Nelson Mandela has died....

[Arginald Valleywater]

One less Communist Terrorist on the planet. Spent more time getting his photo taken with pop stars and celebrities than sorting out the problems of his country. Add in his ex wife should have been tried for murder but used his influence to get off and you have a less than perfect man. If he did such a great job then why is South Africa the rape and murder capital of Africa and most affluent people drive round with a loaded gun in their glove compartment? He did have some nice shirts mind you....

[one eyed jack]

Its weird when people think of Mandela as a terrorist they dont think of his oppressors in the same way.

Terrorists dont come into this world boxed and ready for sale at Asda you know. They are made by circumstances and the environment they are in.

[Cuntybollocks]

You are talking utter rubbish derrick76. Stupid words by you.

Mr Mandela WAS a terrorist, like it or not.

I thought the regime in South Africa was awful. but if you kill the oppressor does it make you a better human being?

[Essex Lad]

I suppose an obvious question is, if as you seem, you hate this country so much, why on earth you live here?

[a m playlist]

Question to Cuntybollocks, Essex Lad, Arginald Valleywater and William - if Mandela was a terrorist, who exactly was he terrorising? And why have you not mentioned the fact that he was a President of South Africa?

I get hacked off when I read some of the comments above, and realise that there are still a lot of (I assume) white folks out there that still cannot seem to grasp the fact that there are human beings out there that do not have white skin.

If there is no such thing as a non-white human being, then what are the likes of Mandela? Subhuman, as the architects of the apartheid system would not doubt have you believe?

[max_tranmere]

This has been mentioned a lot on this thread, so let's analyse it.

I watched the one hour BBC programme about Nelson Mandela last night (Friday) and he was asked about it in an interview filmed 10 years ago which they showed a clip from. He explained it away by saying that terrorism involves attacking people randomly and attacking State's randomly. He said terrorism was non-specific, non targeted, violence. Mandela said that his organisation specifically targeted installations, places, and institutions of the State that were oppressing and mistreating his people - so it was not terrorism according to him.

I know someone who has visited Robben Island and has been in Mandela's old cell. He said the tour guides at the former prison are mainly ex prisoners and former ANC members. This person has one Irish parent and one English parent, and he got chatting to one of the tour guides. When he mentioned his background the guy said "the IRA were a huge inspiration to us". This man seems to view the IRA as a bunch of good chaps, exclusively fighting for a noble cause, and who only targeted bad people who deserved it. He obviously doesn't know about the attack at Enniskillen in 1987 where 11 people, mainly old age pensioners at a Remembrance Day ceremony, were blown to pieces. Or the Birmingham pub bombing in the 1970's which killed 21 innocent people, or the 2 kids killed at Warrington when the IRA bombed the town centre on a Saturday afternoon. There are many many other examples like this. He clearly didn't know either about how the IRA couldn't take criticism and would kill anyone who did criticise them. In the 1980's the Conservative MP Ian Gow was always slating the IRA in the press and on TV, so they killed him. The IRA also used to tar and feather women in Northern Ireland, from their own community, who fraternised with British soldiers. This involved stripping the woman naked, shaving her hair off, then covering her in some kind of goo, and chaining her to a lamppost for 24 hours for all to see. Nice guys, hey? Did the ANC tar and feather black women who has affairs with white men? I don't think they did. Anyone visiting Robben Island, and who might mention they have a bit of Irish ancestory, is likely to have an ignorant former ANC member tell them about how those good old chaps the IRA were enormously inspirational to them.

As the old saying goes: one persons terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Is militant action justified when trying to achieve a political cause, and there is no other way to do it? Some would say yes. I regard Mandela as more of a freedom fighter than a terrorist, but I see him as part terrorist as a lot of innocent people were killed in the process, when they might not have to have been.

Here is a case of the anti-apartheid campaign killing innocent people. This may have been about trying to damage infrastructure but the organisation would know civilians would be harmed too. Everything I've typed in the above paragraphs has been from memory but I had heard about Peter Hain, the politician, once speaking at the funeral of an anti apartheid campaigner and bomber so I looked it up. This from Wikipedia:

"At 15, Hain spoke at the funeral of John Frederick Harris, an anti-apartheid activist who was hanged for murder resulting from the bombing of the Johannesburg main railway station, injuring 23 people and killing an elderly woman, Mrs Ethyl Rhys. Mrs Rhys's grand daughter suffered severe burns."

The ANC seemed to mainly target infrastructure, and it seemed they viewed civilians as justified in being killed if they got in the way. Here is something from Wikipedia that lists some of the attacks on civilian places and things where the ANC would have known innocent non-combatant's would be killed, but did it anyway:

"A number of civilians were also killed in these attacks. Examples of these include the Amanzimtoti bombing, the Sterland bomb in Pretoria, the Wimpy bomb in Pretoria, the Juicy Lucy bomb in Pretoria, and the Magoo's bar bombing in Durban. ANC acts of sabotage aimed at government institutions included the bombing of the Johannesburg Magistrates Court, the attack on the Koeberg nuclear power station, the rocket attack on Voortrekkerhoogte in Pretoria, and the 1983 Church Street bombing in Pretoria, which killed 16 and wounded 130.

