Tributes to Nelson Mandela

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I bring another accent to the debate and to our tribute to Nelson Mandela. Obviously, people in Ireland—north and south—supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement, inspired by men like Kader Asmal, who helped to found the movement here in London and then founded it in Ireland when he moved there. I spoke about him in my maiden speech in this House in 2005, which was in an Africa debate.

Unfortunately, not everyone in Ireland had the same view. In Northern Ireland, people tended to pick and choose their views according to party lines and whose side they were on at home. If we rose above such squabbles, we found that people in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, who were inspirational themselves, were inspired by Nelson Mandela and by the many people who were leading the struggle for democracy in South Africa, whether they were in jail or body-swerving the system, avoiding jail and organising in many different ways.

All sorts of arguments and debates were raging here in the 1980s. I worked for my predecessor, John Hume, as a researcher in Westminster, and I also spent time working in Teddy Kennedy’s office in the States. I know exactly what all the arguments were about why sanctions would not work or should not be put in place, and the argument that the geopolitical order required us to tolerate the apartheid regime. Even while the Government here were officially condemning it, they were not interfering with it in any way.

I also recall that there was a threatened split in the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Ireland in the mid-’80s. Sinn Fein had started contesting elections and so on, and it joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement on a corporate basis. Several significant people then left, such as Garret FitzGerald. John Hume addressed a rally in Dublin, and it was one of the few times he publicly disagreed with Garret FitzGerald. He said that no differences to do with Irish politics should in any way detract from combined and united solidarity in repudiating the iniquity that was apartheid. Both at that rally and in debates in the House, John Hume made the point that we needed sanctions not just as a badge of moral indignation, and not just to put an economic bite on a regime that needed its collar felt, but in solidarity with the struggle for democracy in South Africa. After John Hume made that speech, Kader Asmal, who subsequently told Nelson Mandela that I helped to write it, made a point of getting it sent to South Africa and taken to Nelson Mandela in prison. Kader Asmal said that he thought it was the first time that a parliamentarian had put it that way.

As a member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement—I represented the Union of Students in Ireland and then my party—I found myself in the unusual position of importing something into pre-democratic South Africa in the early 1990s. It was two collapsible aluminium polling booths that were made in my constituency, to be used as part of a training exercise by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. I was one of an international faculty helping in that exercise, in which regional and local ANC activists were being prepared for what may be involved in elections, so that they could organise themselves. They were obviously seething during the transition, because there were talks about talks, and there was a question of whether there would be all-party talks or a constituent assembly, and other difficulties of process followed. Nelson Mandela and his fellow leaders had to keep people together through all those troubles, difficulties and frustrations, and that was one exercise to help achieve that. As well as the polling booths, which were used when we split into two groups and toured the country, at the request of the Americans I also brought unused books of ballot papers from Ireland, north and south.

During those mock arrangements, I witnessed many people who had had lifelong involvement in the struggle for democracy going through their first act of queuing up at a polling station and voting, on an Irish ballot paper. Even though it was a mock election, they were crying. Like the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), who was so struck when the actual election came and he saw the queues of people lining up for the real vote, I saw how important it was.

I met Nelson Mandela and, as I said, Kader Asmal, who became the Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry in the Government of national unity and then Minister of Education in the first ANC Government. Nelson Mandela came to speak to all the political parties from Northern Ireland, which were in South Africa to learn lessons and get an insight from the South African process. It was not the first time we had done that—there had been previous trips—but it was the first time that all the parties were on one trip. We could not all share the same transport, because at that stage Unionist parties still said that they would not be in the same room or on the same transport as Sinn Fein. Even when we were taken on a visit to a local beach, at Africa’s most southerly point, apartheid South Africa’s laws unfortunately had to be reinstated and there was separation. I was at the event with Kader Asmal, who was seething at the idea that we were separated and imposing limits on ourselves, but he told me that Nelson Mandela had said to him, “It is not up to us to impose our standards on them. We can give them our example, and they will find their way.” I thought that was particularly rich.

The initial idea was that Nelson Mandela would speak to certain parties in one room, or one session, and then to other parties including Sinn Fein, or to Sinn Fein on its own, in another room or another session. A splendid solution was reached when people realised the architecture of the centre meant that they could remove two glass sliding walls so that some of us were under the roof while Nelson Mandela addressed us and others were outside—not under the same roof. That is how Unionist blushes were spared, but at least Nelson Mandela, as the elected President of South Africa, was allowed the dignity of saying the same thing to all of us at the same time.

Nelson Mandela gave us many key messages and lessons at that event. There were the familiar ones, such as the fact that we had to negotiate peace with our enemies, not our friends, but there were also points about not only needing to be sure about the integrity of our choice but needing to allow space for the integrity of other choices. He said that it was not enough just to get into talks—mutual engagement was not the target; mutual adjustment was the real, hard test. He also made it clear that, when finding new ground, it is much easier to make common ground than when we fight over the old ground and the old issues, identities and labels.

Many Members have paid tribute to people in England who stood against apartheid, but I want to make particular reference to the Dunnes Stores workers whose strike in 1984 did so much to galvanise opposition to apartheid in Ireland and beyond. I particularly wish to name Mary Manning, Karen Gearon, Alma Russell and Liz Deasy. In recent days, there has been popular demand in Ireland that whatever national delegation goes to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral and the other ceremonies, those Dunnes Stores workers should be part of it. They represent the real spirit of the struggle against apartheid.

Nelson Mandela’s famous opening words at his trial were:

“I am the First Accused.”

Today we remember him as the “first admired”. We hope that we can look forward to his being the “first emulated” in other areas where people are suffering from injustice and conflict, and from the violations that result from unaccountable power, but it is not only in those areas that he should be emulated. We need to remember that as well as indicting the iniquity and inequity of the apartheid system, he indicted the world order as we know it, a world order in which power and wealth are vested in the hands of a privileged minority. If we want to take part in the emulation of Nelson Mandela, we should not just expect things of other people who live in difficult circumstances; we should rise to the challenge, and deal with the apartheid nature of the world economic order that still exists.