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South African Muslims Protest U.N. Racism Conference
PRETORIA, Aug 21 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - South African dignitaries lit an Olympic-style torch in Pretoria Tuesday to symbolize their opposition to racism, as thousands of Muslims took to the streets of Cape Town to protest Israel's continuing oppression of Palestinians.
The two events came 10 days ahead of a U.N.-sponsored global conference on racism, which will be held in the east coast city of Durban from August 31st to September 7th.
"The torch will stand at the Union Buildings [seat of government] until the end of the conference, when it will be extinguished," said Tshepo Ramodibe, spokesman for Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who received the torch.
Marchers gathered to watch the lighting ceremony at Church Square, one of the former symbols of apartheid, where the statue of Boer War leader Paul Kruger still stands.
As the clock struck noon, Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, mayor of greater Pretoria, and other officials managed, after a number of attempts, to light the "torch of tolerance" with a smaller one, as hundreds of people holding candles looked on and sirens sounded.
The government also asked South Africans to turn on their car headlights on at noon to protest against racism.
In Cape Town, organizers of the Muslim demonstration, which stretched several city blocks, said it had drawn 25,000 to 30,000 people.
At a parliament building, where they faced a barricade of armored vehicles and police with riot shields, the demonstrators handed over a memorandum to an MP from the ruling African National Congress
Other police, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying automatic rifles, waited inside the gates.
The crowd, many of whom were Muslim women in hijab (headscarves), led chants of "Zionism equals racism" and "Free Palestine".
They demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon be brought before an international court for "war crimes against Palestinians," referring to his responsibility in the 1982 massacres of up to 2,000 Palestinians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.
Some of them carried Palestinian flags, and others banners with bloody hands painted on them.
The United States threatened to boycott the Durban conference if it equated Zionism with racism, but the situation in the Middle East will be discussed there even if the equation is not made.
After a 1975 U.N. resolution equating Zionism - the ideology at the cornerstone of the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel - with South African apartheid, the U.S. boycotted the last two racism conferences in 1978 and 1983, protesting the negative labeling of Zionism.
Human rights groups have urged that the U.S. participate in the important conference regardless of the wording of the conference's drafts.
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