S. Africa celebrates reconciliation

Friday, December 16, 2005; Posted: 7:59 a.m. EST (12:59 GMT)

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JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- President Thabo Mbeki urged South Africans to set aside apartheid divisions at a celebration of racial reconciliation Friday, while across town a white extremist leader commemorated a bloody colonial victory over tribal warriors.

The events in the capital, Pretoria, underscored lingering tensions 11 years after the end of oppressive white minority rule.

Addressing a ceremony marking South Africa's Reconciliation Day, Mbeki said government had removed many racist laws from the statute books. But he said government's efforts have not been matched by South Africa's people.

"Real reconciliation and nation building can only happen when the South African people, black and white, through their own initiatives, without any prompting from government, take visible and decisive steps to take down the racial walls that still divide us," Mbeki said in a speech broadcast on national television.

"Indeed we need to confront what may be an uncomfortable question, whether as South Africans, black and white, we are under the same flag and under the same anthem marching separately -- even pretending at times that the other does not exist."

He also noted that wealth continues to be distributed along racial lines in Africa's economic powerhouse.

"Accordingly it is the duty not merely of government but of all South Africans to unite against poverty," Mbeki said at the annual ceremony held at Freedom Park, a memorial ground outside Pretoria to honor those who died in the country's many conflicts.

Under apartheid, December 16 was celebrated as the Day of the Covenant, when the descendants of Dutch settlers gave thanks for an 1838 victory in which 500 of them armed with guns circled their wagons into a "laager" and fought off 15,000 spear-wielding Zulus. More than 3,000 Zulus died in the clash known as the Battle of Blood River, while only three Boers suffered slight injuries.

Today, December 16 is a day celebrating the reconciliation achieved between black and white with the country's first all-race election in 1994. But hundreds of Afrikaners still gather every year at the Voortrekker Monument outside Pretoria to mark their old holiday. The 41-meter (135-foot) granite monument commemorates the Dutch settlers' arduous trek into the country's interior.

Others gathered this year in downtown Pretoria for a speech by Eugene Terre'Blanche, leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, who was released last year after serving three years in jail for the beating of a black worker. Terre'Blanche, who arrived and left on horseback, reminisced about the heyday of white rule.

"We have lost everything. We have lost our country," he was quoted as saying by the South African Press Association. "The volk (people) must get together again and go into a laager."

The rival ceremonies took place on the 10th anniversary of the founding of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a landmark attempt to heal the wounds of the past that has inspired other nations confronting turbulent pasts.

"We have come from far knowing that we need one another," the commission's chairman, former archbishop and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu said in a message broadcast Friday on national television. "A rainbow is a rainbow because it is made up of different colors."

He expressed regret, however, in a separate radio interview that more human rights violators were not prosecuted after failing to apply for amnesty from his panel in exchange for disclosing details of their crimes.

"We are allowing impunity," Tutu told the South African Broadcasting Corp. on Thursday night.

He also said more should have been done for the victims who came forward to tell their stories of apartheid horrors. The government has agreed to one-off payments of 30,000 rands ($4,760) each to the thousands of victims of gross abuses who testified, but the payments fall far short of what was recommended by Tutu's panel.