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It is with a sense of great honour, and great pleasure, that we greet the people of Palestine and their leading organisation, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, on this most important occasion.
We look forward to the day when the realisation of the aims and aspirations of the Palestinian people will be achieved through the establishment of the Palestine National State. We look forward to the day when the world community and the great powers in particular, will come to fulfil their duty in terms of the rights of nations to self-determination; and fulfil their duty in terms of international law, by recognising the Palestinian State under the Security Council Partition Resolution which established the State of Israel.
We in the ANC have no difficulty in understanding the struggles of the Palestinian people for national liberation. We share the same goal: national liberation. We share the same strategy and tactics, the mass mobilisation of our people, and the demand for the isolation of the racist regimes by the world community. We share the same kind of growing legitimacy as the world comes to understand the rightness of our cause and the illegitimacy of the racist regimes. The policy and practice of apartheid has rightly been declared a Crime Against Humanity by the United Nations General Assembly. Equally, the General Assembly has declared the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people to be of the same racist nature as apartheid.
We are also drawn to the Palestinian people by the awareness of the alliance between the Zionist State of Israel and the Apartheid South African State. The facts of that alliance in the fields of economic cooperation, military supply and technology, nuclear weapons and guided missiles, military training, diplomacy and counter-liberation intelligence, have been well documented by Abdul Minty (now the South African Governor in the International Atomic Energy Agency), Jane Hunter (publisher Israeli Foreign Affairs: an Independant Research Report on Israels’s Diplomatic, Military, and Intelligence Activities Around the World from 1986 to 1993 in California) and others.
In South Africa today we see the consequences of years of dedicated struggle by the mass of our people, and of the growing effects of the international campaigns for sanctions and isolation of the apartheid regime. We see the De Klerk Regime forced to try to buy time while trying to maintain itself in being. We have recently seen seven of our great leaders released from 26 years of imprisonment. We have seen our people defy the illegitimate apartheid regime's laws to fly the flag of the ANC and to declare for all our country and the world to know, THE ANC LIVES! THE ANC LEADS!
Today we bring greetings to the PLO and the Palestinian people, in the knowledge that THE PLO LIVES! THE PLO LEADS! FORWARD TO THE PALESTINIAN STATE!
FORWARD TO A UNITED, DEMOCRATIC, NON-RACIAL SOUTH AFRICA!