Laurie Spurr, Torre Pellice, Italy, July 7 (ENI) - A South African church leader has urged the international community to continue to support his country in a battle against the lingering effects of racism after the fall of the apartheid system of segregation and racial discrimination.

"Apartheid has gone but racial attitudes haven't changed," said Rev Sol Jacob, Methodist pastor of the Boshoff Street church, in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZuluNatal province, and a former staff member of the South African Council of Churches. "Reconciliation has to happen between people."

Jacob made his plea to the executive committee of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (Warc) and others gathered for Sunday worship on July 6 in the northwestern Italian mountain village of Torre Pellice, where Warc's executive committee is meeting from Monday until July 15.

"It's important for the world community to know we are facing new challenges," Jacob told the congregation. "We are left with poverty. Black people are so poor. We are faced with the economic oppression and we still suffer."

Jacob praised the international church community for pressure it had brought to bear on their governments, businesses and banks of their countries to take action against the apartheid system that reigned from 1948 until 1994, when South Africa got a democratically-elected government.

"One of the pressures that made South Africa change was the declaration by the World Alliance," he said, referring to Warc's 1982 general council which declared apartheid a sin, and its theological defence a heresy, and suspended the all-white Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) of South Africa from membership. The church in 1857 had established separate congregations on the basis of race.

In 1998, the DRC synod admitted the sin of apartheid and was readmitted to Warc. A taskforce of the Warc executive committee is now working to help reunite the country's various Dutch Reformed churches that were separated along racial lines.

"Economic sanctions and pressure brought the South African nation to its knees - not the armed conflict of the liberation movement," said Jacob, who is in northern Italy on sabbatical leave from his church.

In 1981, while on the staff of the South African Council of Churches, Jacob was held in solitary confinement for 45 days without visits from family, a pastor, or a lawyer - because, he told ENI, he had been working to return South African refugees and exiles to the country. "At the end of 45 days, I was told there were no charges against me, I could go."

He insisted that some of the country's most difficult reconciliation work lay ahead: "It takes generations to change attitudes, especially if people are brought up separately separate work, separate education, separate buses - People mustn't think the thing is over," he said. "The real work begins now."

:: Jacob made his remarks the day before thousands of South African church leaders were to meet on Monday in Pretoria, the South African capital, to look at ways to tackle such social problems as violence, poverty, racism and HIV/Aids. Any of these problems "unchallenged, could bring the country to its knees", warned organisers of the South African Christian Leadership Assembly taking place from July 7 to 11. [545 words]

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