OLOF PALME MEMORIAL LECTURE ON DISARMAMENT AND DEVELOPMENT, NEW YORK, JANUARY 21, 1987⁽¹⁾

Tonight is a most moving occasion - for me, personally, for the leaders of the African National Congress who are here with me, for all South Africans who live in this country.

We are moved by the rapturous reception accorded us by this great assembly of friends and supporters, and more particularly by the cause which brings us together tonight.

I should like to express my most profound thanks to the Riverside Church Disarmament Programme and the great honour accorded the African National Congress in inviting me to deliver the first Olof Palme Memorial Lecture.

Five weeks from today the Swedish people and the rest of democratic humanity will be observing the first anniversary of the assassination Olof Palme. On a winter's day in February, this supremely humane man died because he had dared to seek the birth of a humane world. His death will forever remain a poignant and noble plea for the healthy human condition he sought to construct across the face of the globe.

On the day it heard the incredible and shocking news that Olof Palme was no more, humanity wept. It did so because it had lost one of those from among itself who had given it hope that each one of us would become to all others friend, comrade, brother and sister. Humanity bowed its head in shame and remorse because one of its own had deliberately taken all of us backwards - away from reason and peaceful dispute, towards the arbitration of differences by the sword.

We are honoured to be here today to try to amplify with our weak voices the message which Olof Palme can no longer convey himself. But we speak only as some of those who would have gained liberty and happiness from the realisation of his dream, beneficiaries of his vision of world redeemed.

How much better it would have been if his life partner and companion, Lisbet Palme, were standing here, speaking to us. More than all of us present, she would have conveyed to us something of the making of that vision which she, too, helped to form. She would have shown us the portrait of an outstanding statesman, whose inner being she helped to model. We would have been happy if she were with us today, attending a meeting that is as much a tribute to Lisbet as to Olof Palme.

The violence of our century took her husband's life. It succeeded in claiming him as its victim because he abhorred that violence with a singular intensity and sought to lead a life that, by its example, would be an argument against violence. He died because he believed that to protect his person with the instruments of war would itself constitute the fostering of the use of force to which he was implacably opposed. He perished as he did because the offspring of the violence of our century remain as yet steeped in the idea that brute fore can vanquish reason.

Each of the nearly nine decades of the 20th century has contributed its share to the bloodletting. Like the proverbial Prince of Darkness, each has seemed to require its portion and elixir of human blood to feed on. Along the path of its ghastly and fearsome logic are strewn graves that had to be dug to accommodate its demands. Among the fresh sepulchres of the last five years are those of Olof Palme of Sweden, Indira Gandhi of India, Mozambique's Samora Machel and Grenada's Maurice Bishop.

The assassination of all these who were to us friends - our leaders and comrades-in-arms - served to reawaken our sensitivity to the horror of man's violence to man, to the enormity of the crimes of violence that were and are being perpetrated daily against people in many parts of the world. Their deaths constituted a stern rebuke to us: that we can never afford to give encouragement to the killers by getting accustomed to their deeds, by coming to accept that the blood in the streets is as much part of the human reality as the signposts on the highway. They were a reminder confirming the continued virulence of the forces that spawned the murderers of Salvador Allende of Chile, of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Robert and John F. Kennedy.

Olof Palme hated and despised the assassins. He would, if he could, have broken up their murderous conspiracies by the force of argument, challenging all cabals to a contest of intellects and a confrontation of ideas. But even he knew, with a great depth of understanding, that the hands that fire the shots are the products of a century that has seen two world wars and a great number of bloody local conflicts.

They, like all of us, are part of the same humanity from among whom sprang the Nazi criminals who carried out the indelible horror of the attempted genocidal extermination of the Jewish and Slavic people. In common with us all, the killers are heirs to a past over which hang the mushroom clouds of the hydrogen bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Olof Palme knew that to end the use or the threat of the use of force in international relations, to secure and guarantee a just and stable world peace, requires a determined struggle to overcome the tradition of a ready resort to arms. He was aware that the triumph of world peace would have a vested interest in the manufacture of weapons, whose place in society obliges them to argue that world peace is a utopian hope of the simpleminded.

