For Your Information
March 21st - International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination was proclaimed by the United Nations in 1966. The date March 21st was chosen in commemoration of the protesters who were gunned down by South African police in the town of Sharpeville in 1960.
A demonstration had been called jointly by the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to protest the Pass Laws of the apartheid regime. Under these laws, no black Africans were allowed into the town without a pass sanctioning their presence. The tens of thousands of blacks who lived in Sharpeville did not live in the town itself, but in an overcrowded shanty town on the outskirts of the city, where there was minimal access to electricity and clean running water.
A crowd of around 7,000 people marched to the municipal offices at the entrance to the shanty town, demanding an end to the Pass Laws. The police broke up the demonstration, firing tear gas into the crowd and charging with their batons. Several hours later, the protestors regrouped, this time around the Sharpeville police station. Still peaceful, they shouted slogans against police brutality while speakers at a podium denounced the Pass Laws. The police inside the station called for reinforcements. Within an hour there were 300 police officers, including members of the notorious Special Branch, whose use of extra-judicial executions and torture has been well-documented during the recent Truth & Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
The police reinforcements were led by Special Branch Lieutenant Colonel Pienaar, who arrived on the scene and within 15 minutes decided that the demonstrators were out of control and ordered officers to open fire. Sixty-nine people were killed, including children as young as nine. The massacre was reported widely in the international press and helped draw the attention of the world to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.