Chairperson,
Secretary General of the World Conference, Mary Robinson,
Comrades and friends:

On behalf of our government and people, I am honoured to welcome you all to the NGO Forum on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and > Related Intolerance and to extend our best wishes to you for success in your important deliberations.

I would also like to convey a special warm welcome to all the delegates who are here from other countries.

Many among you, and many of the communities and organisations you represent, were combatants in the global struggle for the defeat of the apartheid system and therefore the suppression of the apartheid crime against humanity.

I am therefore pleased to take advantage of this opportunity once more to express our deep-felt gratitude to you, who represent the peoples of the world, for everything you did to ensure that we liberate ourselves from racism and racial discrimination.

We therefore welcome you to South Africa and to Durban as our own liberators, trusting and hoping that you will view this small patch on > the globe as your home.

We welcome you to the African Continent, as victorious fellow combatants in the struggle that finally liquidated the system of colonialism and transformed the last and most stubborn domicile of white minority rule > in Africa into a democratic country.

We welcome you as comrades with whom we have combined, to form a world army of peoples united against racism, for the construction of a common universe of democracy, non-racism, non-sexism, human dignity for all and prosperity for all.

If, in spite of your heavy programme, you have the possibility to tour this important port city of the Indian Ocean, you will see, as in a > living museum, what racism did to this country, which can justly claim to have been the original home of all humanity.

You will see patterns of human settlement that separate Africans, > whites, Indians and Coloureds, to use South African categories with which I am certain you are familiar.

You will also see that these patterns of human settlement also describe in stark terms what it has meant to be black or white, in terms of the distribution of wealth and income or the incidence of poverty and prosperity. They tell a story that is both pathetic and dramatic about the difference between human fulfilment and human degradation.

In other words, you will be exposed to the legacy of a centuries long experience of slavery, colonialism and racial domination which we are determined to eradicate and will eradicate, despite the resistance of those who have benefited from injustice for many centuries.

You are therefore in a country that carries the scars of the entirety of what constitutes the abhorrent legacy of the second millennium, as a result of which the peoples of the world have convened in this city, at the beginning of the third millennium.

You joined in struggle to liberate a country that, in many respects, represented the most malignant expression of a cancer, racism, that is deeply embedded within the universal human experience and within the contemporary global village in which we all live.

It would therefore be correct to say that when we waged the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, at the same time, we were engaged in struggle against global apartheid and apartheid in all countries of our common universe.

In 1994, together we achieved an important victory by defeating white minority rule in South Africa. As we celebrated that victory, we also said the struggle continues!

We said the struggle continues because the defeat of racist rule was but the beginning of a long journey towards the creation of a truly non-racial country.

We said the struggle continues because the birth of a democratic South Africa gave us an additional combat base from which we would sustain our offensive to eradicate all expressions of apartheid injustice everywhere else in the world.

On behalf of the masses of our people who know precisely what racism means, I would like to assure you that this liberated area shall forever remain a reliable base for the pursuit of the common struggle to create a non-racial and non-sexist world.

This NGO Forum will have no meaning unless it unites around the call - peoples of the world unite in struggle against racism until victory is achieved!

Similarly, the inter-governmental conference that will begin in a few days will have no meaning unless it unites around the call - peoples of the world unite in struggle against racism until victory is achieved!

Neither will have succeeded unless these historic conventions result in programmes of action that directly and urgently address the plight and the fate of those whom an irreversible history has defined as the progeny of slave parents, the children of the colonised, the offspring of the racially oppressed, those whom South African apartheid and global apartheid described and treated as sub-human.

It used to be that the superiority of those who are white and the inferiority of those who are black, was enforced, presented and justified as the natural order of things.

Equally, we can and must say that the superiority of those who are male and the inferiority of those who are female, was enforced, presented and justified as the natural order of things.

As has been said, as long as the lions do not have their own historians, so long will the hunters emerge as heroic, mighty and right.