Church Street bombing

The Church Street bombing was a car bomb attack on 20 May 1983 by Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress, in the South African capital Pretoria. The bombing killed 19 and wounded 217, and was one of the largest attacks engaged in by the ANC during its armed struggle against apartheid. The attack consisted of a car bomb set off outside the Nedbank Square building on Church Street at 4:30pm on a Friday. The target was South African Air Force (SAAF) headquarters, but as the bomb was set to go off at the height of rush hour, those killed and wounded included civilians. The bomb went off ten minutes earlier than planned, killing two ANC operatives in the vehicle, Freddie Shangwe and Ezekial Maseko. At least 20 ambulances took the dead and wounded to hospital.

Truth Commission hearing (re: the Church Street bombing):

The ANC's submission said that the bombing was in response to a South African cross-border raid into Lesotho in December 1982 which killed 42 ANC supporters and civilians, and the assassination of Ruth First, an ANC activist and wife of Joe Slovo, in Maputo, Mozambique. It claimed that 11 of the casualties were South African Air Force (SAAF) personnel and hence a military target. The legal representative of some of the victims argued that as administrative staff including telephonists and typists they could not accept that they were a legitimate military target.

Ten MK operatives including Aboobaker Ismail applied for amnesty for this and other bombings. The applications were opposed on various grounds, including that it was a terrorist attack disproportionate to the political motive. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the number of civilians versus military personnel killed was unclear. South African Police statistics indicated that 7 members of the SAAF were killed. The commission found that at least 84 of the injured were SAAF members or employees. Amnesty was granted by the TRC."

A lot of this stuff happened after Mandela was locked up so it would not be reasnable to view him as responsible, however people see him and the ANC as one and the same, the praise they show for him is the same as the praise they show for the organisation of which he was a member.

So to sum up: Mandela was, in my view, 75% freedom fighter and 25% terrorist. I form this view as most of what he and the ANC targeted combatants, the establishment, military, infrastructure, and so on. There were innocents killed too as I've said and it seems likely they knew innocents would die but they did the operations anyway. A lot of the reporting on this over the years and decades has presented Nelson Mandela as a kind of cuddly grandad figure, like I said in an earlier post, and I have to say that for many years I honestly thought he was just thrown in jail to shut him up, I didn't know he had actually done anything to be locked up for. It's down to the individual how they view these things, some will view him 100% freedom fighter, others would view him 100% terrorist. Those who would view him as 100% freedom fighter though are, by implication, condoning and supporting the actions of many militia groups and guerrilla army's throughout the world.

[one eyed jack]

Cuntybollocks wrote:

"I thought the regime in South Africa was awful. but if you kill the oppressor does it make you a better human being?"

No it doesnt but it is a redeeming feature when a man can see the error of his ways ways and atone for it by transforming to a more peaceful approach.

It takes a big man with a big heart to do that.

He was jailed because he refused to renounce violence. I'd say it was vvery hard not to see your oppressors as the enemy and its not hat much different to being at war. These were violent times and manela knew that more violence was not the solution to living in harmony in the future and it is this that the world recognises his efforts.

If this was not true then the world leaders and so many people across the globe wouldve forgotten him a long time ago

[one eyed jack]

Max,

I find talking about the IRA, one has to detach oneself from personal bias to ask how the IRA came into being. Their acts of terrorism got lost in translation in much the same as Al Quaeda flying two planes into the WTC did. It affected a lot of people who probably didnt know of Osama Bin Laden and fuelled hatred against muslims but this was the way Al Quaeda got the worlds attention because of Bushs foreign policy and stepped up a war with the wrong people who are using it to their advantage.

The problem with righteous causes is when elements exploit it for their own interests and this s when the legitimacy of a cause is lost and all people see are just angry vengeful thugs. People cannot empathise with that and thats what made leaders like Mandela, Malcolm X, JFK, Lincoln, Lech Walesa and many more of their kind apart, because they brought it into focus for their oppressors to see what they were doing...and maybe they felt ashamed and wanted to atone for their behaviour. Splinter groups are the worst because theyve made a career out of oppressing. Look at Germany today. They are embarrassed of their nazi past but extreme happening cause extreme things to happen and people cannot see sense but lash out.

Its that lashing out at random that can be seen as terrorism because that is what it is

If acts of terrorism hit us financially and didnt result in the loss of loved ones their cause might be recognised but you kill one of mine I will kill two of yours and it just never ends

Martin Luther King says it best: "An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind"

[number 6]

Some people just hate the fact that some BLACK people are heroes. A few of the posters above included.

[one eyed jack]

Sometimes I wonder if people are selective of their understanding of history. I arrived at my understanding of the man by watching the news and reading up on him.

You can't be a freedom fighter if you've never fought for freedom and last I knew most fighting was never done on paper with a pen.

Its a powerful thing to witness amn make a transition and redeem himself. We can all learn from that