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Oil Mandela praises Pik's Iraq plan at reunion
February 03, 2003 Edition -1
Jo-Anne Smetherham
Former foreign minister Pik Botha plans to visit Iraq to warn president Saddam Hussein that he should open the country completely to weapons inspectors in order to avoid a war, former president Nelson Mandela said at the weekend.
Botha had phoned him to tell him of the plan, Mandela said, and he had given Botha his support.
Mandela was speaking at a function at Vergelegen in Somerset West, where 400 former Rhodes Scholars from across the globe celebrated the end of a reunion marking the centenary of the scholarships.
"One of the mistakes Hussein is making is not allowing the inspectors to go wherever they like," Mandela said.
This included visits to the houses of scientists, for private interviews.
"If Iraq doesn't co-operate, it is going to be very difficult for us to persuade the United States and its allies to respect the United Nations," Mandela said.
If Iraq co-operated fully, however, it would be difficult for the US to justify an attack.
Mandela praised Botha for having "helped us a great deal with South Africa's transition to democracy".
Botha had travelled widely and had "wide horizons" before the negotiated settlement was reached, unlike former president F W de Klerk, he said.
Last week Botha offered his services to the Iraqi
government to help it improve co-operation with the United Nations inspectors.
The offer followed advice by Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, and senior advisers to President George Bush, that Iraq should offer the same full co-operation to the weapons inspectors as the old South African government had done during the 1990s.
Botha was foreign minister when International Atomic Energy Agency officials visited South Africa.
Mandela, at the Vergelegen dinner, praised Botha for having been "far more progressive" than former president F W de Klerk was before South Africa's transition to democracy.
"Botha embarrassed the National Party, because he
said to them, 'Gentlemen, I think the African National Congress has a better case than you'," Mandela said.
"He helped to move De Klerk to the solution he put forward."
Mandela also praised the UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and his deputy, Mohamed El Bardei, as "men of the highest integrity".
A team of South Africans has already met Iraqi officials in Baghdad, in attempts to prevent a war.
The group includes civil society organiser Roelf Meyer and the executive director of UCT's centre for conflict resolution, Laurie Nathan.
Nathan said from Baghdad last week that negotiations were "very, very sensitive", and it was "hard to say whether any of the ideas we have been discussing will bear fruit".
The Iraqi government agreed that the best way of avoiding war was compliance with the UN Security Council on weapons of mass destruction, Nathan said, but believed that Bush would attack to oust Hussein no matter what actions Iraq took to comply.
Last week Mandela lashed out at US president George Bush for his plans to attack Iraq, saying that he was a "president who cannot think properly" and, in the gravest mistake of his life, was "wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust".
He criticised both Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair for undermining the UN, and suggested they might be doing so because the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, was a black man.
Mandela said at Vergelegen that the Rhodes Scholars were "meeting with the memory, if not the ghosts" of Willem Adrian van der Stel, the former owner of the estate, and Cecil John Rhodes, who set up the Rhodes scholarships.
"The first president of the democratic South Africa is
not a ghost yet, although many claim he is only a faint memory," Mandela said.
He acknowledged Van der Stel and Rhodes as "pioneers" in developing South Africa's agricultural and mineral industries respectively, although both had had "controversial chapters to their political lives."
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