Catholic Information Service for Africa (Nairobi)
4 November 2008
Detroit — Anti-Apartheid icon Archbishop Desmond Tutu is sure the world would enter a new era if the wildly popular Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama became president of the United Sates of America.
Americans cast their ballots on Tuesday, with Obama, son of a Kenyan-born father, having a comfortable lead in the opinion polls. He is hugely supported in Africa.
"It is going to be, I believe, a fantastic thing for people of colour around the world. But when you saw how he was received in Germany you realise that it is not just for people of colour, it is going to be a new epoch. A new era will dawn when Obama enters the White House," Archbishop Tutu told the Inter Press Service in Tutu, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, spoke in Michigan last week where he received the University of Michigan's Wallenberg Medal in Ann Arbor for his humanitarian work.
"People sometimes speak about anti-Americanism abroad. There is not in my experience any anti-Americanism. There certainly is resentment in most parts of the world [toward] an arrogant unilateral America that is seen as a big bully-boy refusing to sign Kyoto Protocols when the rest of the world is saying climate change is a very real threat to the continuous existence of human kind - when most of the world signed their own statutes establishing the International Criminal Court and the United States says we'll jump in the lake, and goes and does what many people have said should not happen - the invasion of Iraq - which has become such a horrendous disaster."
Archbishop Tutu said a new leadership will help America's relations with the rest of the world. "And one hopes that the new administration would be one that would say 'we will rid America of the awful mark of Guantanamo Bay, that we will not be a country that makes it possible for things like Abu Ghraib to happen.'"
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