Asked what he thought about a possible attack on Iraq, which Washington has threatened to carry out on its own if U.N. backing is not forthcoming, Mandela said, without naming any specific nation:

"No country, however powerful it may be, is entitled to act outside the United Nations...The United Nations is here to promote peace in the world, and any country that acts outside (it) is making a serious mistake."

Mandela is on a private five-day visit to Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation where many people have expressed disquiet about the possibility of an attack on Iraq.

The former South African president has spoken out repeatedly against unilateral intervention in Iraq but he seemed to go further than previously in linking himself to the view that racism could be a factor behind taking the U.N. lightly.

"When the (U.N.) secretaries-general were white, we never had the question of any country ignoring the United Nations but now that we have got the black secretaries-general like...Kofi Annan, certain countries that believe in white supremacy are ignoring the United Nations," he told reporters at the airport on his arrival.

"We have to combat that without reservation," he said.

In an interview earlier this month Mandela had attributed such a view to others and said it was not his personally. This time he offered no such qualification.

Indonesia backed U.N. resolutions in the lead-up to the previous Gulf War, to evict Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, but there were sporadic protests and some Indonesians named babies born during the fighting after Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Officials described Mandela's visit as private and devoted mostly to his charitable work for children, which they said would be the topic of a call on Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri on Wednesday.

Mandela, 84, championed the fight against white minority rule in South Africa and emerged after 27 years in its jails to become its first black president from 1994 to 1999.

REUTERS

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