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South African Ambassador to Korea Hilton Dennis smiles during an interview with The Korea Times at the embassy in Seoul, last Monday. |
By Kang Hyun-kyung
The late South African leader Nelson Mandela has left a lasting legacy that might be applicable to the Korean Peninsula as South Korea seeks to achieve unification.
On April 14, South African Ambassador to Korea Hilton Dennis said that the legacy boils down to conditioned forgiveness that oppressors will be forgiven if they repent and make full disclosure of their wrongdoings.
The envoy indicated that the Mandela legacy could help ease the fears of the North Korean elite for possible consequences in the post-unification days for their decades-long human rights abuses, and therefore facilitate the unification process.
"(Mandela's response to the National Party governments that implemented decades-long racial segregation) was a more measured and balanced approach, which we believe can have a more lasting impact in terms of the stability of our country," Dennis said in an interview with The Korea Times.
"(The approach) also demonstrates to people around the world that balancing all these interests between hope and fear can be done in a moderate manner."
The ambassador was referring to the guiding principle of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, which was established in 1995, a year after Mandela was elected through the first democratic election.
Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, set up the body to correct the wrongs of the past during the discriminative National Party governments.
The white minority group had implemented a set of segregation measures, widely-known as "apartheid," which means apartness in English.
During the apartheid governments, non-white South Africans were removed from their homes, forced into segregated neighborhoods and their political representation was abolished in 1970.
The United Nations defined apartheid as a war crime.
"During the apartheid governments, many people disappeared. No one knows what happened to them, but people who worked with the security structure of the government knew it," Dennis said.
"So they had to make full disclosure of it. If they didn't make full disclosure, then later legal process could well apply to them. So there was an incentive for them to come forward and tell the full story. Details of how people, who had disappeared, were killed were provided."
The ambassador said that no one in the security or military of the former apartheid government was brought to justice.
Dennis said those who had suffered bitterly during the apartheid regimes came to have a sense of justice while watching the activities of the reconciliation commission.
South Africa is slated to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first non-racial elections on April 27.
Dennis said that the Mandela legacy could help South Korea in its pursuit of peaceful unification.
"I believe some of North Korean elite might have fears because of the thought that they could be brought to an international court because of their involvement in repressive acts against North Korean residents," he said.
The South African envoy said South Korea needs to craft a strategy to convince the members of the North Korean ruling class to believe that they can also benefit once the two Koreas are unified.
"Our peace process in South Africa went on four years, from 1990 to 1994. What brought it down was that those people who had the power, the elite, in the white-people community were worried that if the state fell too quickly then they would lose access to economic power and their standard of living would drop," he said.
"So I am sure in the North there are elites (who share the same concern that South African white minority rulers had in the early 1990s). Therefore you have to develop an approach that can make sure that they are not destroyed (if unification happens)."
WMD lesson
He recommended that a joint group of South Korean officials and members of the North Korean ruling class take a field trip to South Africa to meet former military generals or security officials under the apartheid governments to see that no retaliation was made after the black government took power.
Dennis said South Africa's experience in dismantling its nuclear program in the 1990s can also help North Korea understand that it will be better off if it opts for denuclearization.
South Africa spent nearly 25 percent of a government budget to develop cutting-edge military facilities and weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, some 30 years ago, he said.
After the dismantling of its nuclear program, Dennis said, now South Africa spends less than 1 percent of its budget for defense.
"We thought that we could reduce the threats to our state by having good relations with our neighbors and with the international community. We spend less on the military but spent much more on social services."
The benefits of the defense budget cut went directly to the general public and real differences have been made over the past two decades.
Literacy has improved from 65 to 90 percent, and the general public's access to education rose to 90 percent from 45 in the 1990s, the envoy said.
To make this happen in the North, the envoy noted that a different way of thinking needs to emerge in the North Korean ruling class to realize the beneficial side of the dismantling of its nuclear program.
