Documents showing how the U.S. continued to monitor Nelson Mandela after he was released from prison have been made public.
The documents gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies was because of believes that Mandela was still a potential communist threat.
Thousands of pages of these intelligence documents were made public on Wednesday according to a Washington-based group.
The group called Property of the People filed a motion in court asking for the documents to be made public.
The release was also to mark Mandela’s 100th birthday anniversary celebrations.
The group’s president Ryan Shapiro said in a statement that “The documents reveal that, just as it did in the 1950s and 60s with Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement, the FBI aggressively investigated the U.S. and South African anti-apartheid movements as Communist plots imperiling American security,”
“Worse still, the documents demonstrate the FBI continued its wrong-headed Communist menace investigations of Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement even after U.S. imposition of trade sanctions against apartheid South Africa, after Mandela’s globally-celebrated release from prison, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
“The Mandela Files” can now be found on the group’s website propertyofthepeople.org.
Nelson Mandela was South Africa’s first black president. He who died in 2013 but remains a global icon for peace and reconciliation.
We just published thousands of pages #FOIA lawsuit-obtained FBI, CIA, DIA, & NSA documents re #NelsonMandela, including many docs on US agency efforts to surveil & subvert Mandela and his anti-apartheid struggle. https://t.co/diWUrtDRAB
— PropertyOfThePeople (@PropOTP) July 18, 2018
His anniversary was marked across South Africa this week with former U.S president, Barack Obama delivering a speech on Tuesday in Johannesburg.
Source: Africafeeds.com
