Note #9153 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:
06115 Feb. 21, 2006
Africa must take responsibility for corruption, rights abuses, Tutu says
Anglican archbishop adds in WCC address
that corruption 'has been encouraged by the West'
by Stephen Brown Ecumenical News International
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil - Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu has urged African political leaders to deal with corruption and human-rights abuses on the African continent.
"In Africa we have had a succession of corrupt governments," the former head of the Anglican church in South Africa said during a Feb. 20 press conference at the Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) here. "We have to be honest and say that has happened, although that corruption has been encouraged by the West."
He added, "We too have a responsibility to say that government exists for the sake of the governed."
In his comments, Tutu condemned Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, a man whom he said he once admired. "Now he oversees something that is completely unacceptable," Tutu said.
Mugabe has been accused of presiding over massive human-rights violations in the southern African country in implementing a land re-allocation campaign that has made many Zimbabweans vulnerable to hunger and displaced tens of thousands of people.
"I weep for him and I weep for my sisters and brothers in Zimbabwe," Tutu said. "We who are Africans should be ready to say that a violation of human rights is a violation of human rights."
He added, "Human rights are universal or they are nothing. If it is wrong in Germany, it is wrong in Zimbabwe."
Earlier, in an address to delegates to the Assembly, Tutu praised the WCC for its support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, especially its Program to Combat Racism. Among other things, that program gave humanitarian grants to guerrilla groups fighting minority white rule.
"We overcame apartheid through the crucial help of the united world church," Tutu said in a speech interrupted often for applause and once for a standing ovation. "You established the Program to Combat Racism, which, yes, was controversial, but was quite critical in saying our cause was just and noble, and that those who as a last resort had opted for the armed struggle were not terrorists but freedom fighters."
Tutu noted, "You must celebrate the success you notched up in defeating apartheid, for you were inspired not by a political ideology, but by Biblical and theological imperatives." However, he urged the Geneva-based council to campaign for an end to world poverty.
"We cannot win a so-called war against terror as long as there are conditions of poverty and squalor, ignorance and disease that makes God's children, members of our family, desperate," he said.
But to tackle poverty and human need, the world's churches must come closer together, he said: "We can survive only together. We can be human only together. A united church is no optional extra. A united church is indispensable for the salvation of God's world."
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