC could travel to the United Nations headquarters in New York but not to Washington DC or other parts of the United States. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called the restrictions a "rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela."

South Africa's apartheid government banned the ANC in 1960, imprisoning or forcing into exile its leaders. Mr Mandela, who turns 90 this month, was released in 1990 after spending 27 years in prison. He then became the country's first post-apartheid- era president, before retiring after serving one term in office.

Of Terrorist Lists & Listers

Mumia Abu-Jamal
05/07/08

With the news that Nelson Mandela, former South African president, was, until some scant days ago, on a U.S. government terrorist watch list, comes knowledge of how false and political such a process is.

For, you can bet your bottom dollar that no U.S. terrorist list ever included the names of the white Afrikaners who led South Africans Nationalists, who used the machinery of government to inflict terror on millions of Africans for generations.

Mandela though, as part of the Black resistance movement against racism and apartheid, had his name, and those of others who were members of the African National Congress, added to U.S. government terrorist lists.

Does this at least suggest that something other than terrorism motivated American list-makers?

The government that shot down Black school kids for protesting at Sharpville didn't merit listing.

The government that relegated the lives, hopes and dreams of millions - the majority of its population -- to half-lives of poverty, ignorance and servitude through brutality and violence, didn't merit such a listing.

Yet those who opposed it did.

What does this tell you about the list-makers?

When the International community, voting through the United Nations, opposed the racist apartheid regime, one government in the world used its vote to veto and block all actions against the South Africans: the United States.

When young people around the world protested, the U.S. (often through president Ronald W. Reagan, and his colleague in the Senate, the late JesseHelms) called for "constructive engagement."

The State terrorists who ran South Africa had no greater ally than the USA.

Why should it then surprise us that the opponents of that racist, white supremacist government were listed (until a few days ago) by the U.S. government, as terrorists?

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