Washington, DC — In a high-profile speech, South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu has delivered a powerful call for reconciliation and against revenge and retaliation, heard by many in the audience as a thinly-veiled critique of the US assault on Afghanistan.
The philosophy of "an eye for an eye" could not achieve security, he said. "Violent reaction to the suicide bombers... just seems to give rise to further suicide bombers."
The Archbishop, a veteran leader of the fight against apartheid and, most recently, the head of South Africa's ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), was delivering the second Oliver Tambo lecture in Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Oliver Tambo was the leader of South Africa's African National Congress during the anti-apartheid struggle and until his death in 1993. He himself spoke at the same venue in 1987, at the height of the battle to persuade the international community to impose sanctions on the apartheid government.
Archbishop Tutu said he had been intending to use the opportunity of the speech to call on the United States to mount a $2bn 'Marshall Plan' and help rebuild southern Africa, after years of damage by apartheid. The events of September 11, however had changed his mind.
He said he wanted to offer the experience of South Africa's transition from apartheid to a non-racial democracy as a potential source of inspiration for solving the problems confronting the world today.
During the apartheid years, he said, most commentators were convinced that South Africa was headed for a "bloodbath", in which the country's peoples would take revenge on their oppressors.
Instead, he said, the world had watched in "wonder and awe", starting in February, 1990, when F.W. De Klerk made his "epoch-making move" unbanning political parties, through April 1994 when South Africans of all colours lined up to vote, and then again, three years later, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which the Archbishop chaired, heard the testimony of the evil that was done during the apartheid years.
Far from the country becoming dangerously unstable as the transition progressed, South Africa became a more stable nation despite persistent criminal violence, HIV/Aids and other problems.
By contrast,he said, the social and political instability in the former Soviet Union made South Africa look like a Sunday School picnic. The armed escort of children on their way to school was happening in Northern Ireland, and the widely predicted race riots were happening in Britain, not South Africa.
So how, he asked, had South Africa - a byword for racial intolerance and tension in the past - succeeded against all expectations?
He cited the courage of the country's political leaders, citing both FW De Klerk and Nelson Mandela as being critical to the success of the movement for change, and referred also to Joe Slovo and Chris Hani, ANC military and communist leaders as making a vital contribution. Timing, too, was vital, given the liberalisation moves in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late '80s, which undercut the apartheid regime's argument that it was defending Africa against the red threat.
The commitment, resilience and "remarkable magnanimity" of the country's people were key, he said, as was international support.
But above all, South Africa's struggle for freedom succeeded because "this is a moral universe: right and wrong, good and bad matter. There is no way, ultimately, that evil can have the last word... This is God's world, and he is in charge, despite all appearances to the contrary," he said, drawing ripples of sympathetic laughter from the audience.
"All of us have the capacity for the most ghastly evil," he said. The Christian church must deal with a past in which people were burnt at the stake, when the Crusades in the Middle Ages brought "bloody mayhem" to so many Muslims, and the Spanish Inquisition was abroad: more recently, Christians must face up to their record during Hitler's fascism, to the atrocities in Northern Ireland in the name of religion, and to the genocide in Rwanda. Christianity was a faith, he said, of ever new beginnings.
Without referring directly to the September 11 attacks, Tutu cautioned his audience not to describe those who do great wrong as monsters or devils. A person is not a monster, he said. That kind of description removed the responsibility to be a human being from those accused. Such language, he said,"creates the reality it describes" by polarising opinion and "boxing people in".
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He congratulated those American voices who were, at this time, engaging in "serious introspection" and taking "the opportunity for a hard look at ourselves." That way, he said, lay true greatness.
"You are a wonderful people, warm-hearted and generous to a fault. You are... the only superpower in the world, your economic and military power are undisputed. But that shouldn't be the measure of your greatness. It should be because of your moral stature...whether it causes you anguish that unarmed civilians are being killed, as at the present time."
"Reconciliation, forgiveness, seeing the other, even one's worst enemy, as still human - with the possibility of rehabilitation and changing for the better - are the only the viable methods," he said.
