Tutu Asks U.S. to Back ANC and Contras

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Monday that President Reagan should take the same approach to Tutu’s native country of South Africa as he does to Nicaragua: support anti-government rebels.

Tutu, appearing at a press conference after giving a commencement address at Oberlin College, was asked what he would say to Reagan if he had the chance.

“Do what you are doing in Nicaragua,” he replied, referring to support of the contras against the leftist Sandinista government.

Asked if he wants Reagan to send arms and advisers to anti-government forces in his homeland such as the African National Congress, he responded: “I am a peace lover, not a pacifist. When the West decided there was something called Nazism, most of the West and the churches supported the cause of war against Hitler. And that is consistent with what is called the just-war theory.”

Nonviolence Not Working

Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, said that using nonviolence to fight apartheid in South Africa is not working and that “there can come a time when it would be justifiable, as the lesser of two evils, to overthrow an unjust system by force.”

The archbishop said that whites-only elections earlier this month, which bolstered the government of President Pieter W. Botha, made it more difficult for apartheid to be ended through nonviolent means.

“The options for a reasonably peaceful resolution of the crisis in our country are gradually, or maybe not so gradually, disappearing, and my own view is that our last chance for a reasonably peaceful resolution would be the imposition of effective sanctions by the international community,” he said.

Young People the Key

At the commencement ceremonies at Oberlin, near Cleveland, he said that young people represent the best chance for change in South Africa and in other nations where people are oppressed.

“When we say, ‘We are going to be free!’ we are not concerned just for black freedom; we are, in fact, for white liberation,” Tutu told the graduates. “For it is impossible to have sectional freedom. The only way we can be free in South Africa is together, black and white. The only way we can survive in South Africa is together, black and white.”

Tutu, who received an honorary doctorate of divinity from Oberlin on Monday, is on a U.S. tour after visiting Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago.