Suzman Retiring : S. Africa Rights Activist to Quit Parliament

Helen Suzman, a veteran civil rights campaigner and one of the few white elected officials ever to win the trust and respect of South Africa’s black majority, on Tuesday formally announced her retirement after 36 years in Parliament.

“I feel I have had enough,” said Suzman, 71, who for many years in the 1960s and 1970s was the lone liberal voice in the white Parliament. “The time has come. I must give someone else the opportunity to serve.”

Suzman, the longest-serving member of Parliament, said she will not seek reelection Sept. 6, when whites, Asians and mixed-race Coloreds elect their separate houses of Parliament. Instead, she said, she will begin writing her memoirs.

Long known for her persistent harassment of the ruling National Party, her courage and her sharp wit, Suzman stood up for the country’s 26 million blacks, who have no vote in national affairs. She frequently visited black townships and attended the funerals of many black militants killed in unrest.

Lessons From Funerals

She once proposed that every member of Parliament attend one of those funerals to see the “heavy tide of resistance sweeping through the townships.” But she recommended that the National Party politicians go “heavily disguised as a human being.”

Her nemesis in that long political career was President Pieter W. Botha, now 73 and also retiring in September. More than once, Botha called her “Mother Superior” for her attacks on the National Party, which institutionalized the system of racial segregation known as apartheid.

Suzman never backed away from Botha’s verbal attacks or warnings.

“I am not frightened of you. I never have been and I never will be. I think nothing of you,” she once told Botha in Parliament.

The daughter of a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, she married a physician, Moses Suzman. She left work as an economics professor to enter politics in 1953, winning the seat she still holds in Houghton, an upper-income suburb of Johannesburg.

Six years later, she and 10 other liberal members of Parliament split with the United Party and, during a meeting at her house, formed the Progressive Federal Party. The PFP later became the National Party’s official opposition in Parliament but was supplanted by the right-wing Conservative Party in the 1987 general elections.

Last month, over her objections, her party merged with two smaller white parties to form the Democratic Party. Although she said she was sad about the demise of the PFP, she said that was not the reason for her retirement.

Suzman drew international attention from 1961 to 1973 when, as the sole liberal member of Parliament, she loudly criticized what she saw as civil rights abuses by the government and urged an end to apartheid.

Spurred Investigations

Her speeches spurred investigations into many incidents, including the 1977 death in custody of black consciousness leader Steve Biko, and, this year, the five-year sentence given a white farmer convicted of killing a black worker who had accidentally run over the farmer’s dogs.

She has been a strong opponent of punitive economic sanctions, breaking with militant anti-apartheid leaders. Such measures make whites more resistant to change and set back the efforts of blacks to gain economic and political leverage, she said.

“I absolutely understand the moral outrage against apartheid. I share it,” she has said. “But I cannot support the practical results” of sanctions.

Suzman was one of the few politicians allowed to meet regularly with Nelson R. Mandela, the African National Congress leader serving a life prison term for sabotage.

She has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and won numerous foreign awards, including honorary doctorates from Harvard and Columbia. In 1978, she received the U.N. Award of the International League for Human Rights.

Anti-apartheid leaders on Tuesday praised Suzman’s efforts on behalf of black South Africans, but she also won kind words from the white politicians whom she has most sharply criticized.

Andries Treurnicht, leader of the far-right Conservative Party, described her as “someone you could respect for her conviction,” adding that “Parliament will miss her.”

“She has set a worthy example,” he said.