South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his non-violent resistance to the Apartheid regime in his country, and chairman of the post-Apartheid Peace and Reconciliation Commission, appealed Friday to Israelis and Palestinians to stop the “cycle of violence” in their region.
“Tutu said he condemned ‘unequivocally the dastardly’ attack Thursday by a Palestinian gunman on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem that killed eight Israeli students. He also ‘equally vehemently’ condemned the deaths of civilians in the recent Israeli offensive on Gaza … ‘Peace will not come from the barrel of a gun, as we learned in South Africa’, he said. ‘Peace will only come when the inexorable cycle of reprisal provoking counter reprisal, ad nauseam ends. When the inalienable rights of all, Israeli and Palestinian, are recognized and respected’.”
Tutu is chairperson of former South African President Nelson Mandela’s council of 12 world leaders called The Elders, which has announced that it will be dispatching former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and former Irish president Mary Robinson to visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia from April 13-21. See the AP report here .
Mary Robinson is also a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the second ever appointed by the Organization. It was Kofi Annan who named her, and it was Kofi Annan who tried to restrain her on Chechenya, and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and then let her dangle slowly, slowly in the wind. She was not reappointed, though she wanted to be.
Tutu himself was unable to travel to Beit Hanoun in Gaza last year to investigate the deaths of nine members of a family in their home from what the Israeli government said was accidental malfunctioning IDF artillery fire.
The current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, who has just announced that she will not be accepting a second term in office when her four-year term expires in June, reported to the UN Human Rights Council yesterday that Archbishop Tutu’s mission was cancelled “due to the unwillingness of the Government of Israel to extend the cooperation needed for the mission to travel to Beit Hanoun via Israel”.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Itzhak Levanon, replied in the Human Rights Council meeting that “soon after this utterly biased and one-sided resolution had been
passed, he had a meeting with Reverend Tutu, and personally suggested that he sought [should seek] to fulfill his full mission via countries other than Israel. The resolution did not specify how the fact-finding mission was to reach Beit Hanoun. In the 18 months that had passed since this resolution was adopted, he had remained in contact with Reverend Tutu
on this issue and he had recently received a letter indicating that the Reverend would visit Beit Hanoun by entering through Egypt. It was regretted, however, that the mission delayed activities by a year and a half and in doing so created a negative impression of Israel. It was a fallacy to link the fact that Reverend Tutu had not yet reached Beit
Hanoun with an alleged refusal by Israel to grant visas. What remained was to express again and again Israel’s rejection of biased and one-sided resolutions and to convey the wish of Israel that Reverend Tutu and Professor Chinkin would maintain their pledge to keep an open mind and objectively take into account all stakeholders in the region”.
Archbishop Tutu was also the target of a brief campaign of denunciation last year in the U.S. for unflattering descriptions of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. The campaign fizzled out when American Jewish media demonstrated that Tutu did not say the worst of the words that were attributed to him.