As long as those who are black did not have a voice, so long did those who are white walk the world stage as the very epitome of everything human and humane.

As long as those who are female did not have a voice, so long did those who are male rule the roost as the repository of everything necessary to determine the construction of a civilised human society.

It used to be that the prosperity and advancement of the few and the poverty and underdevelopment of many was enforced, presented and justified as the natural order of things.

As long as the poor and underdeveloped did not have a voice, so long did those who are prosperous and developed continue to present themselves as the select few, who succeeded because they dared to work for their success, while the rest served because they were predestined to serve.

Today, none but the dim-witted and those deranged by fanaticism dare stand up and openly hoist the racist and sexist standards of the past.

It may be that those who, for whatever reason, do not have eyes to see and ears to hear, to borrow a Biblical expression, believe that because racism and sexism are bereft of respectable advocates, they have ceased to exist as social constructs that determine the lives and the future of billions of people.

We have gathered in Durban at the beginning of a century and a millennium because the studied silence of the apostles and practitioners of racism and sexism has not lulled us into the belief that what is not proclaimed from the rooftops does not exist.

Everywhere and without exception, race and gender continue to define the actual living spaces that billions of human beings occupy. They dictate the boundaries that frustrate the translation into reality of the noble concepts that people are born equal, and that all of us are creations of the same natural or super-natural impulse that gave birth to the human world.

All of us have gathered in Durban at the beginning of a century and a millennium because we uphold the view that the walls of racism must come down.

We are meeting here because we are determined to break down these human-made barriers that block what should be an open road to a new world of justice, equality and dignity for all human beings. In this country, as we struggle to remove the roadblocks and strive to open the way to a better life for all, many say that relative to the situation in our immediate past, the enemy is now difficult to identify.

Some of these see themselves as being imprisoned in a circumference within which all, without exception, profess an abiding commitment to help create a just domestic and universal world order. Inside this prison, they can see that the real life they lead, together with countless others besides, at home and abroad, is characterised by alienation, injustice and suffering.

Thus do we communicate promising messages of hope for a better future, when life itself seems to confirm an inevitable and permanent state of hopelessness?

If we are, indeed, responsible leaders of the people we lead or claim to lead, it is imperative that we act to ensure that ideas and reality begin to coalesce. The bright future for humanity we declare as our common goal must find concrete expression in the actual and visible evolution of human society towards that better future for all.

Neither I nor anyone else can say anything more challenging and demanding than that all of us must act to ensure that the vision represented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is translated in our countries and throughout the world into a movement towards the universal achievement of these human rights. It is to define and to agree on the ways and means by which we can, practically, move all humanity towards the realisation of this goal that we meet here today, at this historic NGO Forum against Racism.

The central question that you, the delegates and participants, will have to answer in the clearest way possible is - what is to be done!

As you answer that question, you will not only have to spell out what we fight for. You will also have to explain who is or what are the enemy or enemies that we fight against.

Certainly, one of these enemies goes by the name - denial. There are some in our country and others elsewhere in the world who, for various reasons, argue that class rather than race is the issue we should focus on if we are to understand the huge inequalities that characterise contemporary human society.

The truth, however, is that we have to address both issues of class and race. Clearly inter-linked, one should not be used to deny the impact and relevance of the other, however uncomfortable it might be for some openly and vigorously to confront the scourge of racism.

As I have already said, if you move around this city, and in the country as a whole, you will need no high academic certificate to determine the extent to which our socio-economic reality, and therefore the lives of millions, continue to be defined by the legacy of slavery, colonialism and racism.

This would be true of other cities and countries in the world, including the G7, other developed and developing countries which, surely, would do well to recognise the fact that their societies as well, are, in part, characterised by the centuries old legacy of racism.

Once again, no professional qualification is required to understand that the divide between the North and the South, between the developed and the developing worlds also coincides with the divide between white and black, broadly defined.

