wfn.org | SOUTH AFRICA: BISHOP MEETS FORMER PRESIDENT FOR TALKS

[a.whitefield@quest.org.uk]

Title:BISHOP MEETS FORMER PRESIDENT FOR TALKS
July 1, 1997
ANGLICAN COMMUNION NEWS SERVICE
Canon Jim Rosenthal, Director of Communications
London, England

[97.6.4.3]

SOUTH AFRICA: BISHOP MEETS FORMER PRESIDENT FOR TALKS

(Noel Bruyns, ENI) South Africa's last state president under apartheid,
F.W. de Klerk,  had a tragic lack of insight into the evil of South
Africa's racial segregation policy, the Anglican Bishop of Grahamstown,
David Russell, said last week, 19 June.

Bishop Russell was addressing the media after an hour-long meeting with
Mr. F.W. de Klerk, the  leader of the National Party, which ruled South
Africa from 1948 until President Nelson Mandela's non-racial government
took over in 1994.

The private meeting took place in  Mr. De Klerk's Cape Town office after
the bishop published an open letter in a provincial newspaper, the Daily
Dispatch, challenging him to a public debate after the National Party
denied knowledge of human rights abuses under apartheid.

Mr.  De Klerk appeared to be in a "profound condition of denial" and
continued to present the original motivation for apartheid as something
morally acceptable and justifiable at the time, Bishop Russell told
reporters. "I said I think the motivation was essentially wicked. It was
white greed. It was a determination to hold on to power violently in the
interests of a minority, and that needs to be admitted and said in an
unequivocal way.

"Perhaps that's hoping for a miracle. I went [to the meeting] hoping for
a miracle, a conversion. It didn't happen. I was really appalled at Mr.
De Klerk's lack of insight into what apartheid did to people."

In his open letter to the former state president, the bishop wrote that
it seemed "that you truly need help in understanding the meaning of the
phrase 'gross abuse and violation of human rights' ... committed by the
party in which you played a central part for so long".

The bishop also wrote: "I have experience in my ministry which will
really acknowledge and recognise the manifest guilt of your party
concerning the gross violation of human rights and the cruel abuse of
countless numbers of people."

As a young priest in the 1970s, David Russell made headlines as a
prominent anti-apartheid activist, long before the churches spoke out
strongly against the apartheid state. He gained world prominence for
lying down in front of bulldozers to protest against forced removals of
people of colour from areas declared "whites only". He was forcibly
dragged away by police.