Thank you very much. I'm particularly pleased that there are so many students here. I've been working with students all my life and nothing is more pleasant than to see young, expectant faces at the threshold of a new life and particularly to stand as we are all at the cusp of a new millennium and to get done with the things of the past of this millennium and take a shot at a completely new world that is awaiting us out there. A world with enormous challenges of scientific, technological, and economic nature, but also a world of enormous challenges in the social and political fields. When everything is said and done, and we have reached all our goals and objectives, then the most important issue remains to live together as human beings and as people. I think it's often forgotten that that is the fundamental objective. It's more important than anything else, because if you fail at that then everything else that we have achieved could be and will be rendered to nothing, and therefore any discussion about the future of the country, any discussion of the future of the world, must in the end begin and end with the discussion of people. Economy, economics, science and technology must serve that object and not the other way around, and often we forget that the bottom line becomes the most important concern and people don't matter. Scientific development becomes more important and people don't matter, and that should be reversed. We must refocus on the importance of making a better world for all our people in the future. It's in this area particularly where we in South Africa, with the help of many people in this country and all across the world, have achieved very important milestones and are hoping from those milestones to achieve new milestones. I'm very aware this afternoon that I'm in the presence of the Norwegian Consul General. When I was [in Norway] last I went with President Mandela when he received the Nobel Peace Prize, so I'm going to be very careful in what I say just now or else I don't get the Nobel Peace Prize. I just want to say I'm very glad that you are here and also very, very proud of the way that, through this Nobel Peace Prize and other very important ventures like that, the focus is placed on achievement in the field of building peace, building unity, understanding and celebrating diversity by building unity of people throughout the world. I'm also always very aware of the important role that the United States is playing in the world. It must be quite a feeling for an American to realize and recognize that you are at a point in history where few other nations have been throughout all the ages. Where you feel that you are a citizen of a country that is the leading country in the world, to whom the world looks for leadership. A country that has achieved more in its short life than any nation has ever achieved in the history of mankind. Never has the level of development occurred anywhere in the world than as [it has] developed in this country. Never have the natural resources of a country been harnessed to the common good as it has happened in this country. No country has achieved economic development and good for its citizens as this country has. It's absolutely astounding to see how much you have and how you have turned this into the common good.

The thing that stands out at this particular time in the history of your country is the situation where unemployment is, in real terms, at zero point. Anybody who has strength and a will to work can find work. This is where we are as far as the United States is concerned. You have a political system that can guide this country to greatness, and I think the response of your general elections that were just [held] showed again that the United States is concerned with performing the role that it has to perform as a leader of not only the free world but the leader of the world. We are therefore, from that point of view, conscious of our relationship with the United States of America and also very conscious of the fact that we have a very special relationship with the United States of America. We know that that relationship is not only going to serve the interests of our own country but also the interests of the United States, and therefore the interests of our common relationship if that relationship remains a respectful one, if it remains an honorable one, if it remains an honest one and it remains one where each nation, each part of the partnership, will be guarding its own integrity, its own sovereignty and will be willing, out of that relationship, to be straight and honest with each other. Now we actually have a mandate to do so.

I think there is no ambassador to the United States to Washington with more of a right to criticize or to speak to America about its failings, if that is what it wants to do, than the South African Ambassador. I have the right - you know where I get the right from? An American can get up and say "You dare not interfere in our domestic affairs," and I can say "Well, you interfered in ours." And that is true. America is one nation that interfered directly in South Africa's internal affairs and through that process of interference helped us to our liberation. When you've done things like that with each other a very special relationship develops between countries. It is always moving and touching for me to see, for example, your president, President Clinton, and President Mandela together. It's not only a political partnership, neither is it a partnership of heads of state and neither is it a relationship of friends. It's almost, as I often remind my president, like an uncle and a nephew. That is the relationship between them. I once said to President Clinton, "You relate in such a special way to President Mandela when we were together," and he said "I don't relate in a special way. I'm in awe of him," and that is wonderful. The President of the United States in awe of an African leader. That's great. It says much more than just across countries. It talks about Africa and the Northern Hemisphere. It talks about a new recognition of what Africa has to give to the world.

