Letters

I have the honour to present to Your Excellency and the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid the compliments of our National Executive Committee and my own fraternal greetings.

We write, Your Excellency, to thank you and your esteemed Committee most sincerely for your letter to us on the occasion of this year`s South Africa Freedom Day and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Freedom Charter. We are deeply moved by the noble sentiments which the letter conveys.

The African National Congress and the vast majority of our people are convinced, and committed to the position, that our reply to the rapid racism represented by the apartheid system must be to sue for a non-racial and democratic South Africa. Centuries of conflict, bitterness and suffering must give way to a new era of peace and friendship among all the people of our country.

We consider ourselves particularly fortunate that we have the Freedom Charter as a statement of objectives to which the majority of our people adhere. That very fact imposes upon us the obligation to educate in the spirit of the Charter even the younger generations who were not there when it was freely available.

We are indebted to the Special Committee for the sterling work it has done over the years to bring the Freedom Charter to the attention of the international community. We are certain that this has helped to expose the bankruptcy of the policies pursued by the South African regime and the criminality of the apartheid design that it has imposed on our people.

We look forward to ever closer co-operation between ourselves, Your Excellency and the Special Committee which has established itself as a steadfast ally of our struggling people and a militant combatant of justice, liberty and peace in our country and in southern Africa.

We thank Your Excellency for your good wishes. I take this opportunity to assure Your Excellency that the will to be free among our people has never been stronger than it is today. The brutality which the Pretoria regime continues to mete out to our people serves only as confirmation that the sooner this regime is destroyed and power transferred to the people the better.

The African National Congress and our people`s army Umkhonto We Sizwe, are bending every effort to achieve this result. We are strengthened by the knowledge that we enjoy the continuing support of the Special Committee and the United Nations as a whole in the struggle for the realisation of the objectives contained in the Freedom Charter.

(Signed) O. R. TAMBO
President, African National Congress