These are obvious facts that, in truth, should require no debate. In today's world, in which both the left and the right in politics loudly proclaim their commitment to social justice, there should also be no debate about the urgent need for each and all countries consciously to focus on the elimination of the racial disparities that are so evident everywhere.

The critical importance of this matter should be particularly clear to those who not only recognise the objective reality of the process of globalisation, but also celebrate this process as a force for human emancipation from poverty and underdevelopment.

Put starkly, where this process of globalisation has had negative consequences, its worst victims within countries and universally have been those who are not white? For these countless black people, this has not only meant that the development gap has grown ever wider.

It has also meant the further entrenchment of the structural dis-empowerment of billions of people, making it even more difficult for them to break out of the trap of poverty and underdevelopment.

It is perfectly obvious that the implication of this is that these billions are thus being defined as permanent welfare cases, whose lives and humanity will forever be sustained by the humanitarian assistance of the minority that owns the bulk of global wealth. Such an outcome is both fundamentally undesirable and completely unsustainable.

It is equally obvious that even as it marches triumphant throughout the globe, like an invincible army, the process of globalisation contains within it the makings of an insoluble crisis that will affect even its greatest beneficiaries, unless its inherent tendency to marginalise many is halted and reversed.

Even as it rewards some handsomely, it also helps to create its own enemy. Driven to take to the barricades by unbearable suffering in the midst of plenty, this enemy will surely be weakened by hunger and poverty.

At the same time, it will be greatly strengthened by the fact of the size of the army it can muster, made up of those who are poor and in many instances black, broadly defined. Against this army, there are no impregnable fortresses.

We have gathered at this NGO Forum Against Racism from all corners of the globe because we are not fatalists who believe that there exists a natural order of things that condemns some to poverty, subservience and dehumanisation.

We believe that the human condition can and must be changed through conscious human interventions. It is to agree on these interventions that we have gathered here today.

I would like to believe that a common outcome we all seek is a measurable commitment within countries and among all nations that practical steps will be taken and resources allocated, actually to eradicate the legacy of slavery, colonialism and racism that condemns billions across the globe to poverty and despair. A necessary first step in this regard is an unqualified acknowledgement of the fact that slavery, colonialism and racism represent chapters and practices in human history that cannot but be condemned unequivocally as unjust.

I would like to believe that we want to make the assertion boldly that no human being anywhere in the world can be truly fulfilled if other human beings on our common planet continue to be dehumanised by racial and gender oppression and discrimination and povertyand even by statelessness, as has happened to the Palestinian people.

Accordingly, I would like to believe that the result on which our eyes are focused is the actual emancipation and sustained upliftment of those who continue to suffer from racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

We should not allow ourselves to be diverted by those who are opposed to this outcome of the eradication of the legacy and practice of slavery, colonialism and racism.

Everything must be done to address the gross racial imbalances that stare us in the face everyday. The first step towards the realisation of this objective is a firm commitment by governments and all of us that we will do everything necessary to work towards this outcome.

Together, we constitute the vanguard of the global mass movement, the forces of change that struggle for a just, non-racial and non-sexist world.

The responsibility rests with us to ensure that we mobilise the peoples of the world to act together in unity and solidarity to defeat and bury the demon of racism. Billions across our common globe depend on you to produce this result and thus affirm, in practice, that every human being, regardless of race, colour, origin or gender is entitled to human dignity.

I am convinced that we who are gathered here stand at an extraordinary moment in historic time when it is possible to break through the sound barrier that has, for centuries, defined some as superior and others inferior, simply on the basis of race and colour or caste.

Whether we break through this barrier will depend on what you decide and what you decide to do, as you meet here on the shores of one of the great waterways that link all humanity everywhere, the Indian Ocean. The time is out of joint. You have the duty and possibility to set it right.

On behalf especially of the wretched of the earth, I wish you success in your important work. Thank you.

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