South African Government Gives New Passport to Tutu
The white-minority government has given Bishop Desmond Tutu a new passport, his office said Thursday, three years and a Nobel Peace Prize after it lifted his old one.
The black Anglican bishop of Johannesburg has had to ask permission for each trip abroad, including the one to receive the prize last year. His office said the new document is good until the end of 1985.
When it confiscated his passport in 1982, the government said Tutu had made statements while abroad that encouraged international corporations to withdraw their investments from South Africa. Tutu responded by challenging the government to say where and when he had made the statements. The government never responded.
A spiritual leader of South Africa’s 22 million blacks, Tutu consistently warns the government that it must scrap the official apartheid policy of race segregation or risk an uprising against the 5 million privileged whites.
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