Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu yesterday criticised white South Africans and big business for ignoring their role in apartheid and urged immediate reparations for 20,000 victims of white minority rule.
In handing down the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he headed, Tutu brought to an end a nearly seven-year probe into torture, murder, and other rights crimes committed by all parties during nearly half a century of entrenched white rule in South Africa, which ended in 1994.
"We are celebrating our freedom today from the ghastly shackles and vicious injustice of an unlawful system," Tutu said in handing over the two-volume report to President Thabo Mbeki at an emotional ceremony in Pretoria.
Tutu used the occasion to criticise the US and Britain, saying they did not have the authority to declare war on Iraq. He told reporters that the US-led war was immoral and criticised the US for trying to impose its will on the Iraqi people.
"For me it's kind of deja vu of the time when white people were always able to tell us (Black South Africans) what is good for us," said Tutu, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1984.
"It must be somebody naive to continue to say there was not a single white person who benefited. The system was such that the minute you were born white you were advantaged," he said.