‘Jimmy Carter & Apartheid’

To the Editors:

In “Jimmy Carter and Apartheid” [NYR, March 29], Joseph Lelyveld might also have mentioned Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s June 2002 statement, “A Moral Campaign to End the Occupation.” Citing divestment pressures then and now, Tutu says:

Yesterday’s township dwellers can tell you about today’s life in the occupied territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, an elderly grandfather waits to beg for the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is required to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in the cities, but luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.

Tutu mentions Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, “two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle,” having recently published a letter titled “Not in My Name,” signed by several hundred prominent Jewish South Africans, which drew explicit analogies between apartheid and current Israeli policies. He notes that Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also “pointed out the relevance of the South African experience to the current conflict.”

Tutu argues that a like “moral force and international pressure” will be required to end the occupation.

William H. Slavick

Portland, Maine