Mandela attacks 'racist' Bush
FRED BRIDGLAND IN JOHANNESBURG
NELSON Mandela yesterday launched a contemptuous attack on George Bush, accusing him of racism, an inability to think and a desire to attack Iraq purely for its oil.
In the most blistering attack yet on the US president by a senior international statesman, Mr Mandela, who also reproached Tony Blair, said: "We must continue to ask the question: Why is the United States behaving so arrogantly? Because they are so arrogant, they killed innocent people in Japan during Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"A war on Iraq is something we must condemn without reservation. Bush is acting outside the United Nations and both he and Tony Blair are undermining the United Nations, an organisation which was an idea sponsored by their predecessors."
A deeply angry Mr Mandela, who rarely loses his temper publicly, was guest speaker at an international women’s conference in Johannesburg.
Devoting almost his entire speech to Mr Bush and the potential war in Iraq, Mr Mandela, 86, said: "Because of the United Nations, we have had no world war in the last 50 years.
"If Saddam Hussein was not carrying out the UN instructions and resolutions, I will support the UN without reservation. But what I condemn is one power with a president who can’t think properly and who wants to plunge the world into a holocaust."
Lashing out further, Mr Mandela said he suspected Bush was treating the UN with disdain because the current secretary-general, Kofi Annan, is black. "The US never turned its back on a white secretary-general."
He said: "Who are they [Bush and Blair] to decide now they are the policemen of the world? Bush has no foresight and cannot think properly."
Turning to Mr Blair, the former South African president dismissed the British prime minister as the "US foreign minister" and "the envoy of the US of America".
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