BISHOP TUTU'S ASCENDANCY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180108-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 19, 2010
• Sequence Number: 108
• Publication Date: August 8, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

,STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/19: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180108-0
JOHN REES
p,;. T !CLE APPEA ED
ON PAGE ..-? WASHINGTON TIMES
8 August 1985 EXCr?TE ,
Bishop Tutu's ascendanc
When Bishop Desmond M.
Tutu, head of the South
African Council of
Churches, won the
Nobel Peace Prize last year, he was
catapulted into position as perhaps
the leading political spokesman and
representative to the world media
and public opinion for South Africa's
urban black population.
In February, Bishop Tutu's posi-
tion was further enhanced when he
was named Anglican Bishop of
Johannesburg. (In South Africa, the
Anglican Church is predominantly
black).
As leader of the richest Anglican
diocese in South Africa, and having
to answer to no higher religious
authority in South Africa, the bishop
has far more freedom of action in
this position than he had as SACC
general secretary. During his three
two-year terms of leading the SACC,
an organization of Protestant
denominations with a combined
membership of about 10 million, 80
percent of whom are black, Bishop
Tutu's organization was racked with
controversy.
In large part, it stemmed from his
use of the SACC as a platform from
which to campaign against Pres-
ident Botha's plan for a slow and
carefully paced opening of the
political system to all South African
population groups - a plan the gov-
ernment in Pretoria says is intended
to ease social stress and prevent
such abuses as block-voting by tri-
bal chiefs.
Bishop Tutu's prominence is the
result of his years of work not in
parishional duties, but as an admin-
istrator, organizer, and political
opponent of South Africa's
apartheid system of racial sep-
aration. Black South African com-
mentators such as Percy Qoboza and
others agree that part of Bishop
Tutu's rise is due to the fact that he
is acceptable to the political action
fronts of South Africa's two main
revolutionary movements, the Afri-
can National Council and the much
smaller Pan-Africanist Council of
Azania (PAC).
Recently a prominent Republican
member of the Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee stated that he
"knew nothing about ANC" Yet the
U.S. senators and congressmen who
have suppported sanctions long-
demanded by ANC and its U.S. sup-
porters such as TransAfrica, the
Institute for Policy Studies, Wash-
ington Office on Africa, and
American Committee on Africa,
practically speaking, also have been
aiding the ANC cause.
The United Democratic Front,
formed in 1982, is generally recog-
nized as the internal arm of the
Soviet-supported African National
Congress. During the 1930s and
1940s, the multiracial South African
Communist Party successfully pen-
etrated the ANC leadership and
structure, and became the dominant
political tendency in the organ-
ization. During the early 1950s, the
Communists launched a long-term
campaign through ANC to bring
about installation of a Communist-
dominated system in South Africa.
First, there were mass protests
and civil disobedience. In the early
1960s, the SACP decided that con-
ditions were ripe to launch terrorist
operations as the opening stage for
armed insurrection. The SACP and
the ANC jointly established a terror-
ist cadre, Umkhonto We Sizwe, -
"Spear of the Nation" in the Zulu
language. Umkhonto's bombs were
aimed at South Africa's civilians, of
course: terrorists always attack
civilians first in hopes of causing
them to lose confidence in their gov-
ernment's ability to defend them.
Umkhonto's leader was Nelson
Mandela of the ANC, who was
entirely acceptable to the SACP
leaders and worked intimately with
them, though he himself was not a
party member. However, an
intriguing document in Mr. Man-
dela's handwriting was found at the
time of his arrest - one which he
never repudiated. It was entitled
How to be a Good Communist. Mr.
Mandela's old comrade Joe Slovo
still heads the special operations
unit of the ANClUmkhonto We Sizwe
terrorists. He is a Lithuanian-born
former Johannesburg lawyer who
serves in the ANC Revolutionary
Committee and National Executive.
Mr. Slovo also is a member of the
SACP Politburo; and South African
authorities, after capturing a Soviet
"illegal" who entered south Africa to
monitor the effectiveness of car
bombings, assassinations, and other
terrorist operations carried out by
Mr. Slovo's teams, said that Mr. Slovo
was a high-ranking officer of the
Soviet KGB.
Following the 1976 Soweto riots,
ANC received many ultra-militant
student recruits from the Black
Consciousness Movement. Wit-
nesses before Sen. Jeremiah Den-
ton's Subcommittee on Security and
Terrorism described in detail their
training in Angola and in the Soviet
Union at the hands of Cuban, Rus-
sian, and other Soviet bloc person-
nel. Some of the younger "black
militants" have objected to the domi-
nant influence of white Communists
in ANC. Expulsions and assassina-
tions have awaited ambitious mili-
tant leaders who would not accept
ANC discipline.
This is the terrorist organization
that is financially supported by the
World Council of Churches; and this
is the organization to which Bishop
Desmond Tutu is "acceptable:'
ANC's violence-oriented militant
rivals are to be found in the National
Forum. This grouping envelops vet-
erans of the Pan-Africanist Con-
gress of Azania (PAC) (a terrorist
splinter from the ANC that looked to
Mao's China for its international sup-
port), and philosophical descen-
dants of the late Steve Biko's Black
Consciousness Movement, such as
the South African Students Commit-
tee and Azanian People's Organ-
ization (AZAPO).
The political split between the
"liberation movements" also has eth-
nic or tribal echoes in the long-
standing rivalries between Zulus-
and Xhosa-speakers. European and
American activists rarely compre-
hend the intense degree to which
South Africa's black majority is fac-
tionalized on political and ethnic
grounds.
Bishop Tutu, who for five years
was general secretary of the South
African Council of Churches, reg-
ularly has been invited to address
meetings of both Front and Forum.
His message: the need for black
unity and to end fratricidal violence
so that all energies can be focused
on bringing down the apartheid sys-
tem.
Bishop Tutu's sponsors and his
audience have as much been exter-
nal to South Africa as internal. His
primary sponsors have been the
Geneva-based Protestant ecumeni-
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/19: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201180108-0