[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 30, Number 16 (Monday, April 25, 1994)]
[Pages 874-880]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Interview With Journalists on South Africa

April 20, 1994

    Q. Could I begin, Mr. President, with a two-part question? What is 
the significance of the South African election to you and the American 
people? And do you have any particular message for the people of South 
Africa that we could take back to them?
    The President. First of all, I think it would be difficult to 
overstate the significance of this election to the American people for 
many reasons, first of all, our own history of racial division. We, 
after all, fought a great Civil War over slavery, and we continue to 
deal with our own racial challenges today. So all Americans, I think, 
have always been more drawn to the problems and the promise of South 
Africa than perhaps other nations have been.
    Secondly, our own civil rights movement has, for decades, had a 
relationship with the antiapartheid movement in South Africa. So this 
will be a great sense of personal joy to many, many Americans who have 
been involved in this whole issue personally.
    And finally, it's important to the United States because of the 
promise of harmony and prosperity in South Africa and what that might 
mean, not only to South Africa but to many other nations in the region 
and to the prospect of a revitalization, a new energy, a new peace, a 
new sense of possibility throughout at least the southern part of 
Africa. So it's very important.
    Q. Any particular message?

[[Page 875]]

    The President. The message I would have is this: The United States 
is elated at the prospect of these elections. We have contributed to the 
effort to fight apartheid. We have tried to support the effort to have 
good elections and to make them meaningful, and we want to celebrate 
with and support South Africa. But we realize that the real work will 
begin after the election, of continuing to live in harmony, of fighting 
the new problems every day, of making democracy work, of dealing with 
the social problems and the very severe economic problem. And we intend 
to be a partner from the beginning. We intend to be a full partner.
    Shortly after the election I will announce a substantial increase in 
United States assistance and support for building South Africa 
economically, dealing with the social problems, helping the political 
system to work. And then in June, we will have here a very large 
conference sponsored by the Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, in 
Atlanta, bringing together large numbers of American business people to 
give us the opportunity to urge them to be involved with South Africa in 
the rebuilding.

[At this point, an interviewer cited the Marshall Plan following World 
War II and asked if a similar plan might be suitable for South Africa.]

    The President. Well, I do believe that we ought to dramatically 
increase our assistance, which we will do. I think we ought to 
dramatically increase our private investment in South Africa, which I 
intend to work on. I think we ought to do what we can to mobilize the 
resources of other nations to also contribute. And I intend to spend a 
lot of time and effort on that.
    I don't know that I would say it's exactly like the Marshall Plan or 
that that is exactly what is needed, but it's obvious that a lot of 
money, a lot of investment, and a lot of opportunity is going to be 
needed to sort of jump-start South Africa. It's a very rich country. And 
I think that the promise of this new democracy is that people will be 
able to live up to their potential. And I intend to do what I can to be 
a strong partner in that.
    Q. This is the last one to--would you--you would probably be going 
to Africa soon, and is there any intention of paying a visit to our 
country?
    The President. Well, I hope that I can go, and I very much want to 
go. I assure you I'm going to send a very high-level delegation to the 
inauguration to celebrate the elections. And I have been talking with my 
staff about when I can go to Africa.
    This year, because of the 50th anniversary of the ending of World 
War II, I will wind up making three trips to Europe, and I will go to 
Asia in the fall. But in 1995, 1996, my travel schedule is more open. 
And I very much want to go there.
    I think that the United States, frankly, has not--with the exception 
of South Africa--has not paid as much attention to Africa as it should 
have and to its long-term potential and particularly to those countries 
that are trying to resolve their political problems and do things to 
help their people. So I would be honored to go there. I don't have a 
trip scheduled, but I hope I can go.

[An interviewer indicated that the world faced increased racial and 
ethnic conflict and asked for the President's thoughts on whether a 
successful South African venture would help the world confront the 
problem.]

