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Bruce Haigh, an Australian diplomat who abandoned the protocol of his profession to provide secret support to anti-apartheid figures in South Africa, including the banned newspaper editor depicted in the movie “Cry Freedom,” died on April 7 in Australia. He is 77 years old.
Her sister, Christina Henderson, told an Australian news outlet that she had been deported from Laos when her cancer worsened. He died in hospital in Wollongong, south of Sydney, it said.
Over the years, Mr Haigh worked variously as a rancher (known on Australian sheep and cattle stations as a jackeroo). oil rig workers; an Australian conscript in Vietnam, a diplomat, a champion of refugees, and a columnist and broadcaster who objected to what he saw as excessive American influence on Australia’s security and defense policy.
But a clear example of his commitment to the underdog and those he saw as oppressed came during his stint in the late 1970s as a junior diplomat with the rank of second secretary at the Australian mission in Pretoria.
He arrived there shortly after the riots of June 16, 1976, in Soweto, a large, racially segregated township near Johannesburg, which symbolized a generation of protests against white minority rule.
According to John Matisonn, a veteran South African journalist, Mr Haigh was the first foreign diplomat to meet Steve Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement who died in police custody in 1977, after being brutally beaten in a prison cell. At the time, Mr. Biko had been banned as a proscribed person under apartheid-era laws designed to isolate and silence government opponents.
Mr. Biko had befriended Donald Woods, the top editor of The Daily Dispatch of East London, who was under ban after Mr. Biko’s death and decided to flee South Africa for self-imposed exile in London. Mr. Haigh offered to help him and travel to Lesotho, an independent African country surrounded by South Africa, to meet Mr. Woods, who crossed the border with him disguised as a priest who rode in a car.
Once in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, Mr Woods told his wife, Wendy, to flee South Africa with their five children. Using UN travel documents, the family flew to London via Botswana.
Those events formed the narrative of “Cry Freedom,” the 1987 film based on Mr. Woods’ writings about his relationship with Mr. Biko and directed by Richard Attenborough. Denzel Washington played Mr. Biko.
Mr. Haigh is portrayed in the film as a journalist “for the purpose of assembling stories into a two-hour account on the screen,” Mr. Woods wrote in a 1987 update to his 1980 autobiography “Asking for Trouble.”
Earlier, in late 1977, Mr. Haigh accompanied Mr. Woods to the airport in Johannesburg, where he was flying to the United States for a conference.
After Mr Haigh left the airport after saying goodbye to Mr Woods, a security police officer prevented the journalist from boarding the plane and told him he was now a banned person and would be placed under house arrest.
Under the apartheid laws, banned people could not attend social gatherings or meet more than one person at a time. Among other restrictions, he must report regularly to the police. They are not allowed to be written or quoted or combined with other forbidden people.
According to Mr. Matisonn, writing in Daily Maverick online, a South African news outlet, Mr. Haigh then helped several other anti-apartheid activists to evade the security police, including Shun Chetty, the Biko family lawyer, who fled South Africa in 1979.
Because he had the protection of diplomatic immunity, Mr. Haigh told an Australian interviewer years later: “I can order in South Africa. I can move banned people from one place to another to meet each other. I can bring people across the border.
At one point, the authorities fabricated a newspaper story that Mr. Haigh was seen in only his pajamas at the home of Mr. Biko’s biko partner and fellow activist, Mamphela Ramphele, who went on to several high-profile positions including University vice-chancellor. from Cape Town and managing director of the World Bank. Mr. Haigh’s response, Mr. Matisonn said, was to dismiss the story with a joke: “I never wear pajamas.”
Bruce Douglas Haigh was born on August 6, 1945, in Sydney, Australia. His family later moved to Perth. In 1964, he honed his skills as a horseman to register as a rancher in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia, where he first encountered indigenous people and culture.
“There are black people who speak other languages, easily with each other, the majority,” said in a blog post by writer Julian Cribb. “I feel like I’m in another country. I used to be.”
In addition to his sister, he is survived by his wife, Jodie Burnstein; his son, Robert, from his first marriage to Libby Mosley; and his daughters, Samantha and Georgina, from his second marriage. Another son from his first marriage, Angus, died in 2016.
During the Vietnam War, when Australia was an American ally, he was conscripted with an Australian armored unit. Later, he studied history and politics at the University of Western Australia and joined the Australian diplomatic service.
His first post was in Pakistan, before he went to South Africa and immersed himself in opposition politics – without declaring his activities to his own government. “The Australian government has no understanding of my role in helping Donald and his family escape from South Africa,” Mr Cribb said.
He went on to other diplomatic assignments in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and back in Pakistan, where he befriended Benazir Bhutto, who served as prime minister twice before she was assassinated in 2007. He resigned as a diplomat in 1995 after a brief stint. posting in Sri Lanka. He spent many years as a member of the official panel that reviews the cases of asylum seekers.
Mr Haigh left the panel in 2000 and was a vocal critic of Australian government policy until shortly before his death.
In one of the last articles of the year, he criticized Anthony Albanese, the prime minister of Australia, about the security pact with the United States and the United Kingdom, saying that he was “willingly and disrespectfully following in the footsteps of his discredited predecessors.”
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