Those of us who have a vested interest in world peace - and the African National Congress and the people of South Africa count themselves firmly among the world peace forces - those of us who are involved in this struggle, as Olof Palme was, need to be clear about the obstacles we have to overcome. One of these, which we have to stop and reverse, is a tendency which has characterised the present century.

When this period began, our own country was going through the agonies of the Anglo-Boer War, with its own measure of brutalities. When the First World War started, the rate and the manner of the slaughter of human beings in the battlefields of Europe made the Anglo-Boer War look almost like a gentlemanly affair. In its turn, the Second World War marked an even higher level of savagery, including the use of nuclear weapons, while the Vietnam War was accompanied by newer and yet more horrifying methods of war.

In other conflicts, such as those in some Latin American countries, the use of secret murder squads and the practice of kidnapping and assassinating opponents of tyranny added new dimensions to the repressive use of State power. These methods, tested out in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, and other countries, are now being used by the Pretoria regime in our country. They would undoubtedly be used in any larger international conflict that may break out.

The point we are making is that throughout the last nine decades, there has been a consistent tendency towards the improvement of the destructive capacity of weapons of war. This has led to the development of nuclear weapons and the means for their delivery. At the same time, and as a necessary corollary, the forces whose task it is to plan for and conduct war have worked to improve these and all other elements of their destructive enterprise.

The struggle for world peace is about the direct opposite of all of that. Its objective is to dismantle what the proponents of such concepts as "the balance of terror" view as outstanding achievements. When all of us join forces to demand an end to nuclear tests, it is because we are opposed to the improvement of nuclear weapons. We want to keep space free of any weapons of any kind, because we do not wish to see mankind with a better capacity to fight. In the end, we would rather that humanity had neither the incentive nor the means to engage in a conflict that would end the human race itself.

When Olof Palme convened the Commission on Disarmament and joined the Five Continent Peace Initiative for disarmament and world peace, it was because he knew that these fundamental questions of our time could not be left to those who have nuclear weapons and to experts. To save themselves from destruction, the ordinary people who know nothing about trajectories of missiles or the techniques of splitting atoms have to take their destiny into their own hands.

Today, the mass peace movement occupies an important place in international politics as an expression of that resolve. As the millions march for world peace, with flowers in their hands, they reaffirm the message that Olof Palme tried to convey to all of us, that people can and must walk with no weapons in their hands to demand that everybody else should have no weapons of mass destruction at their disposal. His death can serve only to encourage us to fight on, defending ourselves from the assassins by our unity, our numbers and the justice of our cause.

The question of the activation of the ordinary people in the struggle for peace is also very important with respect to another issue which was of deep concern to Olof Palme. This is the matter of the democratisation of the decision-making process both nationally and internationally. Confident that open debate was a necessary element in the striving of all peoples to determine their future, Olof Palme was a champion of real democratic practice. He was not satisfied with the mere forms, but was deeply concerned to see the substance.

The technological and scientific revolution has transformed questions of war and peace into a complicated affair. The has enhanced the role of experts and specialists and thus concentrated power into even fewer hands than in the past. Given the nature of modern non-conventional weapons, this means that these professionals and a handful of politicians in fact have the power of life and death over the whole of mankind. The peace movement constitutes a historic struggle to democratise international relations with specific reference to the decisive questions of war and peace.

Olof Palme sought to achieve this result with regard to the entirety of the system of international affairs. As much as he understood that the world needs peace, so did he comprehend and engage in struggle against underdevelopment and poverty. He saw the connection between disarmament and development not only in terms of the option of turning swords into ploughshares. He also understood that the achievement of peace itself requires that the world community should abolish underdevelopment and guarantee the social progress of all peoples. While the world is divided between the super-rich and the abjectly poor there can be no peace. As long as the super-rich pour enormous resources into the development of weapons of mass destruction, it will be impossible to banish hunger both within the developed countries themselves and in the Third World.

