I am here in Hiroshima together with a number of other
Nobel peace laureates and we're having a conference
focused on the need to end,
to bring to a full end, what we have in this world,
what is unacceptable, namely, nuclear weapons.
In the end, if we analyze why countries have nuclear weapons
it is because they believe that they face serious threats.
And this leads to the logical conclusion
that in order to convince those countries which have nuclear weapons
to dismantle them lies in removing the threats.
To put it more positively, we must promote peace.
And the way to promote peace, in the end, we have learned in South Africa,
is that enemies must talk to each other.
Those who fight against each other or who are considering
to fight against each other must sit around the table
and they must build trust and they must develop an understanding of each other's problems.
This is what we have done in South Africa.
What helped me to dismantle our nuclear weapons
was the fact, firstly,
that the Berlin Wall came down, that the USSR,
under the leadership of President Mikhail Gorbachev,
changed its attitude and no longer posed a threat to South Africa.
Nonetheless, I had some resistance and I had to convince the military
and some of the people in my government
that it was wise because some of them believed
it is an important capacity to have
and that it will have the effect of frightening other people off.
I want to close this part of what I have to say with a categorical statement:
There is no justification for weapons for mass destruction,
in terms of international law, in terms of morality,
in terms of human rights,
we must rid this world of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
As Africa has become, with what I have done in South Africa,
a nuclear-weapon-free zone, the whole world must become
a nuclear-weapon-free zone.
The challenge of our time is not to threaten
each other with destruction,
but to address what I regard as the single biggest
problem in this world.
And that is that 2 billion of the 7 billion people
on this earth
are living beneath the breadline; they're poor,
they are hungry, they are suffering.
And the second big challenge of our time is how to manage diversity.
Globalization, all countries in the world are beginning to have
important minorities within the same country.
More than half the countries of the world there are now,
apart from the dominant cultural group,
groups comprising more than 10 percent of the total population
which has a different culture.
And the wars of this century is no longer between countries,
It's between people living in the same country.
If we want peace, in more and more countries we'll have
to convince people to show tolerance towards each other,
to understand each other, and to find ways of living peacefully together,
although they differ ethnically or culturally or religiously.
The time has arrived and the youth, the young people
to whom this century belongs,
the time has arrived to concentrate
on promoting peace much more actively and on helping people to rise out of the poverty
and the unemployment and the lack of education under which so many suffer.
That I think is the challenge of the young people here today.
When I was young, what I supported when I supported
Apartheid was not the suppression of black people.
What we proposed was that each of the nations in South Africa
should have their own countries and govern themselves.
South Africa’s population is not just black and white.
We have eleven official languages.
So, if you look at the black population,
there are nine distinguishable different nations, cultural groups,
each with their own language, each with their own history,
each with their own character and traditions.
So the original plan of apartheid was
the same that the world now says is the right solution for Israel and Palestine.
The world is saying Israelis should have their own country, Israel,
and the Palestinians should have their own country next to it, Palestine.
So we said there should be a country for the whites,
there should be a country for the Zulus,
there should be a country for the Sutus, and all the other groups, each one their own country.
But we failed.
We failed for three reasons.
First, the whites were too selfish; they wanted to keep too much land for themselves.
The second is the majority of blacks said that is not how we want our political rights.
And the third is we became all of us,
whether black or white, economically interdependent, we needed each other.
So we reached the stage in the late 1970s and the early 1980s,
that as a government we had to say to ourselves
we have failed
to bring justice to everybody in South Africa
through the route of separate development.
And having admitted to ourselves that failure,
we also had to admit that the situation, as it was,
was morally indefensible, it was wrong.
We then accepted the need for fundamental reform,
going to the root of matters,
changing everything fundamentally.
And the majority of whites agreed with us in government.
But the young lady is right; there were many, many whites
who wanted to cling to the old dispensation.
So, I constantly when I became the leader of my party
and then the president
had to make sure that I continued to convince a majority of whites to support the reforms.
And after I announced on February 2, 1990, the major reforms,
we started to get very strong opposition from the right wing in the white community.
And they accused me that I did not have a mandate
to release Mandela and to do all the things I did afterwards.
So at the beginning of 1992, I called a referendum amongst the whites.
And I said, now you've seen everything I've done,
you know where I'm going to,
now I ask you for a mandate.
And we worked very hard to convince them to vote,
yes, go ahead.
And when they were confronted with this question:
Do we go ahead or do we cling to the past? Seventy percent of the whites said,
yes, go ahead.
From this is a lesson to be learned about leadership.
Leaders must not just ask what do my people want.
Leaders must develop a vision of what will be best for their people.
And then in a democracy,
they must convince a majority of their people to accept that vision.
And then they must develop, leaders must develop an action plan,
how to implement that vision, how to make it a reality.
This is, and I'm thankful for it and I say it with humility,
this is what we've done in South Africa.