Anti-apartheid stalwart Omar dies

Transport minister Dullah Omar, a leading human rights lawyer and anti-apartheid activist who was justice minister in South Africa’s first black-lead government, died today of cancer.

Omar had been battling Hodgkins Classic, a cancer of the lymph nodes, for more than a year. He died in the early hours of today at Constantiaberg Medi-Clinic in Cape Town, the government said in a statement.

“A patriot has gone to rest, forever,” the statement said. “A stalwart has breathed his last breath at his post.”

A leading member of the ruling African National Congress, Omar was a spokesman for former President Nelson Mandela in the months leading to his release after 27 years in jail.

He then participated in the negotiations that paved the way for South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994.

As justice minister in Mandela’s government, he oversaw the establishment of a landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission that heard victims’ accounts of gross human rights abuses and offered the perpetrators amnesty in exchange for a full account of their crimes.

Omar was appointed to his current position when President Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela in 1999.

Born in Cape Town in 1934, Omar studied law and set up his own legal practice in 1960 because he could not find a firm that would employ black lawyers.

Throughout his legal career, he defended those who suffered under apartheid’s racist laws.

He represented trade unionists and political prisoners, including some of those serving sentences at the notorious Robben Island prison where Mandela spent most of years in jail.

He also led the Western Cape region of the United Democratic Front, the ANC’s voice in South Africa during the long years when it was banned and forced into exile.

For his efforts, he was harassed, banned and detained by apartheid security forces. Members of a military death squad even plotted to assassinate him by tampering with his heart medication.

When Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president in 1994, Omar was appointed justice minister in a government of national unity, serving with his former foes.

Praised for the reforms that he brought to South Africa’s once oppressive justice system, he had drawn criticism in recent years for the country’s high number of road fatalities.

Since he was diagnosed with cancer in January 2003, he had withdrawn from most government functions. But officials said he kept in touch with the department.

He is survived by his wife, Farida, and three children.