14 May 2007
As power-sharing was restored between Catholics and Protestants, Irish republicans and British loyalists in Stormont last week, South Africa was praised for the part it played in helping Northern Ireland on the road to peace.
South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils - who represented SA at Tuesday's swearing in of the power-sharing government of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party and Gerry Adams' Sinn Fein - was among a number of South African leaders credited with bringing the British territory's arch-enemies together.
According to the Sunday Times, Adams told his party members that Nelson Mandela, President Thabo Mbeki, Kasrils, businessman Cyril Ramaphosa and police chief Robert McBride had all made "indispensable contributions, without which we would not be where we are today."
Ramaphosa was a key figure in the historic multi-party negotiations that paved the way for South Africa's remarkable transition from apartheid state to democracy in 1994. McBride is currently chief of one of South Africa's biggest metropolitan police forces. In 1992, the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission granted McBride amnesty for the 1986 bombing of Magoo's Bar in Durban.
Declan Kearney, a senior Sinn Fein official, told the Sunday Times that South Africa had "served as a template for our peace process." People in Ireland, Kearney said, had taken South Africa's nation-building experience "not just as a beacon of hope but as a working model of how to achieve peace."
Kasrils told the Sunday Times last week that South Africa had undertaken an intense programme of diplomacy on the critical issues of policing and disarmament in the lead-up to the historic deal at Stormont.
"I'd like to believe we have assisted Sinn Fein - not pushed them - with the disarmament issue among their cadres, which possibly helped to some degree with unity."
Kasrils said the five trips he had made to Belfast over the past year "were very much to get across how we as the [African National Congress] viewed their need to accept the Northern Ireland Police Service, an absolutely critical element in the negotiations with the unionists."
South Africa's Department of Foreign Affairs described last week's restoration of Northern Ireland's Assembly and Executive as a remarkable achievement that gave the people of the British territory the chance to move forward.
"It offers the representatives of all the people of Northern Ireland the opportunity to come together to allow the process of reconciliation started by Good Friday to move forward, and forge the shared, peaceful and prosperous future that they so richly deserve," the department said.
"The peace process in Northern Ireland has been a long and difficult one, but once again illustrates that even the most intractable differences can be settled through negotiation and dialogue, providing that the necessary political will exists.
"We hope that others still mired in conflict, in the Middle East and elsewhere, will take inspiration from the example of Northern Ireland."
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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