11 October 1991
It is an honour for me to participate in this Day of Solidarity with South African Political Prisoners…
I am grateful not only for this opportunity to join you today but also for the important work you have carried out for the past 29 years in the struggle against apartheid. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said: "Justice is indivisible; injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".
Those words could very well serve as the motto of this Committee and, on behalf of eight million lovers of justice who reside in New York City, I thank you and I applaud you for your tireless efforts to bring justice to South Africa.
Another round of applause is in order today. A member of the ANC, Nadine Gordimer, has won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. My congratulations to ANC Deputy-President, Walter Sisulu, on her behalf.
In the same year that Dr. King so eloquently spoke about the indivisibility of justice, another great American, President John F. Kennedy, reminded people throughout the world that the United States stood for the same principle internationally. He said: "We stand for freedom. That is our conviction for ourselves; that is our only commitment to others."
For as long as the United States has been a world Power, we have done our best to stand up for the cause of justice, wherever it is threatened - from the forests of Argonne in 1918 to the fires of Auschwitz in 1945, along the borders of the Koreas in the 1950s and in Israel and Kuwait just this year.
I am proud that, in keeping with this legacy, the City of New York has figured prominently in the international effort to bring an end to the only legalized system of racism in the world today - South African apartheid.
If today America stands for freedom, South Africa stands for oppression.
The laws and structures of apartheid have enabled five million white South Africans to dominate and repress 30 million black South Africans. Apartheid is one of the world's greatest evils since American slavery - and its legacy promises to be every bit as difficult to erase. But erase it we must. And it is in that hope that the City of New York has continued to apply sanctions even after others have proposed to lift them. Sanctions have brought us within sight of the precious shores of freedom. Now is not the time to abandon ship.
In fact, I believe that sanctions are needed now more than ever before for what other international check or balance can help ensure the good faith participation of the South African Government in the upcoming transfer of power to a new democratic government?
As Mama Sisulu so eloquently remarked at a Gracie Mansion reception just two weeks ago: "The transition period in any country's history is always the most sensitive and difficult. Sanctions will be a key tool in the constitutional negotiations from beginning to end."
The creation of a constitution is indeed the most critical moment in the life of any nation. The die is cast, and precedents are set that can plague the new nation for centuries to come.
Consider our own example. Let us for one moment imagine what might have happened had international moral and economic pressure been applied to the fledgling United States of America between 1776 and 1787.
Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Daclaration of Independence - that noble document that asserts "that all men are created equal" - contained a denunciation of the slave trade that was later deleted by the Continental Congress. That statement might have been left in.
In 1787, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton argued in favour of the abolition of slavery in the new federal constitution then being developed. Georgia and South Carolina threatened not to join the Union if slavery were prohibited. Had Washington prevailed in that crucial moment, the Constitution of the United States of America would not have treated my ancestors as sub-human. The entire course of United States history would have been changed.
Nat Turner would not have led his bloody uprising in 1831. Dred Scott would not have been returned to his "owner" in 1857. John Brown would not have attacked Harper's Ferry in 1859. Half a million Americans would not have died in the Civil War. There would have been no draft riots in New York City in 1863 in which dozens of African-Americans were lynched and murdered.
Abraham Lincoln would not have been assassinated, nor would Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King a century later.
The many race riots in our major cities in the twentieth century might never have happened.
Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman might still be alive today, along with the three beautiful little girls who died in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963.
Can there be any doubt that the most crucial moments of the international sanctions movement lie not in the recent past but in the immediate future? In the creation of a new State, the cost of flaws is far too great. We must keep the pressure on apartheid until it finds its rightful place in the dustbin of history.
We must measure the current Government of South Africa not by the dark standards of its past behaviour but by the shining standards of freedom. Examined in this bright light, the National Party's proposal for a new government reveals many flaws.
In this proposed new system the power of the executive is diluted by a rotating presidency on the Yugoslavian model. Unfortunately, the failure of a weak executive to address ethnic strife in Yugoslavia can be measured these days in tombstones.
Besides, it is not just the plan the National Party has disclosed that has led people to lose faith in the existing Government: it is also what the National Party has not disclosed.
The secret funding of Inkatha has damaged our trust in the present administration. And the continued detention of hundreds of political prisoners also draws the credibility of the Government into question.
I am here today to express our solidarity with those prisoners and with the people of South Africa in this symbolic gesture. But next month I will be in South Africa to express our solidarity in a substantive and very concrete gesture. I will bring with me many ideas and resources, but I will also bring with me the memory of this Day of Solidarity. Thank you. God bless you and Nkosi sikel' iAfrika.