President Bush Takes Nelson Mandela Off Terror Watch List

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - President George Bush signed a bill on Tuesday taking Nobel Peace Prize winner and former South African President Nelson Mandela off the U.S. government's terror watch list.

Under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, Mandela and all other former members of the African National Congress (ANC), which was considered a terrorist organization by South Africa's apartheid regime, would need a certification from the secretary of state before he could visit the United States. The President's signing into law of H.R. 5690 ensures that all former members of the ANC are no longer considered "aliens inadmissible due to terrorist or criminal activities."

Critics and White House officials have long called for updating the three-decade old U.S. terror watch list. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had expressed embarrassment over the government policy in April, saying, "I still have to waive in my own counterpart, the foreign minister of South Africa, not to mention the great leader Nelson Mandela."

Mandela, who was feted over the weekend with a huge concert in London's Hyde Park to mark his 90th birthday, spent 27 years in South African prisons under apartheid rule.

"Today the United States finally has removed from its legal code a vestige of that time of collective insults against human dignity," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman, the bill's main sponsor, said in a written statement.

"The label of 'terrorist' will no longer be affixed to associates of the ANC -- among them one of the world's great heroes, Nelson Mandela. Our country stands with those who struggled to bring the reprehensible system of Apartheid to an end," he added.