Archbishop Desmond Tutu has told an audience in Belfast how every society driven by conflict should take heart from the transition to peace in South Africa.
Speaking at a lecture co-hosted by the Committee on the Administration of Justice and the Global Citizens' Circle, Archbishop Tutu spoke of the "hopeful time" we lived in, despite the "horrendous outrage of September 11th in the United States and the distressing response".
"Who just a few years ago could have imagined South Africa as a beacon of hope? For all people South Africa would have only been an example of the most ghastly awfulness, of how not to deal with problems, especially not problems between sections of a society with daggers drawn," he said.
South Africa existed "so that God could point us out to the several trouble spots of the world and say 'Hey, they had a nightmare called apartheid. It has ended. Your nightmare will end, too. They had a problem that was being described as intractable. Humanly speaking it was hopeless. They have solved it.'
"And so now nowhere in the world could ever again say their problem was intractable." Until the eve of elections in South Africa seven years ago there were predictions of a bloodbath, he said.
"We were indeed just a whisker away from the racial conflagration so many had predicted. Our future could not have been more bleak. There were state-sponsored massacres. We were teetering on the edge."
The cause of the problem was a political system which had deliberately excluded most of the population. The Archbishop spoke eloquently of the poverty, inequality and lack of dignity South African blacks had to endure.
He recalled how as a child when he accompanied his father, a headmaster, to the store "this little slip of a girl behind the counter would address my father, 'Yes, boy, what do you want?' "
In another snapshot of the apartheid era, he told how a roadside sign was "waggishly" changed from "Drive carefully. Natives cross here," to "Drive carefully. Natives very cross here." Given this "ghastly history" a civil war seemed unavoidable, he said.
"But we have had a remarkable transition. We have had a negotiated revolution. Sworn enemies sitting around a table. People who had been giving each other awful labels were sitting down at a table."
The former Nobel Peace Prize winner said the negotiations had not always run smoothly. Moments of euphoria were balanced by moments when "we were right down there in the slough of despond."
But eventually, former enemies began working together. People realised no-one needed to lose. "It is now no longer a win-lose situation, it is a win-win situation."