Tutu Facing Trouble at Home for Stand in U.S.

By calling for American and European support for the African National Congress during his three-week tour of the United States, Bishop Desmond Tutu has become more controversial here than ever before, and the black prelate returns home this week amid demands that the South African government silence him.

Tutu’s critics have urged that he be prosecuted for treason, that he be barred from all political activities, including public appearances, or that, at least, he be forbidden to travel abroad again.

The government has described as “shocking and deplorable” Tutu’s declared support of the African National Congress, outlawed here 25 years ago and now the main guerrilla organization fighting the minority white government. State-run Radio South Africa has accused him of fomenting even greater violence here and deliberately undermining efforts at peaceful reform.

Speaking in Atlanta on Jan. 20 where he received the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Prize, Tutu said: “We hope one day to hear the leaders of the Western world say, ‘We side with the African National Congress,’ which sought to change an unjust system peacefully, non-violently, and were sent into the arms of the struggle through (state) violence because the West abandoned us.”

Attack Encouraged

In the wake of the Atlanta speech, white politicians in South Africa, encouraged by the government, and much of the news media have pursued the attack.

“Bishop Tutu claimed in several speeches that he would risk being charged with treason by calling for (economic) sanctions,” the Citizen, a rightist newspaper, said in an editorial. “He should go ahead and achieve his martyrdom without further ado.”

Even some liberal whites who usually defend Tutu say that he went too far in his daily attacks on apartheid and that he must now make clear his position on violence if he is to retain their support.

But Tutu, the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg and winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, shrugged off the criticism. Speaking in Chicago last week, he told reporters, “I don’t usually say anything abroad that I don’t say inside the country. They are just annoyed, I think, at the attention I get.”

He doubted, he said, whether the government would prosecute him under South Africa’s strict security laws or even withdraw his passport. “Why are they so scared of someone who doesn’t have a vote in his country?” Tutu commented. “I am a nothing. Why worry?”

Yet, as each of his speeches has been reported here, always with the emphasis on the racial war that Tutu sees coming if apartheid is not quickly ended, the outrage among most whites and even a few blacks has grown.

“They should not let him back into the country,” one woman, Pippa Davidson, told the Johannesburg Star’s “Speak Out” column Saturday. And a man, Sid Ricklof, said, “Give me a gun, and I’ll shoot him myself.”

Calls multiply daily for Tutu’s prosecution under laws that make any form of support for the African National Congress a crime. Most have come from right-wing politicians, members of the opposition Conservative Party, but new demands have been made by members of the ruling National Party and newspapers that strongly support the government of President Pieter W. Botha.

“At first, we were just annoyed with Tutu on this current trip, but everything he was saying was really just distilled Tutuisms--tough, but really not too harmful,” a senior government official commented last week. “But he really has gone too far now--open calls for economic sanctions on the country, open support for the African National Congress. . . .”

“Now, everyone wants us to act against him. We are fully aware of the damage he has done, and there may be a prima facie case against him under several laws. But we don’t want to act against him. That would make him a martyr in the eyes of the world and of blacks. This would only compound the damage he has already done.”

But the Progressive Federal Party, a liberal white opposition body, took the threat seriously enough to warn the government formally against prosecuting Tutu, signaling that the matter would be brought up when Parliament reconvenes late this week.

Yet, liberal whites are also troubled by what they took to be Tutu’s ambiguous stand on violence while in the United States: His support of the African National Congress, his refusal to condemn terrorist acts by its guerrillas with the same vehemence with which he has criticized the police, his melodramatic warning during a Washington Post interview that unless reform comes soon, South Africa may see a time of “naked terrorism” with possible attacks by militant blacks on white schoolchildren as the “softest of soft targets.”

Moderates’ Worry

“What troubles moderates is that he appears now to be coming too close to implied support of violence,” the anti-apartheid Johannesburg Star commented in an editorial. “Bishop Tutu has been one of the few prominent South Africans able to straddle the great divide in this country. If the Nobel Peace Prize winner gives a nod to violent solutions now, he will forfeit his role as a moderate leader.”

Many political observers, both black and white, have suggested that Tutu has been carried away by the adulation in the United States and that, as a result, he has not really considered what he has been saying there or foreseen its impact here.

Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu leader, described Tutu’s support for the African National Congress, now a political rival of his own Inkatha movement, as “extremely divisive” and a “recipe for violence.”

The funds Tutu has raised in the United States, now estimated at upwards of $400,000, are another element in the growing controversy.

Tutu initially said that the money was needed because donations from white Anglicans had fallen off since he became bishop of Johannesburg a year ago and his diocese was nearly bankrupt. Diocesan officials, white laymen, later explained, however, that the church was not bankrupt and really no worse off than others, but that additional funds were needed to pay for the legal expenses of priests and other blacks who have been charged with a variety of crimes.

“Political priests should be expelled from the church, unfrocked, but Tutu is raising money to defend them and carry on the revolution,” the treasurer of one Anglican parish in Johannesburg’s well-to-do northern suburbs said last week. “The diocese won’t get another cent out of me; I will be resigning as well. For every dollar Tutu collects in America for the radicals, he will lose 10 here for the church.”

But Tutu’s standing among blacks, which had grown tenuous while he preached nonviolence in the face of what blacks saw as mounting repression, seems to have improved with all the controversy.

“What he has said is what most black people believe,” a resident of Soweto, the black satellite city near Johannesburg, told the Star. “Blacks will never tell their white bosses they support the African National Congress for fear they will be victimized.”