    The President. Well, I do have some thoughts, actually. I think it 
has worked in South Africa partly because people with enormous influence 
decided to be statesmen instead of wreckers. After a certain amount of 
time, you had the leaders of the various groups deciding that there was 
no longer a future in fighting and killing and dying, that splitting the 
country up was not an option, and that somehow they were going up or 
down together. And then they translated those understandings into 
concrete commitments, not just an election. An election is only part of 
it, although a big part.
    I think the decision to go for a government of national unity for 5 
years is absolutely critical to this and making the decision before you 
know the outcome of the election. The decision to have a bill of rights, 
the decision to have a constitutional court, I think all these things 
have made a huge difference. And I think what you've got in other 
places, these sort of ancient divisions--racial, ethnic, and religious 
divisions--where people have not

[[Page 876]]

come to that wisdom; they don't understand yet, for whatever reason, 
that in the end they'll be better off if they work together and that 
controlling territory is nowhere near the significance in terms of 
quality of life and meaning of life that it was 100 years ago.
    It's almost as if, in some of the places that you've mentioned--and 
you've written so powerfully about Bosnia, and I know you care a lot 
about Azerbaijan; you have the Abkhaz problem, you have all these 
things-- it's almost as if the cold war sort of imposed a freeze-frame 
on the history of a lot of these places. And then when it went away, 
people woke up and resumed the attitudes that they had held in the early 
part of the 20th century, which they carried over from the 19th century, 
as if there had been no communications revolution, as if there had been 
no changes in the global economy, as if all these things had happened.
    Here in this country, too, the ethnic diversity of the United States 
ought to be our greatest asset as we move into the next century. It used 
to be in America that the burden we carried was the burden of the fight 
between blacks and whites going back to slavery and the Civil War and 
the aftermath. Now, in Los Angeles County alone there are 150 different 
racial and ethnic groups, 150 different ones in one county. And there 
was a study released in our press last week that said sometimes these 
groups resented each other as much as they resented the white majority, 
depending on what the facts were. So we're still dealing with this.
    I have to tell you, I believe that if the elections come off well, 
and especially in the aftermath of the agreement yesterday where Chief 
Buthelezi agreed with Mr. Mandela and Mr. de Klerk to participate in the 
elections and they worked out the constitutional role for the King of 
the Zulus--I think when that was done--I think if this election comes 
off, it will send a message around the world that there is another way 
to deal with these problems and that if it can be done in South Africa, 
how can you justify the old-fashioned killing and fighting and dying 
over a piece of land, over divisions which are not as important as what 
unites people in other places.
    I mean, it's amazing; you think of it--contrast what we see in 
Gorazde with what we see about to happen in South Africa. It's a matter 
of enormous historical impact. And I think that when it is shown around 
the world it has to reverberate in ways that we can't fully assess but 
that have to be positive.

[An interviewer indicated that the proposed aid package for South Africa 
was much smaller than the one offered to Russia; he asked the President 
to response to those who believe the proposed aid package for South 
Africa was insufficient.]

    The President. Well, first of all, we've not finalized the amount of 
the aid package. We're working on it now, and we're going to get as much 
money as we can during this fiscal year from funds that are idle in the 
appropriate accounts. That is, there are some--we are looking, we are 
scouring the Government accounts for things, money that won't be spent 
that we can put into this. And we will do as much as we possibly can.
    South Africa is a country of 40 million people where 7 million are 
homeless, for all practical purposes. There is an enormous amount to be 
done. If you look at it in the larger sense, if you look at the amount 
of investment we have, we have only a billion dollars invested now in 
South Africa since the advent of the sanctions--and I'm glad that I 
could lift the sanctions--but a billion dollars. In the early eighties 
we had $3 billion. And one of the things that I intend to do in June 
with this conference that Secretary Brown is having is to do everything 
I can to accelerate return of American investment to the levels of the 
early eighties, and then to exceed that, because we know, as a practical 
matter, if you look at the incredible human and natural resources of 
South Africa, that there would be more American money, private sector 
American money than Government money.
    Now, next year and the year after--we're going to stay after this 
thing on a multiyear basis--we may be able to do better. But I think, 
given the condition of our budget laws and where the money is right now 
and the fact that we're in the middle of a fiscal year, we're going to 
do quite well.
    I don't want to be--we're in no position to be dictating that; we 
should be asking them. But I can tell you, I know we can make

