- Title: SOUTH AFRICA: FORMER BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY DAVID OWEN ADDRESSES STUDENTS
- Date: 14th September 1979
- Summary: 1. LV AND GV PAN INTERIOR Former British Foreign Secretary Dr. David owen on rostrum before student in University of ??? 0.20 2. SV AND CU Dr. Owen addressing students in English 2.02 OWEN: "We also mourn today the second anniversary of the death on September the 12th, 1977 of Steve Biko, and remember with shame the circumstances of his dying; much of his time in prison, handcuffed and in leg irons, and the final horror of his last hours' travelling naked for over seven hundred miles (1,126 kilometres) in the back of a Land Rover. Steve Biko's death vividly demonstrates in its inhumanity man for man that there is nothing academic, remote or rarefied about human freedom in this country, the focus chosen by you students for your activity in 1979 and the subject of this address. It is a paranoid distortion of the facts to depict South Africa as a lone bastion against communism. By practising apartheid your government is feeding communism and offering it the most fertile breeding ground, albeit forced entirely underground, in Africa. Your Prime Minister has talked of a constellation of free and independent states in Southern Africa and there has been much talk in South Africa over the last few months of this new direction with a strong impression left that you will no longer look to the West as in the past. ??? do not believe that while apartheid continues South Africa has this choice of a constellation of state." Initials CLM/ Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved
- Embargoed: 29th September 1979 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
- Country: South Africa
- Reuters ID: LVAB2AZJ8U3JSRDT4LFO4LAVS1Q9
- Story Text: In South Africa, Britain's former Foreign Secretary Dr. David Owen has warned that unless change is brought about in South Africa through peaceful negotiation between blacks and whites, it will be brought about through violence and economic sanctions. Dr. Owen was delivering the fourteenth annual Richard Feetham Memorial Lecture at Witwatersrand University on Wednesday (12 September). he went on to remark that the introduction of the arms embargo on South Africa in November 1977 was strongly influenced by the circumstances surrounding the death of the black South African leader Steve Biko.
SYNOPSIS: Dr. David Owen told the mainly Afrikaner students at the Rand Afrikaans University that the creation of independent states from its black homelands was a prescription for instability. He said that apartheid had no moral basis, no social justification and was politically suicidal.
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