I do believe that Africa has much to give to the world, particularly when it comes to the whole question of living together as people who are in the fortunate position as a Southern African country to have a first-class economic, technological and scientific infrastructure. We have a banking system as good as you can find anywhere else in the world, an independent central bank, we have everything in place. If you are in Johannesburg you could just as well be in Chicago; all the services you require you can obtain at the push of a button, but at the same time it is also a country which is wrestling to come free of its past. Carmen [Nava] just referred to one very important exercise that we have just emerged from: [the Truth and Reconciliation Commission]. As we wrote our new constitution, as we were busy putting down the ground work for the new South African nation we had to ask ourselves the question "How did other nations do it? How did this great nation of the stars and stripes, how did they do it? What did they do right and what did they neglect to do and what did they do wrong? What is there in the society now that is the result of what they haven't done before or as a result of what they have done but have done wrongly when they sat down and wrote the foundation of the new society?" Then to take that and to take it to our table and to say "Let us look at this afresh. Let us make sure that we will do the painful things. That we will do the difficult things in order to ensure a better future." And one of the issues that we gave attention to, that became perfectly clear that probably, if one could criticize the United States, what the United States could have given more attention to and didn't was the whole issue of race relations.

I knew that we had to take cognizance of that because we knew that race relations is an unpleasant subject. It's like emphasizing issues of difference when we are all one unity. It talks about the past and nobody likes that past, but the point about the past is that if you do not fix the past, then the past bothers you at the time just when you sit down to dinner and then you have to deal with it. It comes up, as the British like to say "like a bad penny." Therefore, it is necessary to look at it. We took this as a serious lesson from perhaps the failings of the United States that there wasn't sufficient effort to attend to the question of race relations to the point where at the present moment, if you should ask me "how is South Africa important to the United States of America. This is a little country, it's in the middle of nowhere. If you push hard it falls off the face of the earth and we are a giant and how could you even suggest that there is a special relationship, or how could you suggest that your country could be important to the United States of America?" Then my response is the following: "You know, we are not in this world alone and neither were we ever meant to be alone. We are together with others and our success is not measured never, ever how we perform as individuals." Our success is measured on how we perform as a group and how we perform within the group. How we through our efforts help the group to do better than it could have had we not been there.

And so it is with the world--as splendid as the United States is, it cannot live in splendid isolation and there is a tendency, young students, for the United States to think that the world ends at the Pacific coastline and the Atlantic coastline and if you really must think of it, it ends at the Canadian border and that's the world and there is much reason to think that and there's much good reason to think that because as I said this country has so much and gives so much but it is not so. In fact, the truth is that some of the most serious disasters that this nation faced in the past and will also face in the future will not be the doings of the internal dynamics of this nation that is the threats and the consequences of actions from outside. The times when this nation was threatened, its existence was threatened, was because of outside threats and therefore it is important that a threat must be managed or it tends to manage you. For that reason we have to ask the question "how are other parts of the world important to us?"

That is why foreign policy is a very, very important element in any country, an important aspect of the U.S. government as well, foreign policy is based on serving and promoting national interests and to promote national interests most effectively [one must] understand the interests of other nations and find ways and means of conflating those interests so that there is a movement forward rather than a conflict of interests. For that reason, one then has to ask the question "What are the interests of the United States and to what extent can a small nation like us, to what extent can we supply what is needed for those interests and to what extent can we also ameliorate threats to the interests, the fundamental interests, of the United States?" Now there is much material to do an economic analysis of this, but I will not do so. What I will [note] is, the economic inter-dependence of the world, the fact that Japan is suffering is felt throughout the world and then the Dow is effected on Wall Street, those elements are self-evident.

