United Nations resolution condemns apartheid

Press, 25 October 1984, Page 10

United Nations resolution condemns apartheid

NZPA-Reuter New York A draft resolution condemning South Africa’s apartheid was adopted by the 15-member Security Council of the United Nations yesterday. Diplomatic sources said that the draft was not opposed, but the United States abstained from voting. ' Bishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican prelate who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week, was invited to speak to the council before the vote. Bishop Tutu, who is teaching at a seminary in New York,, made a brief visit to South Africa last week-end and preached at services .in Soweto, a black township near Johannesburg.

The draft resolution before the council reiterated the world body’s “condemnation of the South African regime’s apartheid policy and its continued-de-fiance of relevant resolutions of the United Nations and the regime’s designs to further entrench apartheid, a system characterised as a crime against humanity.” It would further condemn “the continued massacres of the oppressed people, as well as the arbitrary arrest and detention of leaders and activists of mass organisations.” The draft contained a demand for the immediate eradication of apartheid, dismantling of so-called tribal homelands, and an end to the “uprooting, reio-

cation and denationalisation of the indigenous African people.” Mr Kurt von Schirnding, the South African delegate, said the matter was indisputably domestic. “How dare they presume to prescribe as to how another sovereign State run its own affairs,” he said, referring to the sponsors of the text. These were Bourkinafasso, Egypt, India, Malta, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, and Zimbabwe. Explaining the American abstention, Mrs Jeane Kirkpatrick, the chief United States delegate, said that “some excesses of language” prevented her from joining the other members in voting for the resolution.

She reiterated American abhorrence of apartheid and expressed distress and concern at the violence. The United States fully supported the demands for equal rights contained in the resolution and believed that South Africa’s problems would not be solved until all its people enjoyed their rights as citizens, she said. In Washington the State Department yesterday condemned South Africa’s actions against the black township of Sebokeng • as “repressive measures” and raised doubts about the racial reform promises. A State Department spokesman, John Hughes, said he believed that 347 people were arrested after troops surrounded the town

and police searched for arms, ammunition, banned literature, stolen property, and illicit drugs. Sebokeng has been a centre of rioting that has killed 80 people throughout South Africa since a new constitution last month gave Indians and Coloureds, but not blacks, a limited role in Government. “These repressive measures are bound to obscure and put in question the South African Government’s professed. intentions of dealing with the problems of the country by reform and consensus,” said Mr Hughes. “We deeply regret this latest action by the South African Government,” he said.