SEATTLE COALITION AGAINST APARTHEID April 25, 1988 TO
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SEATTLE COALITION AGAINST APARTHEID April 25, 1988 TO: Mayor of Seattle Charles Royer and the Seattle City Council: A little more than a hundred years ago, the United States was still degraded by a system of chattel slavery. Hundreds of African villages were raided, and thousands of African men and women were sold into slavery to satisfy the relentless greed of the American slave traders and to serve the profit hunger of the Southern Confederacy. The American civil War, the United States' most costly in human lives, finally ended this inhuman slave system, although its racist heritage continues to defile the human and political landscape in the United States to this day: for instance, in the discredited BUT NOT DISMANTLED policy of U.S. "constructive engagement" with the South African system of slavery called "apartheid." In South Africa, the state structure of apartheid is a vicious system under which men, women and children are imprisoned, tortured and killed because they are resisting oppression, demanding their birthrights, and fighting for their freedom. On February 24, 1988, the white-supremacist apartheid regime banned almost all anti-apartheid activities and organizations, thereby banning hundreds of thousands of people (comprising the mass memberships of these organizations) from gathering, meeting, demonstrating, and even from mourning their dead, murdered by the system. Since then over 18 labor, church, political, parents' support and community groups -- including the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the huge umbrella labor organization, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) -- have been outlawed. Leadership has been harassed, jailed, and placed under house arrest: the world has witnessed the arrests of Albertina Sisulu, co-chair with Rev. Allan Boesak of the UDF and a woman in her sixties who has already spent long years in apartheid prisons, and also of Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rev. Boesak, and other clergy engaged in peaceful protest. These degrading acts set in motion by Pretoria's Botha and his Law-and-Order Chief Vlok, and also the recent electoral victories of the blatantly Nazi-like Afrikaner Conservative Party, have revealed dramatically the nature of a genocidal system intent on maintaining the slavery of an entire people, the majority Black population of South Africa. 1 "Apartheid is the only surviving ideology in the world with its roots still firmly planted in the old ideology of Adolf Hitler and Nazism." These are the words of Rev. Boesak, who visited the City of Seattle a few months ago, leaving with its citizens an unforgettable impression of courage and defiance, and leaving also a renewed determination to struggle against all economic, diplomatic, and propagandistic ties with South African apartheid, in Seattle and in the United States. Yet the City of Seattle appears to have failed Rev. Boesak and the oppressed people of South Africa; it has yet to move forward in the complete elimination of apartheid connections. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 30, 1973. It declared apartheid to be a "crime against humanity," and that its crimipal practices violated the principles of international law and the United Nations Charter. In 1962 the UN General Assembly by an overwhelming majority had already recommended to the UN member states that they should "break their diplomatic relations with South Africa, close their seaports to the vessels flying the South African flag and their airports to the planes of South African airways, boycott South African goods, and introduce an embargo on any armaments for South Africa." Given the criminal practices of the South African regime, in particular the recent wholesale bannings of anti-apartheid groups, and given the long-standing condemnation of apartheid as a "crime against humanity" by the United Nations -- of which the United States is a member -- the Seattle Coalition Against Apartheid calls upon Mayor Charles Royer and the Seattle City Council to act in accordance with the UN Resolution on Apartheid by taking every necessary step to break existing apartheid links; specifically, to halt any and all business with South Africa and to end once and for all the privilege of an operative South African consulate here, namely, that of the "honorary consul" for South Africa, Joseph Swing, at 835 Drive East in the Madison Park neighborhood of Seattle. By so doing, the Mayor of Seattle and the Seattle City Council will not only give renewed public support to the UN Resolution on Apartheid but will also indicate clearly that the City of Seattle refuses to legitimize any symbolic, commercial, or cultural South African presence in our city. In the name of the tortured, detained, and murdered children of South Africa: APARTHEID LINKS IN SEATTLE MUST END 1 2.