Forever concerned to promote democratic practice, Olof Palme was unswervingly committed to seeing the poor stand up and speak for themselves. Proud as he was of the political, economic, and social achievements that the Swedish working class had won for itself in struggle, through its trade unions and his own Social Democratic Party, Olof Palme wanted to see the poor of the world stand up and speak for themselves. Accordingly, he held the Organisation of African Unity and the Nonaligned Movement in high esteem. In particular, he entertained an abiding hope that the United Nations Organisation would thrive as an effective voice of the nations of the world, especially the weakest. He viewed it as an instrument that should serve mankind to redress all grievances, to give power to the weak, to marry the two imperatives of world peace and the fastest possible development of those most in need.

Historical circumstance, which has included the colonisation of whole continents, has resulted in the concentration of economic and military power in a few countries. The issue of redressing this imbalance hinges on the requirement which Olof Palme saw so clearly: that it was necessary to fight against all attempts to deprive the underdeveloped nations of their potential and actual political power. At a time when the Third World is rendered more vulnerable to pressure and blackmail because of its considerable economic problems, the task of strengthening the bargaining power of the poor, of giving proper meaning to their right to self-determination, assumes a new significance.

Our own people will always remember Olof Palme as one of us, an unswerving opponent of the apartheid system, one who took sides by supporting the oppressed and our organisation, the African National Congress. Apart from his deep-seated revulsion at the theory and practice of racial domination in our country, he was determined to ensure that we too should have unrestricted access to political power and thus put ourselves in the position where we could take our own sovereign decisions about the future of our country.

Proceeding from this same fundamental thesis, he sided with the Vietnamese people against the attempts of the various United States Administrations to impose their will on Vietnam. A consistent ally of all who fight for national liberation, Olof Palme played an important role in reducing the negative impact of those who sought to define our struggles within the parameters of the East-West conflict. Representing as he did a small, neutral West European country, his ideas and his practice carried considerable weight. They confirmed what to us seems obvious: that, being an act of rebellion against domination, the struggle for national liberation cannot be predicated on serving a new master.

Were he present today, Olof Palme would surely have said that the struggling people of South Africa, as those of Namibia and the rest of southern Africa, should be supported on their own terms. He would have argued, as we must, that a democratic country such as the United States must promote democracy in South Africa in part by upholding our right to have our own history, to have our own national experience, to decide what is best for us.

We recognise the fact that in the real world in which we live and in which we have to conduct our struggle, countries and various factions within these countries place our country as it is today and will be tomorrow, in the context of what are described as national interests. Olof Palme thought the national interests of his own country would best be served by the genuine liberation of South Africa and Namibia and the guarantee of peace, stability, and social progress throughout southern Africa.

Elsewhere, others are making it a condition for the support of the national liberation and democratic forces of our country that we must reproduce ourselves in their image. In the process, they have borrowed and taken over from the opponents of democracy in our country a characterisation of us which is naturally intended to serve the purposes of the oppressors. On the other hand, we must of necessity define ourselves and our purposes in a way that negates our present condition of slavery in all its forms. For us, the process of the negation of the apartheid system must mean that we oppose the arguments and the practices that led to the banning of the African National Congress, the dissolution of the Liberal Party, and the proscription of the Communist Party. We must create the conditions in which it will be possible for any among our people to form Social Democratic, Christian Democratic or any other democratic party of their choice. Without underestimating the difficulties, Olof Palme understood our resolve to set ourselves free - free to think and act independently, free to differ with him without losing his support, free to expand the frontiers of liberty universally by asserting our own right to live as a liberated people in an emancipated world. I think we can say truthfully that he was as happy to be associated with us as we were honoured to count on his support. It is our prayer to the future that those who count themselves as democrats anywhere in the world will pause for a brief moment to reflect on the example that Olof Palme set.