But what is more important is for us to ask what are the concerns, the fundamental concerns of the United States? What are its interests? If I look at the interests of the United States, two outstanding ones where we believe we can play a role and where we have shown that we have played a role, is in the question of race relations and in the question of nuclear nonproliferation. Those are two fundamental issues for the United States. Often people say to me "The question of race relations is overemphasized in the United States because if you look at the numbers, the Caucasian people dominate in the United States," and I say, "Yes, but the non- Caucasians dominate in the cities." A country, particularly a technologically-advanced country, is governed from its cities. Therefore, its been shown that this matter should be dealt with constructively, that it is unfinished business that requires attention. From that point of view, South Africa is a formal partner of the United States; it's not only a friendly nation, it's a partner. There are agreements and documented partnerships between Washington and Pretoria and we, as a partner, realize that we hold the card to, in fact, help the United States meet the challenges in race relations, in a city like Los Angeles, a city like New York, and a city like Washington, D.C. Therefore, it is important that when President Mandela visits here we recognize that he comes here as not only a leader of South Africa but also that he comes with an image of an African Black leader that has made all Black people all over the world proud and has shown that we can transcend our own bitterness, our own sense of having been down, our own bitter history. We can choose the high ground and by so doing lift the spirit, lift the vision of Black people here and across the world to participate in the bigger projects in the world and that in a minute I will try to talk about a little bit more.

A second area is the area of nuclear nonproliferation. That is a direct threat to the United States, and yet the United States realizes that there is very little that it could do to stop the proliferation of nuclear armaments. Scientific and technological advances make it possible for a small nation to destroy the major cities in the United States without even traveling here. This is a crisis, it's a big issue in the world. It has been since the discovery of nuclear armaments. In order to place a curb, in order to get nations to disarm, there should be a persuasion process on the floor of the United Nations which is then executed through processes in-between that the nations of the world agree to. There are a large block of nations in the world called the non- aligned nations. It's actually a misnomer because they were not allied to the East and neither were they allied to the West. But how do you get these people to commit themselves, not only to nuclear nonproliferation but to nuclear disarmament?

Not so long ago one of the first issues that was on my table when I came to the United States is this matter of the indeterminate extension of the nonproliferation treaty. The United States took it to the United Nations where they would get all nations to subscribe to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty but it did not know that if it asks for nonproliferation nobody would vote for it. It's an unfortunate law of history that the small boys never vote with the big boys. The United States is a nuclear force. It has its complete and full nuclear arsenal intact; for it therefore to ask other nations not to acquire nuclear arms or to disband nuclear programs would be a bit of a temerity. The U.S. realized that essentially this big nation is essentially in a weak spot as far as that is concerned and it was in this regard again that I saw clearly how important it was for the United States to get the support of South Africa, to argue that case from the floor of the United States. So there's a treaty today binding nations to subscribe to the rules conducting nuclear proliferation that was signed and nations are expected to hold to them and if they don't the whole world focuses on that nation, as you see is the case at the present moment. But it was South Africa that did this.

And how did South Africa do this? South Africa did it by simply disarming itself, by inviting the world to come and look at how billions of dollars of money that was invested in the nuclear program was destroyed by pouring concrete down our test sites and by asking the world to come and see whenever they doubt that we have destroyed our nuclear capacity and then go out and say "now we want to fight for the rest of the world to do so." And that places us in a very distinctive model position.

So those are just two aspects to show how the interests of the United States are served by a country like South Africa and we want to continue to do so. We want to continue to do so in trade, we want to continue to do so in industry, and we want to continue to do so in economic and financial investment and this is occurring. When I came here at the beginning of 1995 the investment into South Africa was somewhere on the order of about 3 billion dollars. Today it's almost 11 billion dollars. Americans are responding to the opportunities in South Africa. They are understanding also that it's in their interests to invest in countries that offer good returns and a future for their investments. Carmen sits here and she knows that our own company, SBC, is the largest foreign investor into Africa when it bought, with Malaysia Telecom, 50 percent of the telecommunications industry of South Africa. That is an American-South African partnership, conflation of interests, the interests of the shareholders of the American investor in SBC and the growth of the industry and also the economic prowess of our country.

