U.S. Role in South Africa?

It has been said that one fool can ask more questions than 10 wise men can answer. The article by Eschel Rhoodie is so full of distortions and half-truths that it would take 10 letters to the editor to adequately refute it.

Rhoodie’s main point is that President Botha offers a program of democracy that would include all South Africans. He then rhetorically asks, who can say “when the African National Congress ever committed itself to such democracy, to any kind of democracy?”

I am sure that Rhoodie is well aware of the “Freedom Charter,” the founding and governing document of the African National Congress. In the text of the “Freedom Charter” it clearly states, “Every man and woman shall have the right to vote for and to stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws.”

The ANC, since its inception, has been on record as supporting one-person, one-vote in South Africa. In all of Botha’s vacuous raving about “power-sharing” he has never been in favor of this elementary principal of political democracy. In fact, Botha is categorically opposed to it.

Rhoodie’s other slanders of socialist countries is only proof positive that racism and anti-Sovietism go hand in hand. Space does not permit a refutation of those points.

I am amazed and disappointed that The Times would print a column by a man who was run out of his own country (South Africa) for using government funds to buy positive news coverage of South Africa in the U.S. media.

TIMOTHY V. JOHNSON

Los Angeles