The Chronicle interview.

Without a new, strengthened ethical conscience, says Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu in this conversation with the UN Chronicle, "we are for the birds. The Archbishop, who was in New York for the release of the United Nations study on the impact of armed conflict on children - with which he was associated - spoke to us over the telephone soon after his return to Cape Town in December.

While long in coming, the dramatic demise of apartheid brought with it non-racial democracy. South Africa now has a new constitution that is described by many as the most liberal in the world. Your Grace, I would like to ask you in what ways international pressure, public opinion and the United Nations helped in bringing about this change?

Well, international pressure was absolutely crucial. Without it, what happened to this country would have been impossible. The United Nations [helped] through the many resolutions that were passed - culminating in the ones condemning apartheid as a crime against humanity, the resolutions about the arms embargo, the suspending of the membership of South Africa in the General Assembly. All of these helped to bring very considerable pressure to bear on the apartheid Government and its supporters; and, as I said in the beginning, without that help, without the support of the international community, without the United Nations helping to mobilize that support, we would not be where we are. We just want to express our profound gratitude for that support.

Have there been tangible effects from those efforts, in particular those of the United Nations, on individuals in South Africa?

Well, the fact of bringing about a democratic "dispensation" after you had a repressive one would be the most tangible. I do know that the United Nations helped in the provision of, for instance, scholarships to many South African exiles and refugees, which also had a very considerable impact on the lives of individuals. Just the fact of helping to isolate a maverick regime would already have been a very considerable achievement.

You are both a religious and a civil leader. Under the apartheid system, you were able to gain the respect of the international community and important leaders on all sides in South Africa. You've been crucial in helping steer your country through its transition to a non-racial democracy. How have these different roles - religious, spiritual and civil - helped you in your efforts then and now?

I hope that in all I have tried to do, I have been informed by my faith. I haven't said or done anything that could not be based firmly on my Christian understanding of a situation. And, therefore, I have not suffered from any sense of a kind of schizophrenia that now I was operating as a religious person and another time as a political animal. It has all been integrated, because our faith is an incarnational faith. What I do, what I say, is a direct consequence of the faith, insofar as I understand the Christian faith, and I would not have been myself able to do all of these things had it not been for that fundamental backing. I mean, all of what I have done has been the consequence and repercussion of my faith.

Again in those roles, and in particular as head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, how do you feel that the healing process should proceed in South Africa? Can these experiences be "transported" to other countries splintered by conflict, moving towards democratization or undergoing turbulent change?

I would say that at the heart of the Christian faith is reconciliation and atonement. Jesus Christ speaks of himself as drawing all to Him, and Paul speaks about how God was reconciling the world to Himself in Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, what happens in the life of an individual has to be replicated in the lives of societies and of nations. Especially when you are in a period of transition from repression to democracy, there will have been gross violations of human rights that took place. It's crucial that the truth about that period is known so that the victims can be acknowledged, can be empowered, and can have their human and civil dignities rehabilitated in the process. That, in turn, enables them to be in a position to be ready to forgive, provided that the perpetrators for their part also acknowledge the wrong that they did, that in some places there is a judicial system in place because people are worried about impunity.

But I am myself very firmly convinced that if justice is the end of the process in a transition, then it's "curtains" really for that society. Without forgiveness going beyond justice, there can be no future. The healing process is that you should not pretend that the awful things that did happen did not happen, because through that kind of amnesia you are really "victimizing the victims" a second time around. As has been said, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

You've talked in a sense about how a country faces up to its past and yet still moves away from fear towards understanding and even tolerance. Is there help in that process that the international community and the United Nations can offer?

Of course, I think that we can always look to the examples of the sorts of things that the Chileans, the Argentinians, the El Salvadorans, the Spaniards, etc., have tried, so we can learn from their achievements as well as from their mistakes.

We obviously also need material assistance and financing. Our particular operation here has received fairly substantial support from the international community. We have an investigative unit, and about 12 or so of our investigators are people from different countries overseas. Other countries have invested in our operation by granting financial assistance for various parts of our programme. Here again, without such help, we would be very severely handicapped.

The process of reconciliation in South Africa, as you've already suggested, is long and not yet over. Are there still dangers it faces as this process continues?

Yes. Well, it is obvious that in revealing the gory, harrowing details of some of the violations, you run the risk of whipping up emotions in the communities of those who have suffered. With people not quite understanding the whole process of amnesty and how it operates ... it may be that, as a community, we have not yet quite realized the price that we have had to pay for the stability that we are enjoying. It is only now dawning on people what a heavy price it is - when they think for instance that those who assassinated Chris Hani could qualify for amnesty. With some detailing gruesome acts of violations, people may become very upset and that could shake the process. Perhaps the most serious [danger] for me is if the communities that benefitted so signally under apartheid do not have a corresponding generosity of spirit to match the generosity of spirit of those who were the victims.

You are talking about a lengthy process. It's now been 51 years since the end of the Second World War and the founding of the United Nations. Yet, we still see long, often bloody civil and ethnic conflicts, acts of genocide ...

Yes, yes!

... and other cruelty. Looking at the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, South Africa, now eastern Zaire, do you feel that we need a new, strengthened ethical conscience as we head into the next millenium?