[[Page 877]]

it available for economic development projects, for human resource 
projects like housing and health and education, and for democracy and 
institution building--how do you set up a system which will deliver 
these services and function properly.
    It occurs to me, for example, the interconnection in South Africa 
and southern Africa generally, the transportation and waterways and the 
potential for telecommunications interconnection to leverage economic 
growth explosively throughout the region, is very great. It might be 
that your leaders would say, ``Well, if you have this amount of dollars, 
put it into these investments because they'll generate more 
opportunities.'' It may be that your leaders will say, ``We can't stand 
the sight of all these people living in substandard conditions; put more 
of it in housing.'' It might be that there's a public health problem 
that you want to deal with. I think that we should be guided in part, or 
in large measure, by what we're asked to do by the new leaders of the 
new South Africa.
    Q. Mr. President, do you have any plans to invite the new South 
African President to Washington?
    The President. Absolutely, I do.
    Q. Quite soon?
    The President. Yes, I will issue the invitation promptly after the 
election.

[An interviewer suggested that South Africa's crucial need is education 
in democracy and tolerance and said America might be particularly 
helpful in this regard.]

    The President. Well, we're certainly prepared to do that, to make 
that kind of investment. And we have, as you know, invested some money, 
as I said, since I've been President I think somewhere in the range of 
$35 million, just to try to make the political process work right.
    If you ask me one thing I have learned in my own life growing up as 
a young boy in the segregated South, it is that this is something that 
you never solve. You just have to keep improving. You have to keep 
working with it.
    My own interest in politics in America was inflamed overwhelmingly 
by my opposition to racial segregation in my own State, my own 
community, our own neighborhoods, our schools, and the terrible 
consequences which flowed from that. And so I thought, well, you know, 
when I grow up maybe there's something I can do to solve this. And when 
I ran for public office and when I served as a Governor of my State, and 
then when I became President, I think that I'll always be able to say I 
did things to make it better.
    But this is not the sort of thing you solve. Unfortunately, human 
nature being what it is, identifiable differences will always be used by 
narrow-minded people or frustrated people or ignorant people or 
sometimes bad people as a lever, a wedge, a means of acquiring power or 
influence or dominance or just inflicting harm. But it can get better 
and better and better.
    That will be the test. The ultimate test of your democracy will be 
whether a disciplined effort can be made to take the attitudes 
represented, as you acknowledge, by your leaders and keep working until 
they become more and more and more real in the daily lives of every 
citizen of your country. But it is not a job that will ever be 
completely done. It will always be something you have to work on. At 
least that's our experience here. It will get better, but you'll always 
have to work on it.

[An interviewer said that despite some progress, the United States is 
still a largely segregated country and asked if it will improve.]

    The President. If they work at it I think it will get better. But I 
think you will, first of all, people will always tend to show a certain 
affinity to organize their living patterns around people who are more 
like them. But some people will seek a more integrated life. That's my 
experience in the South; that's my experience in America. I mean, I was 
amazed when I traveled around in other parts of America that a lot of 
people that I knew in other parts of the country lived a more segregated 
existence than I did, for whatever reason, maybe just the nature of the 
population of their communities.
    But I think there will always be a certain amount of cohesion of 
people of the same race or ethnic group or religious group, particularly 
if they have strong religious convic- 

[[Page 878]]

