The US has removed former South African president Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress (ANC) from a three-decade old immigration watch list for possible terrorists, the White House said on Tuesday.
In time for the anti-apartheid leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner’s 90th birthday on July 18, US President George W. Bush signed a bill on Tuesday that effectively ended a system under which Mandela had to get special certification from the US secretary of state that he was not a terrorist in order to visit the US.
Now Mandela and members of the ANC will be able to simply apply for visas to travel to the US, the State Department said.
“Today the United States finally has removed from its legal code a vestige of that time of collective insults against human dignity,” said House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, one of the bill’s supporters.
“The label of ‘terrorist’ will no longer be affixed to associates of the ANC — among them one of the world’s great heroes, Nelson Mandela. Our country stands with those who struggled to bring the reprehensible system of apartheid to an end,” Berman said.
The measure authorizes US officials “to determine that provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act that render aliens inadmissible due to terrorist or criminal activities would not apply with respect to activities undertaken in association with the African National Congress in opposition to apartheid rule in South Africa.”
Mandela won the Nobel peace price in 1993, and was president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.
The measure ensures “that there aren’t any extra hoops for either a distinguished individual, like former president Mandela, or other members of the African National Congress to get a US visa,” State Department spokesman Tom Casey said.
He said the original purpose of the law, introduced during the 1980s during former US president Ronald Reagan’s administration, was to fight terrorism.
“So we’re pleased that we could make this correction to what is otherwise a good and important piece of legislation,” he said.
In April, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged a Senate committee to remove the restrictions on the ANC, calling it a “rather embarrassing matter that I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela.”
When a similar bill passed the House of Representatives last month, Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat who cosponsored it, said she was “especially pleased we are taking this important step to finally right this inexcusable wrong.”
Lee and others said the legislation was anachronistic and wrongfully labeled heroes and freedom fighters as terrorists.
Lee recalled that under the original legislation ANC officials could travel to UN headquarters in New York but not to Washington or other parts of the US.
The US has “moved closer at last to removing the great shame of dishonoring this great leader by including him on our government’s terror watch list,” Senator John Kerry said after the bill was passed in Congress on Friday.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where
RSS