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16 December 2008

His Excellency former President Thabo Mbeki
Minister of Arts and Culture, Dr Pallo Jordan;
The Chief Executive Officer of Freedom Park Trust, Dr Mongane Wally Serote;
Board members of the Freedom Park Trust;
Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I thank you most sincerely for inviting me to celebrate the National Reconciliation Day with you. 

On this Day of Reconciliation let us celebrate our nation and make a dedicated attempt to join hearts, minds and efforts for a united, non-racial, non-sexist, just and democratic South Africa.  

The continued healing and reconciliation of our nation demands of all of us to reflect on the issues which still cause pain and division and to develop individual and communal responses to address them.` 

It is a measure of our ability as a nation to rise above the divisions of history that today, a day that once represented fierce battles, we are able to celebrate reconciliation. 
 
Chairperson
On this Day of Reconciliation, The Freedom Park celebrates the theme: “Families United in Humanity”.  

Accordingly, we are celebrating the common ground and the unifying thread that runs through our core units of society.  

A family is the basic unit of society and to the extent that it is intact, functional and stable, it will help with the building of stability in society. 

Many families have over the years, lost their beloved sons and daughters in the struggle for self determination. 

Therefore it is important to find a balance through making peace, creating harmony and espousing moral foundations within our families, with the view to building a nation based on social cohesion and grounded in unity. 

By focusing on what unites us, instead of on that which divides us, The Freedom Park explores and celebrates South Africa’s inherent capacity for reconciliation by highlighting the common identity that we share as a nation. 

The Patron-in-chief of The Freedom Park, Former President Nelson Mandela, captured the essence of the importance of this day when he said, and I quote:   
“There are few countries which dedicate a national public holiday to reconciliation.  But then there are few nations with our history of enforced division, oppression and sustained conflict.  And fewer still, which have undergone such a remarkable transition to reclaim their humanity . . . This Day of Reconciliation, celebrates the progress we have made; it reaffirms our commitment; and it measures the challenges.” 

Having consciously chosen a peaceful settlement to our past has led to South Africa being acclaimed the world over for its clarity of vision about the common future it sought to forge. 

We have accomplished this despite the political and social differences that define our diverse nation.   

This is not to suggest that our nation does not face residual and in some instances serious challenges stemming from our racially divided past. 
 
In fact, our past and our diversity still generate a number of contradictions which result in some imbalances in our country.   

These contradictions sharply express themselves in the manner in which our past continues to pain us in many vital areas of our life as a country. 

This pain is caused by, amongst others, the lingering racial and ethnic divisions, gender inequalities, poverty and language disparities.  

And more importantly, this lingering pain from our odious past finds pronounced expression in the economic inequalities which government has been addressing with much vigour and determination over the years since the dawn of democracy. 

To this end the government has been targeting these issues as key concerns towards healing and reconciling our nation. 

Our approach to healing and reconciling our country has been and still is rooted in the practice of forgiving and remembering our past without vindictiveness or vengefulness.  

On this day we affirm the self-evident historical fact that the history of our country is the history of all of us, including the perpetrators and the victims of the apartheid past. 

Consequently, in recognising that we have inherited this common past, government has clearly expressed the view that we cannot speak of this South African past without the victims, the perpetrators and everybody in-between, who were part of this sad history. 

Therefore, celebrating the Reconciliation Day calls upon all our families to unite in humanity, not only to bury the past but also to fashion out the future out of the ashes of this past. 

We inherited this past, and there are many families which paid dearly for their involvement in its making. 

As South Africans we all stand on the same platform of being part of this fledgling nation that continues to reconcile and build, without seeking to pretend that our past did not happen.  

Our conception of today’s theme ‘families united in humanity’, encapsulates the historical truth that freedom is indivisible. 

No social group can lay claim to the enjoyment of freedom to the exclusion of everybody else. 

Sections of our nation that come from either side of the divide of the past, the perpetrators and the victims, are deserving of freedom in equal measure. 

In this regard, when we agreed to establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), we meant to lay bare the truth about the past atrocities perpetrated against the oppressed. 

At the same time, this was an opportunity for the perpetrators to come forward and to disclose the full details of their role in the violations of human rights. 

The TRC therefore was not a process meant for the victims alone, but for all of us South Africans, including the perpetrators, to know the full truth so that we could build on it the foundation for a new society.  

Consequently, all of us agree that if we are to bring about true reconciliation among our people, there would have to be a form of community reparations to make up for the damage done to them. 

We did this well aware that the gross injustices visited on our people could not be quantified in monetary terms. 

However, true reconciliation would be strengthened by not only symbolic reparations, such as communal facilities geared to help improve the living conditions of our people but by the attainment of better life for all.  

In this connection we have been driven by the realisation that victims of sufferings, responding to the imperatives of history, had to bear the brunt of the struggle in the form of deaths and material losses. 

In a manner of speaking, the act of dressing up the wounds of the past must be preceded by the painful processes of washing and cleaning them up in order to ensure that no germs are left in the wounds. 

In the same vein, The Freedom Park represents a vision of providing a platform to bring the nation together for healing and reconciliation purposes – the very reason we are here today. 

It is to this symbolic place that our nation should turn to find echoes of the past and learn valuable lessons going forward.  

Indeed, the act of coming to Freedom Park is intended to draw relevant lessons so that the past is by no means repeated by future generations. 

At the same time, all of us South Africans cannot absolve ourselves from the responsibility to deepen this ethos of reconciliation. 

As much as government can provide and has provided the enabling conditions for healing and reconciliation, the challenge is for our nation as a whole to participate actively in promoting our reconciliation agenda.  

Our policies aimed at further strengthening reconciliation in our nation will need to be internalised and turned into lived reality by all citizens of South Africa. 

All the social role players, including business and civil society, must take the responsibility to promote national reconciliation through contributing to programmes of social cohesion.   

Social cohesion cannot be built in an environment of racial enmity or a refusal to acknowledge past challenges which are still casting their long, cold shadows on the present. 

In this regard, I am calling on all South Africans on this historically symbolic day to recommit themselves to the vision of a non-racial society conscious of the injustices of the past and the need to work together across all social barriers to realise this noble vision.  

Fourteen years into our democracy, there is much that we have achieved together, and yet more still needs to be done to achieve the promised better life for all. 

Chairperson
Very soon our country will once again be going to the polls to elect a new government, a step that will further consolidate our fledgling democracy. 

On this day we should also recommit ourselves to uphold the noble principles enshrined in our constitution, which include freedom of expression. 

The history we share and the common future we seek to build impel all of us to collectively affirm the democratic rights of all to express themselves without any restriction within the confines of the constitution. 

Consistent with this, we call upon our people to continue to uphold all the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, so that all political entities in the country can express themselves politically, without let or hindrance.  

Let all of us South Africans resolve to work for our common destiny as a nation, so that the values we have sown continue to inspire us to achieve our goals of a united, democratic, non racial, non sexist and prosperous nation. 

I thank you. 

Issued by: The Presidency
16 December 2008