Well, without that, we are for the birds. I mean, clearly if we do not inculcate tolerance - tolerance of diversity, tolerance of differences - we are going to keep running up against the threat of explosions and eruptions when people take advantage of the different kinds of chauvinism to which we so easily succumb. You know, we obviously must give everybody space to be themselves. They must feel that their distinctiveness is not under threat. That their culture, their language, their religion (the things that make them who they are) are not under threat, forcing them therefore to react against those who are different from them in the sorts of ways that we have seen - the ethnic cleansings and so on. We should be able to find a way of giving people a sense of security.

At the present time, we are all going through a kind of transition, with many road signs having been shifted, points of reference either removed or changed. And so people have a sense of disorientation. That is why they want to cling to the simplistic answers that they can get from the fundamentalists. That is why they are then easily inveigled into saying that people who are different are dangerous, and why they can therefore support ethnic cleansing and so on.

Oh yes. You are after all a global organization and have still got remarkable resources of persons and skills. You played a wonderful role in the process of transition in Namibia. I mean, when people sometimes criticize the United Nations, when they point to the debacles, say, in Bosnia, they forget the splendid role that you played in Namibia, in Cambodia, in Mozambique, in South Africa.

They forget that the UN can only be as effective as it is enabled to be effective. You cannot expect an Organization which has Members withholding their contributions to have the capacity to do the things that it could do if it had those resources - which are, after all, resources made available by Member States.

And people forget the incredible work that is being done by the World Health Organization. It has helped to improve health generally in the world. They forget the work of UNICEF, which has reduced infant mortality rates in very many parts of the world. They forget the work of UNESCO, of the Human Rights Commission, of the High Commissioner for Refugees. People tend to see what they are looking for.

On another subject, you were involved in the preparation of a recent UN study on the impact of armed conflict on children, put together by Mrs. Graca Machel of Mozambique. She called it "unconsiderable" that we clearly and consistently see children's rights attacked, children assaulted, violated and murdered, and "yet, our conscience has not revolved nor a sense of dignity challenged". How is it possible for the world to become so fatigued that we're moved only until the next image or crisis comes up? What can be done?

Well, I don't think that we should become too cynical or despondent. It is a survival mechanism. I think if we remain at the same level of sensitivity, possibly we would not be able to survive. What we should be saying more and more is that the faith community should be doing its damnedest to help develop a high level of morality. I mean, once you reach a certain stage, say, in sophistication, then if you are eating an apple and it falls on the ground, you don't think twice about the fact that you are not going to pick it up to eat. Whereas perhaps at a lower level of sophistication, maybe due to greater need, it could fall even in a very dirty spot and you would pick it up and brush it off and continue to eat it.

What I am trying to say is that we ought to be able to help people develop in such a way that certain things would be unthinkable - just as unthinkable as your picking up an apple that has fallen into a rubbish bin. That we would [by second nature] say it is totally unacceptable, totally unthinkable, that children should be turned into child soldiers.

It should be totally unthinkable, unacceptable, to allow the use of anti-personnel mines. We know that they are designed deliberately to maim, not to kill, and that most of the people who have become their casualties are not combatants, but civilians. How can we ever be able to tolerate Governments investing huge sums in the production of things of that kind, or be willing to use such abominable instruments of death and destruction?

And, developing this, we could get to the point where we say it is unconscionable, it is unacceptable, in a world of reasonable plenty, that so many should suffer starvation and hunger - all in a sense due to the fact that people in one part of the world have surpluses and are willing even to destroy those surpluses because they are worried about what effect dumping them on people in another part would have on prices. I mean, it is obscene.

And we ought to be working towards ensuring that we would have a nuclear-free world. We would have a world where all of us would be deeply conscious of ecological issues, where all of us would be people who are concerned about the international economic world order that is so basically, fundamentally unjust. It would become sort of automatic that we would dismiss or condemn things that did not measure up to the moral standards that the different faiths are helping to inculcate.

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Desmond Tutu was born in Klerksdorp, South Africa, in 1931, the son of a schoolteacher and a domestic worker. At the age of 12 he first met and was later greatly influenced by Father Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican cleric in the Johannesburg township of Sophiatown and an outspoken early critic of apartheid.

Tutu became Dean of St. Mary's Cathedral, Johannesburg, in 1975, and was shortly thereafter elected Bishop of Lesotho. By this time South Africa was in turmoil, in the wake of the Soweto uprising of 1976, and Bishop Tutu was persuaded to leave the calm diocese of Lesotho to take up the post of General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. It was in this position - a post he held from 1978 to 1985 - that he became a national and international figure. In 1984, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1985, Tutu was elected Bishop of Johannesburg, in which capacity he did much to bridge the chasm between black and white Anglicans in South Africa. In 1986, he was elected Archbishop of Cape Town. In electing him, the Anglican Church placed its trust in him as its spiritual leader and showed its confidence in his pursuit of racial justice in South Africa. In 1987, he was elected President of the All Africa Conference of Churches.

Before 1990, Archbishop Tutu's vigorous advocacy of social justice made him a figure of great controversy. Today, he is seen as an elder statesman with a major role to play in reconciliation. He regularly appeals to the parties in the Government of National Unity for peaceful cooperation and an end to violence and corruption. He is one of the very few people who appear to have the standing to effect reconciliation within the society. In December 1995, President Nelson Mandela appointed the Archbishop to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Tutu retired from office as Archbishop in June 1996, but has been named Archbishop Emeritus as from July.