Death of Kader Asmal
international |
rights, freedoms and repression |
news report 
Wednesday June 22, 2011 17:26
by SLH
News is breaking of the death of anti-apartheid campaigner Kader Asmal. He was a founder member of both the British Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement.
Kader Asmal's son Adam confirmed that Kader died at about 4pm this afternoon in Constantia hospital in Cape Town after having a heart attack and slipping into a coma. He was 76. He had also suffered from bone marrow cancer for some time.
He is survived by a wife, Louise Parkinson, and two sons, two brothers and a sister.
He served democratic South Africa for almost 14-years from 1994 until 2008. His cabinet portfolios included water affairs, forestry and education.
He was also Professor of Human Rights at the University of the Western Cape, chairman of the council of the University of the North and vice-president of the African Association of International Law.
More details and links to follow.
Comments (6 of 6)
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http://www.newstime.co.za/SouthAfrica/Professor_Kader_A...7578/
http://www.pretorianews.co.za/kader-asmal-dies-1.1087002
The Irish Times now has a report on his death
irishtimes.com - Last Updated: Wednesday, June 22, 2011, 17:55
Kader Asmal dies in SA, aged 76
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0622/....html
I wasn't a member of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, but joined a couple of its marches against racism. I have a background in aid work in Africa. Many years ago I met Kadar Asmal several times through involvement in civil liberty and third world committee work. He was a highly focused and intelligent person, one of the brainiest people I've met. After a public meeting on divorce at Liberty Hall around 1980 I met him with others in a pub and he chatted about various things. He criticised Irish university students at the time as people who ' have no convictions' meaning that they declined to get involved in social reform issues and cared mainly about future careers. He also told us that Northern Ireland Catholics were desperate for effective political leadership. (That all changed when the 1981 hunger strikes in the H blocks pushed Sinn Fein into successful parliamentary political activity, among other things.) Asmal indicated quietly his disappointment that so many political and social activists in the republic were turning their backs on the sorry affairs of Northern Ireland.
He personally kept in touch with influential rights lawyers, academics, trade unionists and potential young politicians in Northern Ireland, through his civil liberties work. He networked extensively around the island, especially through the IAAM, which he and his wife Louise kept a firm management grip on since its founding. His personal political sympathies were to the left and he kept in discreet contact with key activists in left groups while maintaining a public stance of political party neutrality. He shrewdly cultivated support for the anti apartheid cause from a wide spectrum of Irish society, but the rump of the IRFU remained unmoved. An electrifying platform orator, an expert on human rights law, a wry commentator in private conversation, and a determined man who lived to participate constructively in the fulfilment of his humane dream for South Africa. Quite a character, quite an achiever.
speakin of which...
...I can't help thinking we could do with his courage and good humour to provide a public statement regarding the dome of silence descending over the Gaza flotilla.
Israel seems to have everyone either bought or intimidated into lockstep. The flotilla is 'provocation', but the blockade is kosher.
Shalom.
Extraordinary that the Irish Times gives hardly a mention to his many years of rights and freedoms activity in Ireland and mentions not all his work in the Irish Council of Civil Liberties (nor do any other contributions other than a one-sentence quote). From what I know of Kader he was a determined defender not only of the rights of the people of his native South Africa, and of the people of the Six Counties as mentioned above, as well as of others fighting colonialism and imperialism, but more specifically and on a daily basis, of the civil rights of the people in the state in which he lived, the 26 Counties, through his work in the Irish Council of Civil Liberties.
He would have been saddened, I think, to see the depths civil rights reached in this state, for example during the visit of the British Queen, and that the organisation he did so much to build up did so little for the people of Dublin in particular during that period.
De Royal Oirish Times. The most EMBEDDED of the bedfellers. The liberal veneer is long gone.
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