WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2008-04-28 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Jan
President Thabo Mbeki has called on South Africans “to unite in action” to confront the “savagery of racism” and the challenges of high food and fuel prices.
Mbeki stressed that even 14 years into democracy, South Africans couldn’t be truly free while so many still live in poverty and racism persisted.
“Indeed, we can’t claim to be truly free when insidious and blatant racism still exists in our society.
“We can’t claim to be truly free when racism still rears its ugly head in our institutions of higher learning, in the media, in the private sector, in the boardrooms and with the xenophobic occurrences that we observed in some communities in recent weeks,” he said on Sunday in Lansdowne, Cape Town in his last Freedom Day speech as president.
| ‘We can’t claim to be truly free when racism still rears its ugly head’ |
Mbeki said the widespread condemnation of recent acts of racism and xenophobia showed that South Africans “will not tolerate people who want to drag us back into the savagery of racism and apartheid”.
He said if people suspected someone of attacks on foreigners, they should alert the police, and not take the law into their own hands.
He said the fight against apartheid was hard, and described the detentions without trial, disappearances, exiles, assassinations, forced removals and the Group Areas Act as “testimonies that our freedom was never free”.
So, the country had to work harder to defeat sexism, racism and xenophobia, particularly as there were “pockets of backwardness” in the country.
Mbeki said there were still too many people who were poor, unemployed and without proper houses.
“There are other problems we must confront together as they impact negatively on the standard of living of the people.
“These include the national electricity emergency, high food and fuel prices and high interest rates.”
Opening the celebration, Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan also condemned continuing racism and xenophobia so long after the “mass action” on April 27 1994, when South Africans voted for freedom for the first time.
Western Cape Premier Ebrahim Rasool said people in the province should stop blaming one another for racism, an apparent reference to the ongoing spats between and within political parties, including the Western Cape ANC.
Cape Town mayor Helen Zille did not attend the event, instead sending her deputy, Grant Haskin. She denied suggestions of a snub: she was in KwaZulu-Natal attending a family wedding and so spoke at a function there.
Also absent was the majority of the Western Cape ANC leadership, largely seen as anti-Mbeki.
A fly past by the SA Air Force and a 21-gun salute greeted the crowd of about 2 000 people and 200 guests, including Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel.