SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID
The Canadian Alexander Defence Committee, established to aid the victims of apartheid persecution in South Africa, announced June 25 that a number of distinguished Canadians..have added their names to the list of eminent men and women in the United States, Britain and West Germany who are sponsors of the Alexander Defence Committees in those countries.
Among the Canadian sponsors are Northrop Frye, internationally known literary critic and author; Abraham Feinberg, rabbi emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple, lecturer and vice-president of the Association for Civil Liberties; Professor Blumenfeld, an interna-~ tionally known town planner; Professor Robin S. Harris, principal of Innis College, University of Toronto; Austin Clarke, author of the novel, The Survivors at the Crossing; Al Purdy, whose recent book of poems, Cariboo Horses, has been highly praised; and Fred Stinson, re Ce ane ex-M.P., a Founder of Canadian University Services Overseas CUSO
The secretary of the Canadian committee, Regula Modlich, who made the announcement, said that many other prominent. Canadians will be adding their voices in support of those men and women in South Africa, whose only crime is their claim to liberty and human dignity. For the Alexander Defence Committees have become: the active symbol of men's hatred of racist tyranny and injustice.
The aim of the committees is to publicise such gross victimization as surrounds the case of Dr. Neville Alexander and his ten associates, and thus “to focus public opinion on the inhuman apartheid
policies of South Africa and. on the destruction of civil and political liberties," They stress the urgency, also, to provide funds for the political prisoners and their dependents. In Britain, publicspirited men such as Bertrand Russell, Frank Allaun, M.P., S. Silverman, M.eP., and Prof.E.A.Thomson, immediately pledged their support. Among the fifty sponsors of the U.S. committee are eminent scientists, economists, writers, such as: Linus Pauling, Prof. Reinhold Niebur, John 0, Kille:s, Carlton Beals, Rev.A.J.Muste, Pete Seeger and James Forman, a ces
In 1963, when Dr. Alexander. and ten young Coloured men and women were arrested and, after five months of solitary confinement, tried under the savage *‘sabotage Act," over 5,500 péople in West Germany sent a petition to UN Secretary U Thant "to bring this terror trial to the attention of the UN and the public of the whole world,"
Dr. Alexander had won high academic honours in. Tubingen before returning to teach in South Africa. Thousands of dollars were collected to meet the heavy legal costs and provide aid for the dependents.
All eleven were condemned to long terms of imprisonment, though no act of sabotage was proven against them, The seven men are in Robben Island jail, notorious for its brutalities. An appeal has been dismissed, a
Those interested in further ntorackion on’ the committee and
its work can write to: Miss R. Modlich, Secretary, Alexander Defence Committee, Box 824, Station F, Toronto, Ont., Canada.