Durban | Friday
The World Conference Against Racism had to convey the message that the people of the world were determined to unite to repair the “gross human damage” of the past, President Thabo Mbeki said on Friday.
“Nobody ever chose to be a slave, to be colonised, to be racially oppressed. The impulses of the time caused these crimes to be committed by human beings against others,” he said at the opening ceremony attended by 15 heads of state, mostly from African nations.
“Surely, the impulse of our own time says to all of us that we must do everything we can to free those who to this day suffer from racism, xenophobia and related intolerance because their forebears were enslaved, colonised and racially oppressed.”
Mbeki said it had become necessary to convene in Durban because it had been recognised that there were “many in our common world who suffer indignity and humiliation because they are not white”.
“Their cultures and traditions are despised as savage and primitive and their identities denied. They are not white and are deeply immersed in poverty.
Of them it is said that they are human but black, whereas others are described as human and white.”
The world conference would have to indicate what was to be done practically so that all human beings actually enjoyed the inalienable rights to human dignity, he said.
To the masses, human solidarity was not a foreign concept.
“To them, this world conference must convey the message that the peoples of the world are inspired by a new inter-nationalism that says that we are determined to unite in action to repair the gross human damage that was caused in the past.”
On the Middle East conflict which has threatened to derail the conference, Mbeki said that region cried out for a just, stable and permanent peace that was long overdue.
“The people of Palestine, like those of Israel and everywhere else in the world, are also entitled to pursue their fullest and all-round development in conditions of freedom, safety and security.”
Among those attending the conference is Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Mbeki also referred to Africa saying it deserved peace like any other, “to rescue the peoples from death and destruction and to open the doors for us too, to develop in conditions of freedom, safety and security”.
“Thus will the conditions be created for us as Africans to take to the long road towards the eradication of the legacy, which is our daily companion, of slavery, colonialism and racism.”
Mbeki said that only recently had the world bade farewell to a century that had visited terrible suffering to millions of people.
“It inflicted a terrible Holocaust on the Jewish people, It imposed a frightful genocide on the people of Rwanda. It produced criminal regimes of people demented by adherence to anti-human ideologies of racial superiority.”
Yet that century had also given a global compact in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It had given humanity as a whole the possibility to accumulate the knowledge and the means to realise the noble vision contained in that document, Mbeki said.
“We have gathered in Durban to make the commitment that this we will do, together, to decide what steps we will take to ensure what has to be done, is done.”
Mbeki welcomed delegates to the country “which you helped to liberate from apartheid racism. He hoped that the celebration of that victory would give the world conference the inspiration to produce results that would define the 21st century as the century that restored to all, their human dignity.