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From ejkov@panix.com Sat, 18 Dec 1993 18:45:26 EST
---------- Forwarded message ----------
/** africa.souther: 465.0 **/
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE AFRICAN NATIONAL
CONGRESS, NELSON MANDELA, AT THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE AWARD CEREMONY:
OSLO, NORWAY. DECEMBER 10, 1993.
Your Majesty the King,
Your Royal Highness, Honourable Prime Minister, Madame Gro Brundtland,
Ministers, Members of Parliament and Ambassadors,
Esteemed Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,
Fellow Laureate, Mr F.W. de Klerk,
Distinguished guests,
Friends, ladies and gentlemen:
I am indeed truly humbled to be standing here today to receive this
year's Nobel Peace Prize.
I extend my heartfelt thanks to the Norwegian Nobel Committee for
elevating us to the status of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate my
compatriot and fellow laureate, State President F.W. de Klerk, on
his receipt of this high honour.
Together, we join two distinguished South Africans, the late Chief
Albert Luthuli and His Grace Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to whose
seminal contributions to the peaceful struggle against the evil
system of apartheid you paid well-deserved tribute by awarding them
the Nobel Peace Prize.
It will not be presumptuous of us if we also add, among our
predecessors, the name of another outstanding Nobel Peace Prize
winner, the late African- American statesman and internationalist,
the Rev Martin Luther King Jr.
He, too, grappled with and died in the effort to make a
contribution to the just solution of the same great issues of the
day which we have had to face as South Africans.
We speak here of the challenge of the dichotomies of war and peace,
violence and non-violence, racism and human dignity, oppression and
repression and liberty and human rights, poverty and freedom from
want.
We stand here today as nothing more than a representative of the
millions of our people who dared to rise up against a social system
whose very essence is war, violence, racism, oppression, repression
and the impoverishment of an entire people.
I am also here today as a representative of the millions of people
across the globe, the anti-apartheid movement, the governments and
organisations that joined with us, not to fight against South
Africa as a country or any of its peoples, but to oppose an inhuman
system and sue for a speedy end to the apartheid crime against
humanity.
These countless human beings, both inside and outside our country,
had the nobility of spirit to stand in the path of tyranny and
injustice, without seeking selfish gain. They recognised that an
injury to one is an injury to all and therefore acted together in
defence of justice and a common human decency.
Because of their courage and persistence for many years, we can,
today, even set the dates when all humanity will join together to
celebrate one of the outstanding human victories of our century.
When that moment comes, we shall, together, rejoice in a common
victory over racism, apartheid and white minority rule.
That triumph will finally bring to a close a history of five
hundred years of African colonisation that began with the
establishment of the Portuguese empire.
Thus, it will mark a great step forward in history and also serve
as a common pledge of the peoples of the world to fight racism
wherever it occurs and whatever guise it assumes.
At the southern tip of the continent of Africa, a rich reward is in
the making, an invaluable gift is in the preparation, for those who
suffered in the name of all humanity when they sacrificed
everything - for liberty, peace, human dignity and human
fulfilment.
This reward will not be measured in money. Nor can it be reckoned
in the collective price of the rare metals and precious stones that
rest in the bowels of the African soil we tread in the footsteps of
our ancestors. It will and must be measured by the happiness and
welfare of the children, at once the most vulnerable citizens in
any society and the greatest of our treasures.
The children must, at last, play in the open veld, no longer
tortured by the pangs of hunger or ravaged by disease or threatened
with the scourge of ignorance, molestation and abuse, and no longer
required to engage in deeds whose gravity exceeds the demands of
their tender years.
In front of this distinguished audience, we commit the new South
Africa to the relentless pursuit of the purposes defined in the
World Declaration on the Survival, Protection and Development of
Children.
The reward of which we have spoken will and must also be measured
by the happiness and welfare of the mothers and fathers of these
children, who must walk the earth without fear of being robbed,
killed for political or material profit, or spat upon because they
are beggars.
They too must be relieved of the heavy burden of despair which they
carry in their hearts, born of hunger, homelessness and
unemployment.
The value of that gift to all who have suffered will and must be
measured by the happiness and welfare of all the people of our
country, who will have torn down the inhuman walls that divide
them.
These great masses will have turned their backs on the grave insult
to human dignity which described some as masters and others as
servants, and transformed each into a predator whose survival
depended on the destruction of the other.
The value of our shared reward will and must be measured by the
joyful peace which will triumph, because the common humanity that
bonds both black and white into one human race, will have said to
each one of us that we shall all live like the children of
paradise.
Thus shall we live, because we will have created a society which
recognises that all people are born equal, with each entitled in
equal measure to life, liberty, prosperity, human rights and good
governance.
Such a society should never allow again that there should be
prisoners of conscience nor that any person's human rights should
be violated.
Neither should it ever happen that once more the avenues to
peaceful change are blocked by usurpers who seek to take power away
from the people, in pursuit of their own, ignoble purposes.
In relation to these matters, we appeal to those who govern Burma
that they release our fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San
Suu Kyi, and engage her and those she represents in serious
dialogue, for the benefit of all the people of Burma.
We pray that those who have the power to do so will, without
further delay, permit that she uses her talents and energies for
the greater good of the people of her country and humanity as a
whole.
Far from the rough and tumble of the politics of our own country,
I would like to take this opportunity to join the Norwegian Nobel
Committee and pay tribute to my joint laureate, Mr F.W. de Klerk.
He had the courage to admit that a terrible wrong had been done to
our country and people through the imposition of the system of
apartheid.
He had the foresight to understand and accept that all the people
of South Africa must, through negotiations and as equal
participants in the process, together determine what they want to
make of their future.
But there are still some within our country who wrongly believe
they can make a contribution to the cause of justice and peace by
clinging to the shibboleths that have been proved to spell nothing
but disaster.
It remains our hope that these, too, will be blessed with
sufficient reason to realise that history will not be denied and
that the new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant
past, however refined or enticingly repackaged.
We live with the hope that as she battles to remake herself, South
Africa will be like a microcosm of the new world that is striving
to be born.
This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a
world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and
ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and
external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions
forced to become refugees.
The processes in which South Africa and Southern Africa as a whole
are engaged, beckon and urge us all that we take this tide at the
flood and make of this region a living example of what all people
of conscience would like the world to be.
We do not believe that this Nobel Peace Prize is intended as a
commendation for matters that have happened and passed.
We hear the voices which say that it is an appeal from all those,
throughout the universe, who sought an end to the system of
apartheid.
We understand their call, that we devote what remains of our lives
to the use of our country's unique and painful experience to
demonstrate, in practice, that the normal condition for human
existence is democracy, justice, peace, non-racism, non-sexism,
prosperity for everybody, a healthy environment and equality and
solidarity among the peoples.
Moved by that appeal and inspired by the eminence you have thrust
upon us, we undertake that we too will do what we can to contribute
to the renewal of our world so that none should, in future, be
described as the wretched of the earth.
Let it never be said by future generations that indifference,
cynicism or selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideals of
humanism which the Nobel Peace Prize encapsulates.
Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr to have
been correct, when he said that humanity can no longer be
tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.
Let the efforts of us all, prove that he was not a mere dreamer
when he spoke of the beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace being
more precious than diamonds or silver or gold.
Let a new age dawn!
Thank you.
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