Kid wears bomber kit
2004-03-29 08:02
Pretoria - "What do you have around your body?"
"Bombs," six-year-old Uzair Dockrat replied quietly on Sunday as he and his brothers joined more than 300 Muslims in a protest march to the Israeli embassy in Pretoria.
He was wearing a homemade "suicide-bomber jacket" with red and blue cardboard rolls, representing bombs, pasted to the jacket.
The protest march was in honour of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, leader of the Palestinian Hamas group, who was killed in his wheelchair outside a mosque in Gaza in an Israeli missile attack last week.
"Why are you wearing the 'bombs'?" a reporter asked Uzair, but he could not provide an immediate answer.
"Tell her what the Jews did," a man, apparently the boy's father, encouraged, but Uzair was still reluctant to talk.
The man was asked whether he wanted this boy to become a martyr some day.
"Not me, it is him who wants to become a martyr, because he knows the status of a martyr. However, he is striving towards victory and justice rather than martyrdom," the man, who did not want to be named, replied.
Protesters later burned two Israeli flags in front of the embassy.
Police spokesperson Anton Breedt said about 150 police officers were on hand to protect the Israeli and American embassies. The organisers expected more than 3 000 people.
The leaders of the march read a memorandum in which they demanded that South Africa immediately sever all ties with Israel, which they called "an arrogant and destructive cancer".
They also demanded that the South African ambassador to Israel be recalled, that no weapons be supplied to Israel and that sanctions be instituted against that country.
The group also asked government to put pressure on America to immediately put an end to its "immoral support" for Israel and to force Israel to release all political prisoners.