POLITICS-US: Mandela’s Magic Soothes Embattled Washington

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 23 1998 (IPS) - South African President Nelson Mandela Wednesday became the first African to receive the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, the country’s highest civilian honour, in a glittering ceremony that even united President Bill Clinton with his Republican nemisis, House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Mandela used the occasion, which brought a welcome respite to the increasingly bitter political fighting here over the scandal involving Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, to press for greater global economic equity between developed and developing nations.

Speaking in the majestic Capitol Rotunda, Mandela called the award “a symbol of partnership for peace, prosperity and equity as we enter the new millenium.”

Past inequities, he said “call for a partnership of Africa and the United States, developing and developed countries, in bringing about a transfer of resources and addressing the imbalances and disparities which have been so dramatically exposed in the turmoil in the world economic system.”

The scene at the rotunda was extraordinary, made much more so by the venomous atmosphere created by the Lewinsky scandal that has engulfed Washington in recent weeks. Mandela sat between Gingrich and Clinton both of whom poured effusive praise over the ever-smiling South African president.

One memorable sight was of when Sen. Strom Thurmond, 95, the Senate’s oldest and longest-serving member, raised Mandela’s arm in triumph after the medal award. Thurmond, now a Republican, broke from the Democratic Party and ran for president as head of the arch-segregationist “Dixiecrats” in 1948, exactly 50 years ago.

Mandela, responding to the moment, disclosed that “there is one regret I have had throughout my life: that I never became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. I would like my friend Evander Holyfield to know that today I feel like the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.”

Clinton, who presented the medal, said that “no medal, no award, no fortune, nothing we could give him could possible compare to the gift he has given to us and to the world. The only gift that is true recompense is to continue his mission and to live by the power of his profound and wonderful example.”

Gingrich was equally effusive and compared Mandela to George Washington, the first U.S. president and the first recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal.

“We are privileged today to be in the presence of the father of multiracial democracy in Africa and the leading example in the world today of the spirit of Washington and (civil rights leader Martin Luther) King,” Gingrich said.

Pointedly evoking the personal cost of politics today, Gingrich noted that “When you contemplate 27 years in prison, when you imagine walking out of that isolation with your heart larger and not smaller, I think, President Mandela, you give every person on the planet a personal witness to how valuable freedom must be, to be worthy of such a life.”

The medal, which costs the Treasury some 30,000 dollars, has been awarded to just 117 people in the past 200 years, the vast majority of whom have been US citizens, including prominent military officers, business leaders, philanthropists and entertainers. A handful of foreigners has also received it, including former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and, most recently, Mother Theresa of Calcutta. It can only be awarded by an act of Congress.

A bipartisan group of congressmen, including Gingrich, Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, and Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Maxine Waters, introduced a bill to award Mandela the medal last July. The effort was spearheaded by New York Republican Congressman Amo Houghton, who presided over Thursday’s ceremony.

Houghton dedicated the ceremony to Amy Biehl, a white student who went to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship to study and help register African women to vote in the 1994 elections which brought Mandela to power, four years after he was released from prison.

Biehl was killed in racial violence in 1993. Last year, however, her parents asked for amnesty for her convicted murderers as part of the reconciliation process in South Africa. “She made our aspirations her own and lost her life in the turmoil of our transition,” Mandela said in noting that she was one of the “countless ordinary American citizens who responded to the call to join the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign…”

The campaign in the United States was particularly successful. Church and human rights groups pressured US companies to divest from South Africa beginning in the late 1970s. In 1986, a bipartisan coalition in Congress prevailed over then-President Ronald Reagan’s opposition to impose far-reaching economic sanctions against Pretoria. Gingrich, then a Republican “young Turk,” joined the majority.

Because of the United States’ own history of racial division, South Africa has long been an important issue in public debate here, and a life-sized bust of Martin Luther King featured prominently near the dais during Wednesday’s ceremony.

Clinton referred to this indirectly when he said, “We owe it to Nelson Mandela not simply to give him this award, but to live by the lesson he taught us and to tear down every last vestige of apartheid in our own hearts…”

The ceremony at the Capitol followed a dinner Tuesday night hosted by Clinton at the White House – where Mandela and his wife spouse, Graca Machel, stayed overnight.

Mandela, who addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York earlier this week, told the dinner gathering that he was aware of the current debate about the Lewinsky affair, stressing that “it is not our business to interfere in this matter.

“But we do wish to say that President Clinton is a friend of South Africa and Africa…the friend of the great mass of black people and the minorities and the disabled of the United States… We have often thought that our morality does not allow us to desert our friends,” he said.