To return, to the whole question of race relations: we decided we were going to deal with by facing up to the past. By examining the past. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I want to tell you this. That I, as a South African, discovered at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It's that the past is so real that it comes right into the future all the time, comes right into the present all the time. What happened yesterday, what happened the year before, what happened many years or generations ago, comes back and back. Children want to know, what am I? Who am I? Where do I come from? Why are things the way they are? Tell me, Mommy. And then mother tells them, influences them, colors their perspective for the now and colors their perspective for the future. If we want our children, our young leaders, to work for peace, to work for unity, to work for a better world, then they must understand not only where things went wrong but what is being done to put them right. If you don't do that, then you are in fact in a proverbial way trying to sweep the sins of the past under the carpet.

Having said that, the difficulty that every human being has to concede is that, you know, with all our abilities, yes, it's a brain surgeon that treats a brain and a mind as if it's a telephone and he has mastered science and skills that are mind-boggling. Those issues are doable. But one thing that human beings have to remind ourselves about is that there are things that we can't do, things that we are hopeless children about. Things that are like a willow in the wind, we just don't know how to deal with them. But that does not give us excuses not to try to deal with them. One area where the human being does not have the capacity to deal effectively and adequately is the area of the past. No scientist can get up and say "I've got the answer on how to deal with the past." It's a difficult area, because it consists of things that have happened, that people have done, and that you can do very little about, but you also have to face that it has consequences. You have to deal with those consequences, and you have to find a way of doing it bearing in mind the inherent limitations upon you in order to deal with them. This is where an element comes in where you try and deal with the past in as truthful and as transparent and as open a manner [as you can]. You confess to each other your sins of uselessness and hopelessness when you deal with this problem because then, already, you have made progress. Just say to the next person "You know, we have done a lot wrong against you. I've done a lot to you. I don't know what to do about it, can you tell me what you think I ought to do about it?" and even after that, then you've already achieved much, what you don't achieve is if you say "because I can't do anything about it, let's forget about it and move forward."

Throughout history, and particularly modern history, in Chile, in Nicaragua, in Argentina, in Germany after the Second World War, the issue of the past was brought to the table. And every time there was just a lot of inadequacies. The time after the Holocaust in the Second World War it was decided to shoot the 13 judges who were responsible for sentencing people unfairly and were responsible for the legal system in Germany. We looked at that and we said "That was a great act, wonderful to get to see the brains of your enemy fly against the wall. That gives us a great sense of ?I got him.'" But then you ask the question "So, what have I achieved now?" And the answer to that is that the kids of that judge are now going to chase you, and in their hearts they will never forget how their grandparents died. So you just open up a new circle and a new cycle of recrimination. We said, "that we don't want." We looked at the models of South American, countries and we decided that what we were going to do was to call all those people who have committed atrocities to come publicly forward to say what they've done in the presence of those next of kin of people that have been treated in a manner that is atrocious. So that a mother can yell what has happened to her son. So that a father can be told that his son's bones lie at the bottom of a dam, or that the children could hear that their father was burned in the field. And then at least they know that and you know that the knowledge of things like that is important to victims, and then to be able to see the person that has perpetrated that confessing to what he has done -- and then to ask the pardon of those that have perpetrated it.

In South Africa right at the present moment people _{106]___________ you are sitting listening to me now, questioning "is that enough?" The answer is "no, it's not enough." But what more can you do? Well, you can say "Put it in front of a bus and just drive over his body with all the wheels and do that publicly." That sounds good, but where does that bring you? So in a way this discourse about the past must be brought into the open. Those that were purely criminal acts and not politically motivated, those acts should be up for punishment. I want to tell you that this has been an attempt to bring white people and black people together, to bring the perpetrators of apartheid and its atrocious system together with the people who were the victims of it. Also, for us who fought the war of liberation, to hear what happened in our camps, to hear what we've done to people who spied on the system and to put that out there so that the nation knows. When we've bled over it and we've talked about it and we've punished those that need it by public punishment and forgiven those that have done it because they did it in pursuit of a political goal, we can then say "Let's now decide that we have dispensed with the past and moved forward." But the point that I want to make is that it is not an easy matter. It was a difficult problem, it's still difficult. We're still bleeding and we've still suffering as a consequence, but we did it in the spirit and in the sense that as well as we are developing and growing at the present moment economically, doing very well scientifically, technologically, politically, extremely good, our government is doing an exceptionally good job.

