Desmond Tutu

The final volume of the report of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is 976 pages long and heavy to hold. Heavy, too, are its contents: the names of thousands of South Africans, followed by brief, chilling descriptions of how they were killed, tortured or left maimed or scarred in the three turbulent decades leading up to the country's first democratic election, in 1994. On Friday, the commission's chairman, retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond M.

"Tutu and Franklin: A Journey Towards Peace," a new two-hour documentary premiering tonight on KCET-TV, chronicles the historic first encounter between South Africa's Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and U.S. historian and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Dr. John Hope Franklin. For a week in December 1998, they met on Goree Island, the infamous former slave port off the coast of Senegal, to discuss their nations' struggle for racial equality.

Retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called on the United States to end capital punishment. At a news conference preceding his receipt of an honorary doctorate from the University of Nevada at Reno, Tutu said not all of those who have been executed were guilty of the crimes for which they died. "I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty," said Tutu, whose work to end apartheid in South Africa earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. "I want the abolition of it.

Cancer detected in South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has not spread beyond his prostate, doctors told the Nobel Prize winner on Saturday. A tissue sample from Tutu's lymph nodes was taken Thursday to determine if the cancer had spread. The procedure also helped doctors to determine that cryosurgery, which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze the cancer, should be effective in treating Tutu's prostate gland.

"They unbuttoned my shirt and pulled my breast out of my bra, they emptied one drawer and my breast was squeezed in the drawer. They did this several times on each of the breasts up until white sticky stuff burst out of the nipples . . . I cried, but it was no use, because no one could hear me." What kind of man is it that can do this or can push an electrified rod up the anus of a teenage boy or can coldbloodedly kill an uncooperative detainee and then hold an all-night steak-and-beer barbecue while he and the other killers burn their victim's body to ashes in a nearby fire?

Retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel laureate who heads this country's truth commission, is to board a plane this morning for a teaching job in Atlanta. Vice Chairman Alex Boraine is bound for New York. Commissioner Fazel Randera, a physician, is going back to private practice. "The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is now closed," Commissioner Dumisa Ntsebeza, a human rights attorney, said Friday. A beaming Tutu added: "We have done it. Now let us move on."

For almost 15 months now, the horrors have gushed forth in hundreds of hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the panel created to record the agony and ordeal of the victims of apartheid--and to provide legal immunity or pardons to those who confess to its crimes. Weeping survivors, including children, have told nightmarish tales of pain and persecution. Police have admitted to murder. Politicians have confessed to terrorist bombings.

Retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu revealed that doctors found cancer in his prostate gland and are unsure if the disease has spread. The 65-year-old Tutu, who won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-apartheid efforts, went into the hospital Wednesday to have doctors check his enlarged prostate gland. A biopsy six months earlier had been negative for cancer, but this time doctors removed a large section of the gland and studied it further, discovering the disease, Tutu said.

Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu tore into the ruling African National Congress, saying he will quit as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission unless the party's leaders admit to past atrocities. The former Anglican archbishop lambasted the ANC's chief legal advisor, Mathews Phosa, for saying that former ANC guerrillas do not need to ask for amnesty because their fight against apartheid was a "just struggle."

Desmond Tutu has retired as Anglican archbishop, but in many ways the spiritual leader of the anti-apartheid struggle remains South Africa's moral spokesman. So Tutu's comments carried a sharp sting after the politically charged acquittals Friday of the most senior officials ever tried for apartheid-related crimes. Former Defense Minister Magnus Malan and his top military and intelligence chiefs were cleared of 18 murder, attempted murder and conspiracy charges.