SOUTH AFRICA: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu says some of South Africa's leaders are sinners and his compatriots have failed to sustain the idealism that brought an end to apartheid.

Noble Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, a hero of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle, says some of the country's leaders are sinners and that his countrymen had failed to sustain the idealism that brought freedom. "Part of our own disillusionment is the high expectations that we had, "Archbishop Tutu told reporters on Monday night (September 25) at a British High Commission function ahead of his birthday on October 7. "We imagined that because we had this noble cause.... the vast majority of people were altruistic, were idealistic, and we thought we were going to translate that and transfer it automatically to the time when we were then free; it's not happened," he said. Asked about South Africa's political leaders, Tutu said they had shown that they are human. "We all have been afflicted by original sin," he said, "and original sin has no racial discrimination." Tutu was speaking a week after former deputy president Jacob Zuma won at least a temporary legal reprieve in efforts to prosecute him for corruption. The collapse of Zuma's graft trial has renewed speculation that he could become South Africa's next president but he denied last week that he has renewed a campaign to become the country's next leader. Tutu has previously said he would not support Zuma, who was acquitted earlier his year on a rape charge, to become president of South Africa due to his moral failings. Tutu, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his peaceful opposition to white rule. He headed South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear the painful stories of survivors and victims of apartheid crimes. Perpetrators were offered amnesty if they voluntarily detailed their roles in activities that left tens of thousands of people dead and families searching for answers. Such was the symbolic importance of the commission as a forum to help heal the traumatic effects of apartheid that it was emulated in other long-suffering nations, including Liberia, Sierra Leone, Lebanon and Nigeria. The archbishop said South Africa had "very serious" problems such as poverty, AIDS, corruption and crime but had achieved a remarkable degree of stability in 12 years of democracy. "Which country doesn't have problems? ...When you think of, say, America. It's been free for 300 years. What has Katrina revealed?" he asked, referring to the hurricane that flooded New Orleans and focused world attention on poverty in the largely black city. "You see some horrendous things that you would not have expected in a country that is the only superpower," he said.

ITN Source | September 26, 2006

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