We have spoken of Olof Palme's abhorrence of violence. That attitude was also reflected, among other things, by his promotion of Sweden's traditional neutrality and his timely opposition to military blocs. And yet he was not a pacifist. Neither would he allow hypocritical positions about the issue of violence to pass as immutable and inherited wisdom.

On occasion, when he addressed the question of armed struggle against racist and colonial domination in southern Africa, he referred to the history of his own country and party. Referring to the period when Sweden had colonised Norway, he said there could never have been any peace between the peoples of these countries until Norway was free. The oppressive Swedes of the day could not demand peaceable behaviour of the Norwegians until Norway had become decolonised. Nobody has the right to demand peaceable behaviour of us within our own country until we are free. Furthermore, as Olof Palme argued, drawing on the history of his party, nobody should demand of us that we should seek change by nonviolent means when we are denied all constitutional possibilities to redress the grievances of the majority.

We yearn for the day when these issues, as they affect us in southern Africa, will be treated by the rest of the Western world with the same honesty with which Olof Palme approached them. We know that the American people went to war to achieve their independence and to suppress slavery. We have been taught that modern Britain and France, the Soviet Union, China, Mexico, and many other countries owe their being in part to armed rebellions due to the oppression the ruling classes of the day imposed on the respective peoples of these countries. We also know that these people took up arms because they valued life, as we do.

Our own manifesto proclaiming our resort to arms was no different in its meaning and its intention from the proclamations that the peoples of Europe issued when they took up arms against the genocidal Nazi regime. Why, then, does the West treat us as an exception? Whence the newfound argument that the use of armed force to achieve political purposes is impermissible?

A formidable debater, Olof Palme always sought to cut through the cant and hypocrisy of those who wield power.

We too must cut through the cant and hypocrisy as a result of which apartheid is condemned by word while it is given material sustenance. We must expose for what it is the description of white minority violence as the maintenance of law and order. We must spread the understanding that all talk about minority rights is a disguised demand for white privilege. We who know from experience have to cut through the cant and hypocrisy to explain that to reform oppression is to maintain oppression in an amended form. Liberty is an act of liberation both for the oppressed and the oppressors, a condition for the peaceful coexistence of peoples and individuals.

No words, however clever, no concepts, however profound in their appearance, can reconcile the conflict between freedom and oppression, between truth and falsification. Nothing could ever persuade Olof Palme that he must reconcile himself to the inevitability of world war, the permanence of want among millions of human beings and the oppression of people on any grounds, such as those of race, colour, sex, religion or nationality.

Every age has its prophet. The immediate conditions of life demand of the peoples that they act in particular ways. And yet each day carries both the burden of its past and the seeds of the future. Our day bears both the scars of yesterday and the potential for human development whose basis has been laid by the present and earlier generations. To understand and overcome the former as well as to appreciate and exploit the latter requires men and women with the honesty, courage, intelligence, and instinct of an Olof Palme.

As a prophet of our age, Olof Palme showed us a vision of a world free of oppression, hunger, and war. He spoke for millions of people who readily responded to the imperatives of our time to be free, secure, and not threatened by poverty. To achieve these objectives the ordinary people must still overcome a desperate resistance from those who view the striving for these inalienable rights as an act of treason.

In the course of this struggle, some of us will die as Olof Palme did. Others will sacrifice as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and others are doing. And yet we know that, as surely as their names will never be forgotten, all they stand for will certainly triumph. In the face of the risen people, let all tyrants tremble. In the interests of all humanity, we will insure that the cause for which Olof Palme sacrificed his life emerges victorious.

1. ¹ From: Weiss, Cora (ed.) Olof Palme Memorial Lecture on

Disarmament and Development (Oliver Tambo, Allan Boesak, Wm. Sloane Coffin, Anders Ferm), Riverside Church, January 21, 1987. New York: The Riverside Church Disarmament Program, 1987