Helen Suzman fought for justice in S. Africa

Helen Suzman, the internationally renowned anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and raised an often-lonely voice for change among South Africa's white minority, died in Johannesburg Thursday, a relative said. She was 91.

Her son-in-law, Jeffrey Jowell, a law professor in London, said she died at her home in a Johannesburg suburb after a brief illness.

For decades, Mrs. Suzman was among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to racial rule. As the liberal Progressive Party's lone representative in the all-white Parliament for 13 years until the mid-1970s, she used her parliamentary immunity to speak out when other avenues of legal protest were harshly suppressed.

While she challenged apartheid at a time of violent protests among the black majority, she advocated peaceful change. More controversially, she differed sharply with more radical campaigners inside and outside South Africa who supported economic sanctions to pressure the country's white rulers toward reform, saying that sanctions would hurt poor blacks more than whites.

To Mrs. Suzman's frustration, this led some of her critics to say she was unwittingly helping to prolong apartheid.

Diminutive, elegant and indefatigable, Mrs. Suzman was relentless in confronting the forbidding Afrikaner prime ministers — Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster and P.W. Botha — who became synonymous with apartheid's repression of the black and mixed-race populations.

She was dismissive of the death threats she received by telephone and in the mail, and undaunted in her showdowns with the men she described as apartheid's leading "bullies," who in turn dismissed her as a "dangerous subversive" and a "sickly humanist."

Shouts of "Go back to Moscow!" greeted her when she rose in Parliament, and, at least once, "Go back to Israel! ," a reference to her ancestry as the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania.

"I am not frightened of you; I never have been and I never will be," she told Botha in a parliamentary exchange in the late 1970s. "I think nothing of you."

Botha called her "a vicious little cat."

When a government minister once accused her of embarrassing South Africa with her parliamentary questions, she replied, "It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers."

Her home and office telephones were constantly tapped, an intrusion she liked to counter by blowing an earsplitting whistle into the mouthpiece.

Perhaps because of her renown outside South Africa, she was never detained or subjected to one of the stifling "banning orders" that apartheid leaders used to curb dissent by prohibiting people from attending political meetings, speaking in public or leaving their homes.

Her opposition to economic sanctions made her a contentious figure among some apartheid opponents, including protesters on U.S. college campuses, such as Brandeis and Harvard, where she received honorary degrees. "I understand the moral abhorrence and pleasure it gives you when you demonstrate," she told a New York audience in 1986. "But I don't see how wrecking the economy of the country will ensure a more stable and just society."

She rarely faced such criticism from South Africa's best-known black leaders. Mandela spoke with affection of her visits to the Robben Island prison off Cape Town, where he was serving a life sentence imposed in 1964 and where he remained until he was moved to a mainland prison nearly 20 years later. Using her parliamentary visiting rights, she made her first trip in 1967 and returned frequently.

"It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard," Mandela recalled when he was released in 1990 after serving 27 years. "She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells."

On Thursday, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) paid tribute by saying Mrs. Suzman "became a thorn in the flesh of apartheid by openly criticizing segregation of Blacks by a Whites-only apartheid system."

Mandela's foundation issued a statement saying Africa had lost "a great patriot and a fearless fighter against apartheid."

While no longer in Parliament in her final years, she remained an acerbic critic of what she viewed as official wrongdoing, now by the country's new black rulers. Only recently, she joined other prominent South Africans in demanding a fresh inquiry into dubious government weapons contracts in the 1990s, some involving the president of the ANC, Jacob Zuma.

Mrs. Suzman was born Helen Gavronsky on Nov. 17, 1917, in Germiston, a gold-mining town on the outskirts of Johannesburg. She was educated at the Parktown convent school in Johannesburg, and studied economics at the city's Witwatersrand University. At 19, she married Moses Meyer Suzman, a cardiologist, with whom she had two daughters, before returning to the university in 1944. They survive her.

Celia Dugger contributed to this report.