tions. You see that all over the world. You see that here. To a certain 
extent, there's nothing wrong with that and it's not unhelpful. What is 
unhelpful is if that is used as a way to divide people and if it leads 
to some sort of legal or practical discrimination. And I think what Mr. 
Lewis is saying is absolutely right. We still have too much of that in 
America.
    We had a meeting here this morning, just for example, we had a 
meeting this morning; we had a couple of hundred people in the Rose 
Garden to talk about how to better immunize all of our children in 
America. And it's appalling that a country as wealthy as we are only 
immunizes about two-thirds of our kids, about 64 percent of our children 
under 2 with all the recommended childhood immunizations. And it is 
impossible to avoid the conclusion that one of the reasons is that 
children under 2 are more likely to be children of color and more likely 
to be poor than adults over 50 who tend to make the decisions that 
control public policy in this country. That's one reason. That's not the 
only reason, but it's one reason.
    So we had a meeting today to celebrate trying to organize ourselves 
with some discipline at the community level to eradicate not only a 
health problem but a problem of discrimination against the young, the 
poor, and often, children of color. But I think you see this played out 
over and over and over again in every society. But I do believe you can 
make it better.
    And what I think is going to happen in this country is that 
increasingly we will come to understand that the fact that we are a 
multiracial society is an enormous asset in a global economy, but only 
if we take advantage of it, only if we educate all our children, keep 
them healthy, and teach people to live together in ways that permit them 
all to succeed. Otherwise, this potential asset becomes an enormous 
problem.
    South Africa has an enormous asset now. You have a biracial society; 
you have some other ethnic groups, too, I know, and mixed race, but you 
have essentially two great large ethnic groups of people, each of whom 
have different experiences, different backgrounds, different contacts 
throughout the world now. It can be a terrific asset for you that you 
are different, but only if you use it. It has been a terrible handicap. 
You can now turn it into an asset.
    So I guess my answer to Tony is, some places it will be better; some 
places it will be worse throughout the world. But if you look at the way 
the world is going, you basically are going to have two kinds of 
societies that will do well, it seems to me: highly homogeneous, 
coherent societies that think they can operate with great discipline by 
their own sets of cultural rules which are widely accepted within the 
society, who will then attempt to do well in the global economy by 
having high rates of savings, investment, and exporting to others but 
keeping their own life; or open, multiethnic societies which welcome the 
whole world and try to find a way to make strength out of diversity. And 
what you're going to see is each of those societies will be dealing with 
the conflicts that any course of action dictates.
    You've got a great reform movement going on in Japan, fighting great 
opposition, because they're saying, ``We need to be more open; we need 
to appreciate diversity more,'' but ``We don't want to be so open, we 
don't have any discipline or control or direction or whatever.'' And you 
have America saying, ``This diversity is a great asset for us, but not 
if we have so little discipline, our crime rates are too high, our 
education systems are too poor, or whatever.'' So you have these two 
great models, each of them trying to find the strengths of one another.
    You have a chance to do that in South Africa. And it's a unique 
opportunity, at least in that part of the African Continent. And I think 
it's an extraordinary thing. And I think the world will come beating a 
path to your doorstep. It won't just be the United States; the whole 
world will start showing up down there when you pull this election off, 
because they will be so exhilarated by the moral and the practical 
potential of what it is you're engaged in. That's what I believe.

[An interviewer cited the concern expressed by a white South African 
journalist about possible human rights abuses by the new government.]

    The President. I'd like to answer the question--it's a good question 
and a fair

[[Page 879]]

one--and I'd like to sort of--I'll give you two answers, consistent one 
with the other, but I think showing what I perceive to be the dimension 
of the problem.
    First of all, the leaders of the country have taken great steps to 
minimize the prospect of that development by agreeing to a constitution 
with a strong bill of rights and a constitutional court and by agreeing 
to a government of national unity and by also, frankly, siding with 
international global developments that are consistent with human rights, 
renouncing terrorism, renouncing the spread of proliferation of weapons 
of mass destruction. All these augur for a government that will be 
balanced and fair and will not tolerate as official policy the abuse of 
human rights. If that should occur, I think the United States should 
have the same obligation to speak against it there as we did before in 
South Africa, and as we do now elsewhere in the world. I think that's 
hopeful.
    I think the far greater danger for the man who wrote the piece--and 
it was a very moving piece, I thought--the far greater danger is what is 
in the heart of millions of people who--to go back to your question--who 
have not yet bought into the whole process that is unfolding. And who 
knows how many people there are carrying what wounds inside who may 
think they have some opportunity and some position to which they might 
be elected or just some opportunity because of their newfound freedom 
for payback time? I mean, that is something that no one can calculate.
    In other words, democracy requires every day millions and millions 
and millions of decisions in a country as large as 40 million, by 
people--they just make decisions--sometimes you'll begin to make them 
almost subconsciously--to support the democratic process, to show 
personal restraint, to respect the rights of other people, to deal with 
all these things. I think what's going to be the far bigger challenge, 
is when you get the government in place and you've got the laws, you've 
got the bill of rights, you've got all this stuff, the government's 
going to try to do the right thing, I think the majority party will try 
to do the right thing--what will happen is, what about all the people up 
and down the line? And what is in their hearts? What kind of temptations 
or opportunities will be there? Those are things that happen to free 
societies, and you'll just have to work at stamping them out and 
minimizing them. I think that's what the real problem is.

