Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-05-Speech-2-131"

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"en.19991005.8.2-131"2
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"Mr President, with Nelson Mandela’s farewell as President and the election of Thabo Mbeki, South Africa entered a new political era. As one young South African who had grown up in Denmark expressed it, “it is good for South Africa now that Mandela is retiring.” It is not good for a democracy to have a god as President, and Mandela was and remains a deity. But you do not rebel against gods, not in any case when they have just opened the way to freedom. By this, I do not mean that Thabo Mbeki does not have god-like characteristics. What I mean is that the patience shown by the poor towards Nelson Mandela will not be shown towards Thabo Mbeki. They are making demands here and now for food, housing, education, that is to say, all the things which we in the western world take for granted. For the time being, they remain only criminals. Subsequently, they will rise in rebellion. This puts Thabo Mbeki in a quite different situation from his predecessor, but it also puts us in the EU in a quite different situation. We should remember this fact and we should also remember the Balkans and what Kofi Annan said in his speech to the UN at the opening of the General Assembly this year: that it is incredible how much we sacrifice to go to war and how little we sacrifice to prevent war. That is why it is good that we have obtained the present agreement between South Africa and the EU. It is certainly not as good as it ought to be. It is not nearly generous enough, and I should like to thank the rapporteur, Mrs Kinnock, for pointing this out. Nonetheless, it is there and it binds the EU and South Africa together. Hopefully, it will mean that, in South Africa too, it is felt that it is no longer so very far from the EU to South Africa, either physically or psychologically, and that the gap between words and action is no longer so lengthy as, without a shadow of a doubt, it was felt to be in the period after 1994 and up until 1999."@en1

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