Special Hearings — Faith Community Hearings — 1997-11-17

AUERBACH: Thank you very much. I think then I need perhaps in the context   of these hearings to say first of all that the World Conference on Religion   and Peace (and I apologise because you yourself Sir, know this better than I   do) is not in fact a faith community. It is also not a collective as some people   believe of all the faith communities. We have been able to speak, but we've   never been able to say that we speak for all the members of all the faith communities   with whom we have contact in the form of membership. Rather, we are an organisation   of individuals and a few organisations drawn from various faith groups. A collective   made up of those who joined by accepting our basic tenant and the commitment   of striving for peace and justice. Now, I need perhaps to explain that the South   African chapter of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, which in the   world was started in 1920, the South African chapter was started in 1984 and   it was started specifically in order to bring together those people of different   faiths, who were united in their struggle for justice and opposition to apartheid   in South Africa, so that in a sense, you can say maybe this was a late start   in South Africa, because in the history of apartheid and the history of what   your commission, the period your commission covers, 1984 is late. It is not   early. So that we wanted to be a part of those who were struggling against apartheid   in the eighties in particular and we have felt it particularly enriching that   through our commons commitment to justice from different faiths, from christians,   Muslims, Jews and Hindus, we have found something to which you have in a sense   referred to in your opening remarks, which is that there are many commonalties   between different religions and that a belief in justice is a powerful cement   that can hold people together.
And therefore, when we came together, we tried in various ways to bring people   together for that purpose and one of the, I would say, major ways in which we   did that was to organise the annual peace lecture, which we named after you   Sir, when you got the Nobel Peace Prize. And perhaps it's worth putting on record   what we have written here. The first lecture to have been delivered by you in   December 1985, was banned by the State. Perhaps it's worth saying that and I   quote "The police had reason to apprehend that the safety of members of   the public and their property will be seriously endangered by a gathering being   organised by the South African Chapter of the World Conference on Religion and   Peace". I might say, Sir, that at the time I was working at the Funda Centre   in Soweto and I remember seeing the State's notice on the door of the office   of the building in which I worked, so I had a particular awareness of that at   the time. The State also refused visas to six of nine international religious   leaders in the international World Conference of Religion and Peace, who had   intended to attend the lecture in order to demonstrate their solidarity with   the fledgling South African chapter and one of the reasons, it should perhaps   be stated, that the lecture was instituted is to remind people of faith to put   into practice those sanctions and traditions of justice and peace which are   inherent in their respective religions.
During more than a decade we learnt to work together for commons goals while   respecting one another's different beliefs and practices. In line with this,   we invited representatives of different faiths to deliver the lectures Christian,   Hindu, Jewish and Muslim speakers and last year, his holiness the Dali Lama   addressed us, so that many of the people who spoke have been eminent persons   within and beyond their own religious traditions. During the eighties, we did   campaign for justice and against apartheid in a variety of ways. It is perhaps   worth singling out that WCRP protested when some elements in the Dutch Reformed   Church declared Islam a false religion and we felt that this should be publicly   opposed because there were many ways in which Muslims and Christians, especially   but not only in the Western Cape, had worked together in the liberation struggle   and this kind of view of declaring another religion false would disturb relationships.   So we protested against that and some of the other matters we did is that we   took a delegation, that you in fact led a delegation of WCRP to Lusaka with   a joint consultation with a liberation movement in exile on religious communities   in a post-apartheid South Africa. And we have, over the years, been quite active   in bringing together the various religious bodies. In a conference in May 1988   we organised a consultation in Soweto on the subject Believers in the Struggle   for Justice and Peace, and then following a suggestion by Judge Albie Sacks,   we did organise in 1990 a conference, proceedings of which have also been published,   Believers in the Future, a conference of national religious leaders to discuss   the future of religion and state relations in post-apartheid South Africa.
Now, we realise of course in May 1990, these things were easier than they had   been before. But that conference saw a very large number of people from a variety   of faiths articulating their views on religion, state relationships and following   that gathering in 1990, we organised a process of trying to work out a declaration   of religious rights and responsibility which was finally adopted at a conference   in Pretoria two years later, after very extensive consultations among different   religious groups and I think we could well argue that some of the later togetherness   of different faiths on public occasions such as most notably, the inauguration   of President Mandela, had their origin in these two conferences in 1990 and   1992, where people actually came together to look at religion as an aspect of   society without in the first instance looking at whether it was the Muslim or   Christian or Jewish or Hindu or other religion. 
I do not know what otherperhaps I should leave justshould make   two further points that obviously we do not claim that we did all we should   have done in order to bring more members of various faith communities together   in the struggle for justice. We were sometimes well aware of the fact that within   our faith communities, the support given to the kinds of endeavours that WCRP   stood for were not supported by the majority of religious groups. Sometimes   some of us felt marginalised by being seen as sort of "way out there".   But nevertheless, speaking for myself, I didn't ever encounter hostility within   my own faith community. Maybe alienation and I think that applies possibly to   some other religious communities as well. But certainly we tried and I guess   that is the first step on the path to reconciliation - we never did attempt   to cut loose from our major religious communities and while we might have marched   with those with whom the majority did not march, we didn't ever sort of say,   "We won't talk to the rest of you if you don't march with us". 
As to the future, we did undertake last year an interesting process on religious   interpretations of reconciliation and we've taken the liberty of attaching the   results of that to this submission. It resulted in a proposal on reconciliation   and nation building and through quite extensive consultation we produced a three   page document on the subject and we targeted it at the day of reconciliation   last year, but while we distributed it widely, it didn't have the echo that   we hoped it would have, but we believe that it remains relevant and we accept   and we hope to make a contribution. We accept that your commission alone cannot   complete or even take vastly forward the process of reconciliation because it   contains elements that, as a commission, you cannot deal with, but as faith   communities and as a joint body representing people in faith communities, we   can make a contribution by bringing people together in the process of reconciliation.   We realise it's a long process, but we also realise that it's a difficult process   and that we have experience of talking glibly of bringing people together and   failing to do so. It's not so easy because people still to a very large extent   remain locked into their own groups and their own communities. I think, if I   may, I'll stop there and leave the rest to debate. Thank you.