Dullah Omar

Abdullah Mohamed Omar ( born May 26, 1934 in Cape Town, † March 13, 2004 ibid; short Dullah Omar ) was a South African lawyer and politician who stood in opposition to the apartheid regime, and from 1994 worked until his death as a minister.

Life

Omar Abdullah was born in a family of eleven siblings in Cape Town district Observatory. His parents were Indian-born Muslims who ran a store. He attended Trafalgar High School in District Six District. His English teacher, the Trotskyist Ben gravel, convinced him to join the Non European Unity Movement ( NEUM ). Omar studied at the University of Cape Town and earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1955, in 1957 a Bachelor of Law. From 1960 he worked in District Six as a lawyer and defended anti-apartheid activists of the Pan- African Congress (PAC ) and the African National Congress ( ANC), and later the Black Consciousness Movement. He belonged to the early 1980s to the NEUM. He joined in 1983 at the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1987 and its chairman in the western part of the Cape Province.

Omar has been repeatedly banned and detained without charge. He supported imprisoned ANC members, including Nelson Mandela, on the prison island Robben Iceland and in other prisons. He survived two assassination attempts in 1989 of the Civil Co-operation Bureau, a secret division of the South African army. At the first stop his heart tablets should be replaced with a deadly poison. In the second trial application saved him, that he was accompanied by his wife. He was speaker of Nelson Mandela in 1989, shortly before his release after 27 years in prison. He joined the ANC.

1994 Omar was Minister of Justice under the first freely elected President Mandela. For security reasons, he was forced to retire against his will, his modest house in the Cape Town area Rylands. He took over in case of absence of the Vice President Mandela and the function of the President. Omar was instrumental in the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ( TRC), the aufarbeitete from 1996 committed during the apartheid regime. He introduced in 1996 the new democratic constitution. Against the rise of organized crime, he established a broad national coverage determination service modeled after the FBI, The Scorpions was called. After the parliamentary elections of 1999, he took over under Thabo Mbeki, the South African Department of Transport and headed this department until his death from Hodgkin 's lymphoma. He was given a state funeral and was buried according to Islamic rites on the same day.

Omar was married and had three children.

Honors

2005: Order of Luthuli in Silver ( posthumously )