I heard the other day Michel Camdessus, the head of the IMF, say to President Mandela that South Africa is really an example of fiscal discipline, of good financial management to the rest of the world, and it shows on the market, but if we can do all that right, if we fail to take the past into recognition, if we fail to look at ways where things went wrong in the family of the South African nation and if we fail then together to commit white hands to take black hands and say "It is our country together. We are all here together. We have more than you have because we have had more privileges, because we have had more advantages, and we are now going to work to bring you up to level with us. Let us do this together. Let us join hands and work together." If we fail in that particular process, then we would have failed our country anyway, even if we become good at whatever we try to do.

People often, and this is my closing comment, people often make the statement that it's Mandela who's done this. It is true Mandela is a remarkable person. In fact, he is quite extraordinary. He is quite unbelievable. When you find a person who goes to jail because he pleads for peace and he pleads for unity and he comes out of jail 50 years later and it's almost as if he says "As I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me" and he just goes on and works for goodness. But the point to make is that he is not unique. The spirit of Mandela would have climbed, would not have succeeded had he not received the endorsement and the agreement of the South African nation. This is very African, very African. You read the history of any African nation and you will find that in that history there was a leader who came to power on the basis of the mandate of the spirit and sense of his people. He said, "let's move on." A very good example to me that I leave you with is Sadat. He's not forgotten. Everybody talks about the Israelis, about Rabin, and Begin. But it was Sadat who looked forward and said "I want peace." And Sadat lost his life in the process. He's dead now, he's assassinated. Many others were also. Martin Luther King said "Let's work together. Let's forget the past. Let's make equality real and move on and build a great America." He was shot for that. He's dead now, he's gone.

So we can go through the world and there were people like that and the whole South African nation together today stands ready to proceed and continue, not only with the foundations laid by Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Anwar Sadat, Ghandi and others, but also to stand ready to carry this message of togetherness of peace in the world into the future.

It is for that reason, when I started my talk, I said I'm so pleased that the young people are here because, young people, this is the message that you must take forward. You must take the message forward that we are diverse and different people but in that diversity and difference lie the wonderful challenge that, because we are different, we can live and work to become one, or we can use our differences as a reason to start fighting and tearing each others' eyes out. I believe that we, as the older people, have now laid the groundwork for you to move into the new millennium with a mind set, with various examples of nations and of peoples who have chosen to do the courageous thing, to talk about the past in order to bring about reconciliation and to build unity so that all the powers, all the scientific, technological, financial, medical, all these wonderful abilities that you nation has become known for, that all those powers could be harnessed in one direction and that is to bring peace, equanimity, magnamity and unity in the world.

I think for all those of us who are believing people it is not for nothing that all this happens at the end of the 20th century. We can now go into the next millennium; it's almost in years a period ends, and it's almost in years the next millennium starts and we are going one day to follow the young people as they take us into a better future than the one that we have left for them. So this is my message, this is the vision of South Africa and this is the vision of the new world for all of us. What is most wonderful about this vision is that we know it's realizable because people like Mandela and many others have shown through their lives that in fact it is real and it is possible. It's not pie in the sky. It is really possible to achieve this. Again, I believe that this great nation, the United States of America, will be the leader in making this possible. Not only what it does on its own, but also how it conducts itself in the world. It's for that reason that I feel that the relationship between South Africa and the United States is one made in heaven. It's a great relationship. It's two nations who know what they want to do, and who are ready and prepared to do it together.

Thank you very much.