Speaking to reconciliation: perspectives from the field.

• Position: Interview

Role of Education

Education has a fundamental role to play not only in reconciliation but also in the reputation of the country, which has been hurt by conflicts of the past. Education is particularly important in the implementation of agreements flowing from the settlements of past conflicts and differences. So in this sense of the word, education did not play a crucial role in the run-up to our negotiations and the Constitution that emanated from them. There have been changes to the South African education system, and we are constantly working on improving it further.

There is a great debate about how history should be rewritten. Basically, if it is rewritten in such a way that an old, skewed version of history is replaced with a new, skewed version of history, then it will not be a step forward. We need to find consensus on how to accommodate in our history lessons all of our diverse communities. We have eleven official languages in South Africa. We are talking, therefore, of a history of eleven distinguishable cultural groups with different languages, their own royal houses with different histories, stretching over hundreds of years. We have to bring all of that into our history curriculum.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

When we had to make a decision about how to deal with the apartheid past in South Africa, we reached a consensus in the government that we needed a truth and reconciliation commission. The task, therefore, given by the legislation of this commission, was not only unearthing the truth of the past but also dealing with it in a way that would promote reconciliation. In hindsight, they did quite a good job of unearthing the truth--there were atrocities committed on all sides. This brought some measure of reconciliation to victims and brought home to all of us the sense that we should never allow this type of conflict to ever take place in South Africa again.

The commission, however, failed to open the entire can of worms, and the perception grew that the process was somewhat skewed. It concentrated on the misdemeanors of five of the former security forces, but it did not get to the bottom of black-on-black violence, nor did it address issues like the cold-blooded assasination of more than four hundred leading figures in the Inkhata Freedom party, a Zulu-based party. Other aspects that weren't addressed included the issue of needless murders and the intimidation of civil society--black civil society--by radical elements. On the reconciliation side, I think it made a contribution, but in its own report, it stated that it had not come near to really fulfilling its task. There should be ongoing focus and activity and an organized approach toward taking the reconciliation process further.

Exporting the South African Model

I am convinced that many lessons can be learned from our experience. Of course, the situation is different from country to country, and the emphasis must therefore be slightly different. But we also made mistakes that I think should be avoided when people adopt our model. One such mistake was that the Truth Commission was not composed in a way that was sufficiently representative of all the interested parties. In that sense, it was loaded, from a partisan political point of view, with people supporting one political party. There was no representation for other important political parties. That brought about a slight sense of alienation from those that were not represented on the commission, that didn't feel that they were a real part of the commission.

Role of Third-Party Pressure

I am not saying that sanctions and growing international isolation did not play a role in South Africa's transition from apartheid. They kept us on our toes. They helped to make us, as with any government, realize the seriousness of the situation. But what culminated in my initiatives, announced on the 2nd of February 1990, was a whole process, which took over almost a decade, of the governing national party of that time looking very objectively at itself. An internal debate took place that brought us to the point where we said to each other, "Where we are now is no longer morally defensible." We were in the wrong place, whatever the original intention, which was to create a little Europe down here on a nation-state basis.

We failed in achieving that. Therefore, we initiated and undertook fundamental and far-reaching change. This led us, in 1986, to abandon the concept of separate development and to adopt a new vision of a united South Africa--with one-person, one-vote; with all forms of discrimination to be abolished; with the exceptive protection of minorities against suppression or oppression; and with effective controls over the pursuit of power. Most importantly, that vision said we needed to become a constitutional state like the United States, where the Constitution is above all other laws, and where any act of Parliament can be tested against the Constitution or can be nullified if it militates against the value system embodied in that Constitution.

When I became President in 1989, I was solely convinced of this new vision. My predecessor started to slow down and didn't have the enthusiasm or the health to implement it. My task was to take that new vision and develop an action plan to make it become a reality. So I would say if I were to put on one side of a scale the concept of outside pressures and on the other side, internal reform on the pressures of our consciousness, then I would say the internal process carried more weight in the process of change than the external pressures.

At times, the external pressures delayed change because they drove our economy to become inward looking. When there was an oil embargo, we developed our own way to make oil from coal. When there was a rubber embargo, we started to make artificial rubber. In the final analysis, sanctions led us to make seven atomic bombs. All those were negative effects of sanctions. Negative effects tied up billions and billions of dollars that could have been used in a much better way in the best interest for all the people of South Africa. So, it wasn't all positive. I am not a great supporter of sanctions for any country. I think they should be reserved for the application of serious pressure, and if they don't succeed in bringing...