Bill Clinton: “Well, I do have some thoughts, actually. I think it has worked in South Africa partly because people with enormous…”

“Well, I do have some thoughts, actually. I think it has worked in South Africa partly because people with enormous influence decided to be statesmen instead of wreckers. After a certain amount of time, you had the leaders of the various groups deciding that there was no longer a future in fighting and killing and dying, that splitting the country up was not an option, and that somehow they were going up or down together. And then they translated those understandings into concrete commitments, not just an election. An election is only part of it, although a big part. I think the decision to go for a government of national unity for 5 years is absolutely critical to this and making the decision before you know the outcome of the election. The decision to have a bill of rights, the decision to have a constitutional court, I think all these things have made a huge difference. And I think what you've got in other places, these sort of ancient divisions--racial, ethnic, and religious divisions--where people have not come to that wisdom; they don't understand yet, for whatever reason, that in the end they'll be better off if they work together and that controlling territory is of nowhere near the significance in terms of quality of life and meaning of life that it was 100 years ago. It's almost as if, in some of the places that you've mentioned--and you've written so powerfully about Bosnia, and I know you care a lot about Azerbaijan; you have the Abkhaz problem, you have all these things-- it's almost as if the cold war sort of imposed a freeze-frame on the history of a lot of these places. And then when it went away, people woke up and resumed the attitudes that they had held in the early part of the 20th century, which they carried over from the 19th century, as if there had been no communications revolution, as if there had been no changes in the global economy, as if all these things had happened. Here in this country, too, the ethnic diversity of the United States ought to be our greatest asset as we move into the next century. It used to be in America that the burden we carried was the burden of the fight between blacks and whites going back to slavery and the Civil War and the aftermath. Now, in Los Angeles County alone there are 150 different racial and ethnic groups, 150 different ones in one county. And there was a study released in our press last week that said sometimes these groups resented each other as much as they resented the white majority, depending on what the facts were. So we're still dealing with this. I have to tell you, I believe that if the elections come off well, and especially in the aftermath of the agreement yesterday where Chief Buthelezi agreed with Mr. Mandela and Mr. de Klerk to participate in the elections and they worked out the constitutional role for the King of the Zulus--I think when that was done--I think if this election comes off, it will send a message around the world that there is another way to deal with these problems and that if it can be done in South Africa, how can you justify the old-fashioned killing and fighting and dying over a piece of land, over divisions which are not as important as what unites people in other places. I mean, it's amazing; you think of it--contrast what we see in Gorazde with what we see about to happen in South Africa. It's a matter of enormous historical impact. And I think that when it is shown around the world it has to reverberate in ways that we can't fully assess but that have to be positive. [An interviewer said that the proposed aid package for South Africa was much smaller than the one offered to Russia and suggested it might be insufficient.]”