US Lawmakers Want Mandela off Terror List
Reuters, June 19, 2008
Some U.S. lawmakers are trying to pass legislation to remove former South African President Nelson Mandela from a U.S. list of terrorists by his 90th birthday next month, officials said on Thursday.
{snip}
Lawmakers in April introduced legislation in Congress to remove Mandela from the list, a step that is normally a government administrative matter, because they were frustrated by the time the process was taking.
The State Department has said it and the Justice Department fully support the bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 8 and is awaiting Senate approval.
“We have been able to clarify and resolve certain questions that were hanging in the minds of some people as to whether to support the process or not,” Nhlapo [Welile Nhlapo, South African Ambassador to the United States] said without elaborating.
“We are trying ourselves to talk to some of these people, clarify what else they may have on their mind . . . so that we can get this over,” he added.
The former South African president and some in the now-ruling African National Congress are still blacklisted under U.S. laws and need special permission to enter the United States more than a decade after the apartheid struggle ended.
{snip}
The ANC was banned by South Africa’s white rulers in 1960, its leaders jailed or forced into exile until the ban on the movement was lifted 30 years later.
Strict security measures passed by Congress after the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States kept the ANC’s “terrorist” label because it used armed force as part of its campaign against apartheid.
{snip}
Rep. Donald Payne, a New Jersey Democrat, told the Africa Society late on Wednesday that removing organizations from the terrorist list was an administrative matter that had taken too long, adding: “We’re trying to make sure that he is not a terrorist when we celebrate his 90th birthday.”
Mandela was jailed for 27 years for his struggle against apartheid, and has become a worldwide symbol of freedom. He was hailed for overseeing the peaceful transition from white to black rule as South Africa’s first post-apartheid era president.