[An interviewer asked if the United States would make a greater effort 
to uplift and assist Africa.]

    The President. I think the United States should focus more on Africa 
as a whole, as a continent.
    Q. Do you intend to do that?
    The President. And I intend to do that. Now, you know today, of 
course, we're profoundly--I know that--I won't use your term, but you 
know what occupies our headlines, of course, are in the north, Somalia 
and Sudan and the problems there and then moving down the continent to 
Rwanda and Burundi and then moving down to Angola where more children 
have been injured by land mines than in any war in human history. It's 
not on CNN at night, so people don't talk about it. And we're terribly 
troubled by Rwanda now, but it wasn't so many months ago that in a 
period of months it's estimated that as many as a quarter of a million 
or more people died in Burundi.
    So it is true. But there are other stories in South Africa as well. 
There are other countries where progress is being made, where democracy 
is beginning to work, where people are beginning to try to put together 
these things that will make a successful country. And it seems to me 
that the United States ought to be working with countries that are 
trying to make good things happen, as well as doing what we can to 
alleviate human suffering where there's a tragedy.
    And I think we need a more balanced and more aggressive policy in 
Africa, and I am hopeful that we'll be able to provide one. We've been 
so caught up with our own financial problems and cutting back on 
everything. And in our country, foreign aid of all kinds has a history 
of being unpopular among the people and, therefore, among the Congress. 
But I think that if there is a success in South Africa, which I expect 
there to be, I believe America will try to come to you; I believe the 
world will try to come to you; I think there will be a fascination about 
it. And I

[[Page 880]]

think that it will not only spark greater development in the southern 
part of Africa, but it will give us a more balanced view of what our 
overall policy should be. I realize I'm an optimist, but that's what I 
believe will happen.

[An interviewer praised the President's sincerity and stated that South 
Africa was fortunate to have Mr. Mandela and Mr. de Klerk as role models 
in the move toward tolerance and democracy.]

    The President. Well, if I might just comment on that and say one 
thing--I thank you for saying that. And I thank you for being positively 
inclined toward me. If you lived here, you would have an obligation to 
be more critical of me. [Laughter] I accept it.
    Let me tell you what I think about that. I think that both Mandela 
and de Klerk are remarkable stories, and together, they are a stern 
rebuke to the cynics of the world: de Klerk for the reason you said, 
because he was an Afrikaner and because of the image we all have of that 
and what it was and what it meant politically and racially and every 
way; Mandela because he spent the best years of his life in a prison 
cell, walked out by most standards an older man, still ready to be young 
and vigorous and able to free himself of the bitterness that would 
surely have destroyed most people who had to live for 27 years behind 
bars. That also is an astonishing story.
    If these two people are capable of that sort of internal growth and 
wisdom and understanding, there must be a way for the rest of us to 
impart some of that to the society at large in South Africa and the 
United States or wherever, so that they, in turn, can live together. But 
both stories are truly astonishing.
    I think also they owe a lot to others, too. We were talking before I 
came into this interview--I believe, in the history of the Nobel Prize, 
the conflict in South Africa between the races is the only thing that's 
produced four Nobel Prizes over the same issue: Albert Luthuli, then 
Bishop Tutu, and then Mandela and de Klerk. I mean, this is something 
that the world has been fixated on with you for a long time.
    But the internal changes of those two people, that's what you have 
to find a way--that goes back to where you started. You have to find a 
way to mirror that down here where people live and buy newspapers and go 
to work every day and find a way to live together.
    Thank you.

Note: The interview began at 7:03 p.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the 
White House. The interviewers were Richard Steyn, editor-in-chief, The 
Star, Johannesburg, South Africa; Aggrey Klaaste, editor, The Sowetan, 
Soweto, South Africa; Anthony Lewis, New York Times; and Clarence Page, 
Chicago Tribune. This item was released by the Office of the Press 
Secretary on April 22. A tape was not available for verification of the 
content of this interview.