Dullah Omar, 69; activist held S. Africa Cabinet posts

CAPE TOWN -- Transport Minister Dullah Omar, a leading human rights lawyer and antiapartheid activist who served as justice minister in South Africa's first black-led government, died yesterday of cancer. He was 69.

Mr. Omar had been battling Hodgkin's disease, lymph node cancer, for more than a year, the government said in a statement.

A leading member of the ruling African National Congress, Mr. Omar was a spokesman for Nelson Mandela in the months leading to the former president's release after 27 years in jail.

Mr. Omar then participated in the negotiations that paved the way for South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994.

As justice minister in Mandela's government, he oversaw the establishment of the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard victims' accounts of human rights abuses and offered the perpetrators amnesty in exchange for a full accounting of their crimes.

Mr. Omar was appointed to his current position when President Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela in 1999.

Born in Cape Town in 1934, Mr. Omar studied law and set up his own legal practice in 1960 because he couldn't find a firm that would employ black lawyers. Throughout his legal career, he defended those who suffered under apartheid's racist laws.

For his efforts, he was harassed, banned, and detained by apartheid security forces.

Members of a military death squad plotted to assassinate him by tampering with his heart medication.