HOME | ARCHIVES |

Issue 27: September-October 2003

COMMENT

World holds vested interest in a successful South Africa

PRETORIA -- The last 10 to 15 years have not been the best advertisement for the human species. Our brutality toward fellow human beings, including children and women, seems to plumb ever-lower depths. The positive side of identifying with fellow members of a particular religion, race, tribe or ethnic sect is only too often mirrored by the negative side of inflicting unspeakable horrors on those outside our own select group.

The result has been far too many examples of large-scale killings and ethnic cleansing. The different manifestations of ethnic cleansing include the methodical killing of members of a particular group to diminish or eliminate their presence in a particular area; the organized physical removal of members of a particular group from a particular geographical area; acts of terror designed to force people to flee; and the systematic rape for political purposes of women of a particular group (either as another form of terrorism, or as a means of changing the ethnic composition of that group).

As this indicates, an unhappy trend of contemporary conflict has been the increased vulnerability of civilians, often involving their deliberate targeting. Sometimes the permanent displacement of civilian populations has been a primary objective of the conflict. There has also been increasing concern about the deliberate use of systematic rape to provoke exclusion from a group.

Efforts to suppress armed (and sometimes unarmed) dissent have in too many cases led to excessive and disproportionate actions by governments, producing in some cases excessive and unwarranted suffering on the part of civilian populations.

In a few cases, regimes have launched campaigns of terror on their own populations, sometimes in the name of an ideology (including apartheid); sometimes spurred on by racial, religious or ethnic hatred (including by whites against blacks and vice versa); and sometimes purely for personal gain or plunder. In other cases, they have supported or abetted terror campaigns aimed at other countries that have resulted in major destruction and loss of life.

Civil wars are often viewed, in the prosperous industrial countries, simply as a set of discrete and unrelated crises occurring in distant and unimportant regions. In reality, what is happening is a convulsive process of state fragmentation and state formation that is transforming the international order itself. Moreover, the rich world is deeply implicated in the process. Civil conflicts are fueled by arms and monetary transfers that originate in the developed world, and their destabilizing effects are felt in the developed world in everything from globally interconnected terrorism to refugee flows, the export of drugs, the spread of infectious disease and organized crime.

There is no longer such a thing as a humanitarian catastrophe occurring "in a faraway country of which we know little." South Africa is a faraway country of which we know much. For one of the great, defining struggles of modern times was the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa. And one of the great icons of modern times is Nelson Mandela, who became the first president of South Africa after its liberation from apartheid. Robben Island, where he was imprisoned for over two decades off the coast of Cape Town, is today a museum: a testament both to man's inhumanity and to the capacity of the human spirit to soar above petty hatreds, ennobled by the vision of an inclusive society living in harmony with one another.

An important key to success in post-apartheid reconciliation was the choice of how to deal with the ghosts of the past. There are many alternative modes of healing and restitution with a view to reconciliation that puts the traumas of the past firmly in the past. In South Africa this was successfully done by means of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The so-called South African "miracle" -- the essentially peaceful transition from a racist apartheid regime to a multiracial democracy -- came at a cost. The price paid for peace was to rule out retribution in favor of reconciliation. If the leaders of the African National Congress had insisted on exacting revenge through the full powers of the law for acts of crime under the apartheid regime, the transition, in the best professional judgment of the ANC leaders themselves, would have been more painful, violent and protracted.

As a corollary, the new South Africa would have been a correspondingly less stable and vibrant democracy if the politicians, police and military of the ancien regime had feared a Nuremberg-style trial. Grasping the significance of this, arguing the case with his own people and acting on that basis marked the difference between Mandela's being merely a politician and a visionary statesman.

Post-apartheid South Africa thus made a deliberate effort through social and political channels to escape cycles of retributive violence coming out of decades of tumultuous political conflicts congealed around communal identity.

The purely juridical approach to "transitional justice" traps and suspends communities in the prism of past hatreds. South Africa's record of bringing closure to the legacy of systematic savagery in a deeply conflicted society is superior to that of institutions of international criminal justice in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The latter's closure is more authoritative but also more partial and premature. The South African example falls in the tradition of "restorative justice" rather than retributive justice.

Given the deeply wounding sectarian atrocities that are so distressingly common all over the world, all of us have an abiding interest in seeing that the South African experiment in multiracial democracy takes firm root and flourishes for generations to come.

For me this took on a particular meaning in Durban. South Africa's total population of people of Indian origin is now smaller than that in the United States. But most of South Africa's people of South Asian descent live in Durban (around 800,000 in all), which makes it the largest Indian city outside the subcontinent.

It is in the environs just outside Durban that Mahatma Gandhi began his great experiments in determined but nonviolent struggles against social and political injustice. Fittingly, his granddaughter, Ela Gandhi, has recently been appointed to begin a program in nonviolence at the University of Natal (shortly to be merged with the University of Durban-Westville). It was deeply satisfying to discuss her plans with her.

The interesting thing is how the Indians of South Africa do not identify themselves as Indians. Of course they are conscious and proud of their heritage from across the warm Indian Ocean. They generally have dreams one day of visiting the village from where their ancestors made the journey as indentured laborers to another colony in the sprawling British empire. But home is where the heart is, and their hearts are very firmly and solely in South Africa.

Unfortunately, similar sentiments by the Indians of Fiji did not succeed in breaking down suspicions by the "indigenous" Fijians (one would think that second-through-fifth generation Indians would qualify as indigenes, but apparently not: words do mean whatever we choose them to mean). Intercommunal tensions lay behind the coups that ousted Indian-led or dominated governments, and have produced a flight of Indian people and professional skills.

Hopefully history -- from Idi Amin's Uganda in the 1970s (Amin was rather less hospitable to his own people than Saudi Arabia was to him in comfortable exile) to Fiji in the 1980s -- will not be repeated as farce or tragedy in South Africa.

India was the first big champion of the anti-apartheid cause after its own independence in 1947, and for many years paid a political price for this in relations with the Western countries whose fault tolerance for apartheid was much higher until the late 1980s. Building on that history, India and South Africa have forged increasingly close bonds in world affairs since the transition to multiracial democracy.

Most recently they have teamed up with Brazil in an informal IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) grouping. Given the three countries' sophistication as intermediate economies, their depth of homegrown intellectual talent and their political clout in their respective continents, this has the potential to be a formidable axis of virtue for developing countries.

Add China's weight, and one can see why the industrial countries ran into difficulty in Cancun, Mexico, during the failed world trade talks last month in trying to ram through their priorities at the expense of developing-country needs. If the quartet is united, as it was in Cancun, the familiar tactics of bribing, bullying and ruling-by-dividing the developing countries will become increasingly counterproductive.

Ramesh Thakur is UNU Vice Rector and director of the Peace and Governance Programme. This commentary first appeared in the October 5 edition of the The Japan Times. These are his personal views.

HOME

Copyright © 2003  United Nations University. All rights reserved.