21 March 19901
We are gathered together on this historic occasion to honour the memory of the martyrs of Sharpeville. Thirty years ago today, a few thousand ordinary and unarmed black men, women and children assembled outside the police station in Sharpeville township just outside the town of Vereeniging in South Africa in order to protest against the pass laws that restricted much of their day-to-day lives. As the world knows, their peaceful protest was met with bullets - some observers say dum-dum bullets - in their backs. Sixty-nine died and hundreds were severely wounded. Survivors carry their scars to this day. We salute them. We condemn the apartheid regime that killed and maimed those innocent people. Their sacrifice was not in vain. The freedom torch they lit has been handed down through the years to a new generation of freedom-fighters. But, of course, times have changed, and a climate that is more favourable to the freedom for which they died now prevails.
Internationally, there is a thaw in East-West relations. In Eastern Europe, old nation-States are renewing themselves in an unprecedented manner. Namibia, the last classic colony in Africa, is free at last, thus leaving South Africa as Africa's only colony, albeit a colony with a difference. After two decades of bitter armed conflict between the forces of apartheid colonialism and those of the gallant people of Namibia, that country is now forever free as an independent sovereign State among the nations of the world. We join the international community in saluting these heroic people, their Government, their President Comrade Sam Nujoma and the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) for scoring such signal victories. The defeat of apartheid in Namibia augurs well for its defeat inside South Africa itself.
Thanks to the efforts of our people, assisted consistently over the years by the international community, the Pretoria regime is at last showing signs of a readiness to talk to the authentic leaders of our people. After nearly 28 years of imprisonment, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and others are now free to take their proper places of leadership amongst our people. The African National Congress and other political organizations have been un-banned; the state of emergency has been modified in part.
The ANC has taken advantage of this climate to relocate its headquarters from Lusaka in Zambia to Johannesburg in South Africa. It has also resolved to set up regional structures inside South Africa and to repatriate thousands of its members back home. That is a major exercise which will need the assistance of individual Member States as well as of the Organization.
Those developments have not taken place because the Pretoria regime has undergone a change of heart on the road to Damascus. Those changes have happened because of the determined struggle of our people and of the international community. It is for that reason that we call upon the international community to maintain and, indeed, intensify the pressure of comprehensive sanctions against the regime, for, as Nelson Mandela pointed out recently, to lift sanctions at this stage would be to abort the process towards a negotiated settlement of the South African conflict. Accordingly, we deeply regret and condemn the unfriendly decision of the British Government unilaterally to lift some sanctions against Pretoria in contemptuous disregard of its obligations embodied in the Declaration adopted by consensus in December 1989 at the sixteenth special session of the General Assembly.
Twenty-two days from now, on 11 April, a delegation of the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, will meet President De Klerk and his team to discuss the removal of obstacles to negotiations aimed at breaking the apartheid log-jam. In this regard our demands are clear. They were spelt out succinctly in the Harare Declaration in August 1989, which has since been adopted by the members of the Non-Aligned Movement, noted by the Commonwealth countries at Kuala Lumpur in October 1989 and adopted by the sixteenth special session of the General Assembly on 14 December of that year.
But only the Pretoria regime can create conditions conducive to successful negotiations over the dismantling of apartheid and the establishment of true democracy in our country. Simply stated, that regime must withdraw its soldiers and their heavy armoury from our defenceless townships. It is unacceptable that armed soldiers should be billetted on unarmed and peace-loving and peaceful civilians in time of peace in their own country. We cannot negotiate under duress or military threats from the South African Defence Force - in fact, that is a misnomer, because it is a South African offensive force. Soldiers should defend national borders against armed invasion by armies of foreign countries. Soldiers should not be used to suppress rights, freedoms and liberties of the citizens.
Secondly, the regime provoked the state of unrest in our country by introducing a tricameral constitution in September 1984 that excluded the African people, and only the African people, from Parliament. The regime should have foreseen the consequences of its folly and avoided them, not by establishing a fourth and separate parliament for Africans but by opening the doors of the one Parliament to all the people of South Africa, irrespective of race, colour, creed, religion, sex, status or national origin. Predictably, we have been living under a state of emergency ever since. That artificial state of emergency must now go. We must be free to consult our people across the length and breadth of our country on the burning political issues of the day.
Thirdly, the remaining 3,000-odd political prisoners must be freed at once. It will not do for the regime to criminalize their political activities and then use that as an excuse for keeping them in prison long after our national leaders and the political organizations at whose behest they acted as they did have been released from prison or unbanned. Those prisoners must be freed. They are among the most dedicated and outstanding political leaders of our people. They, with all of us, need to consult our constituents before any negotiations can take place. Only such comprehensive consultations can give legitimacy to the results of future negotiations with Pretoria.
Fourthly, Pretoria must stop all political trials and all political executions. We cannot sit down to negotiate when across the road our comrades on death row are being executed. That is impossible.
Fifthly, a general amnesty must be granted to all exiles to enable them to return home to participate in the negotiations. No serious negotiations can take place with Pretoria without the full participation of Oliver Tambo, our President, and his colleagues in exile. Those leaders have borne the brunt of war for three decades. They have earned a place around the conference table. Without them, negotiations will be like acting Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Such negotiations will be an empty sham.
Once those five pre-conditions are met, negotiations will begin in earnest between the ANC and other forces of democracy, on the one hand, and the Pretoria regime, on the other. It is essential to restate what the negotiations will be about: negotiations, when they begin, will not be about reforming or amending or tinkering with apartheid. Christian leaders have pronounced apartheid to be an unreformable sin and a heresy to be exorcized. The United Nations itself has declared apartheid a crime against humanity. Those words were last heard at Nuremberg in 1946. Clearly, a crime of such proportions cannot be reformed or amended. It can only be abolished, root and branch. That is what negotiations must be about, namely, the total abolition or dismantling of apartheid and, logically, the modalities for the transfer of total State power from the minority to the majority. This is what democracy is all about: it is - without prejudice to the rights of the minority - unquestionably government of the majority of the people for the benefit of the majority of the people by representatives of the majority of the people. This is the bottom line of what negotiations are about.
Translated into legal terms, this means that the tricameral parliament must go. Bantustans must be abolished and our people there reintegrated, as is their natural right, into a free, post-apartheid South Africa. The obnoxious, so-called Natives Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, supplemented by the Group Areas Act and various resettlement schemes, must be repealed, and our people must be given back their lost lands. All so-called security laws must be repealed. Bantu education, which has sought to warp and distort the minds of our people these many years, must go. Indeed, all apartheid laws enacted - especially since May 1948 - must be repealed. On the ashes of the apartheid State must be built a new, unified, unitary, non-racial, non-sexist democratic State and society of equal citizens who will have no regard in their relations with one another to the skin colour, race, religion, status, national origin, class or sex of their fellow human beings.
We invite our white compatriots to join us in building a new political order, a new constitutional order, a new economic order, a new social and cultural order, based on those universal principles.
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