E Rasool: Global Initiative to Counter Human Trafficking International
Forum

3 October 2007

I want to greet and acknowledge all the people who are here tonight, thank
you very much for your presence in South Africa. I want to acknowledge the
United Nations team in the office of drugs and crime. I want to say to you that
the Western Cape and South Africa could indeed become a laboratory to find the
mechanisms for dealing with the challenges we face.

We have not inherited hundreds of years of tradition, we are a new
democracy, we are creative people, we are pliable and adaptable and this is the
ideal laboratory for the United Nations to see what can work and what does not
work, so feel free to use us as that laboratory.

I want to thank Advocate Majokweni from the National Prosecuting Authority
and your entire team that is here. Thank you very much for being here and for
being in the forefront of the work that is important to our people. I also want
to greet and acknowledge Minister Ramatlakane, our Minister for Community
Safety who is also amongst us this evening. You all heard our Minister of
Finance and Tourism speaking and I think the reason we asked her to speak this
evening was because amongst all the tourists we want to bring to our province,
we do not want those who exploit the vulnerability of our people. That is where
we draw the line.

Like Archbishop Ndungane, I want to start of with a quote, because I think
it captures so much of what we are doing here over the next few days. It is
something that Richard Rorty writes in his book Contingency, Irony and
Solidarity, this is what he says and I quote:

"In my utopia, human solidarity would not be seen as a fact to be recognised
by clearing away prejudice or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but,
rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by
imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers.
Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by
increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and
humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people".

I think today and the next few days are about creating that solidarity
between people who may not have been exactly the same. It is about unleashing
our imaginative capacity rather than our purely intellectual and reflective
capacity, because for us to be committed to the fight against human
trafficking, it is not going to be a commitment that comes from intellectual
excursion. The stats are there, the theories are there, but the will to act
must be unleashed by the use of the human capacity for imagination.

When we can put ourselves in the other's shoes and feel their pain and
humiliation, then we will be moved to action. We must define and contextualise
this problem. In the first iteration of this problem in the world, a few
hundred years ago it was pure slavery. Today we call it human trafficking. Even
when there were people who walked around in chains, even when there were people
who were physically taken off one continent and transplanted into another
continent, even when there were people who were made to work in chains, it took
our human instincts, decades if not centuries to say that it was wrong.

It took our religious consciousness decades if not centuries, to stand up
and to develop a counter theology, to counter act the theology that turned a
blind eye to human bondage. It took decades if not centuries to develop
solidarity against that form of slavery, which was visible, which was in your
face, which was horrible. It took decades if not centuries for the world to
stand up in revulsion and say that slavery was wrong.

The danger is that it may take centuries to develop a revulsion against
human trafficking because this form of slavery is more subtle, it is more
hidden. We know it exists but we do not see the chains. We know it is there but
we do not hear the whips.

The point that I am making is that this will take an extraordinary
unleashing of the imagination to spur us into action and hence the decision to
have this conference start, with a service in a Cathedral this morning, was
probably one of the most inspired ones because it seemed to locate that the
problem was rather in the soul of our people as much as it is in the commercial
transactions or any of the other more visible elements of society. It says that
in order for us to win this battle against human trafficking, we have to awaken
something in the spirit, the instinct and the soul of our people.

It was the right thing to kick off this fight against human trafficking, not
simply through the mobilisation of the law enforcement agencies, not simply
through the mobilisation of organisations across the world but by mobilising
the religious instinct for good, the drive for morality and to stir the souls
of our people out of their religious consciousness, to act against
something.

To a large extent, the religious consciousness has understood how to believe
in that which they do not see. When we do not see the chains, we need people
whose imaginations have told them that there is something to be acted against
and that is what we have decided to mobilise over the next few days.

It is not because I believe that any of the religious leaders who are
sitting here, believe that they have the divine right to be the first in line
to provide solutions. I do not believe that anyone is sitting here with a
religious arrogance that we have all the answers. I believe in fact, that the
religious community needs this mobilisation for its own relevance.

Religion has often been the cause of some of the most difficult times that
the world has seen. It has often tacitly created conditions for wrong things to
manifest such as, for example: it is sometimes silent on matters such as
patriarchy that allows others to interpret the bible or Qur'an to the extreme,
as if women can then be trafficked and children can be trafficked because what
after all are women. If they cannot be equal in your church, can they be equal
in your life, if they cannot be equal in your Mosque, if they cannot even enter
your Mosque, can they be anything other than subhuman?

So this is not where the religious leadership stands up in arrogance to lead
the fight. I believe that the religious leadership is saying: this fight is
embedded in the very fabric of our worship. We need it to even liberate
ourselves from those things which we have inherited from times gone by. We need
to be liberated from patriarchy ourselves, in order to liberate people from
trafficking.

The point that I am making is that the sideshow to this conference has been
a remarkable one. Because we have shown tonight, earlier today in our march,
this morning in our service and over the next few days at our conference, that
we often concentrate far too much on the formal differences between us. We are
so obsessed with who is Muslim, who is Christian, who is Jew and who is Hindu,
that we are blinded to other matters.

We are so obsessed with the fights in Palestine between Jews and Muslims, in
Northern Ireland historically between Catholics and Protestants. We have fallen
into the trap of believing that those differences define us.

What Cape Town tells the world today, is that the world is not divided
according to Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jews, Catholic, Protestants orthodoxies.
The world is divided by mindset. The world is divided by those who when they
faced the kind of adversity that we face in the world today, they turn to
fundamentalism and extremism as a way to deal with things.

There are others who tend turn to conservative orthodoxy, who retreat into
the Mosques and to the churches, hiding from the world, denying the world being
unable to fathom what is unfolding. What Cape Town has shown today is that here
is a group of people, rooted in their own traditions, but unafraid of sharing
their faith with others, free of the kind of insecurity that is the thriving
point of extremism on the one hand and conservative orthodoxy on the other
hand. Here are people, who understand that the objectives of all religions are
the same, that if we cannot make a difference to the least amongst us, we are
not worth our salt on this earth.

What you show us here today is that as a Muslim I have far more in common
with the Anglican Archbishop, than I have with the fellow Muslim who has
dabbled with extremism. That the fellow Muslim who has dabbled in extremism,
has far more in common with the Baptist who votes for war in Iraq, they have
their own conversations on the battlefields of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and
other places. We have our conversations in trying to solve the problems that
made life a hell for the most vulnerable amongst us.

That is what I think, is the important bi-product that you produce in
mobilising us for the main product, which is the fight against human
trafficking. We can only be thankful that Antonio Maria Costa has come to
Archbishop Ndungane and out of their conversation they have decided on this
course of action because I think we have gained as a world, far more out of
that conversation than merely the fight against human trafficking.

We are beginning to discover that we have a common soul and that the soul
can respond to human suffering and that in our religious text, in our different
religious traditions, we have the impulse to the same good that the world
requires. We have shown that if we stand together in this way, we can isolate
the extremists on the one hand and we can make irrelevant the conservative
orthodox who denies the world but we can gently lead them both from their own
extremes and bring them to the center where all of us are. That is what the
world requires and that is what I think we celebrate here tonight.

Thank you very much and welcome.

Issued by: Office of the Premier, Western Cape Provincial Government
3 October 2007
Source: Western Cape Provincial Government (http://www.capegateway.gov.za)