At the end of a London conference on African publishing, the chairperson of the National Heritage Council of South Africa, historian and academic Luli Callinicos told Ecumenical News International: "There's a committee of historians who've been discussing this and soldiers from the South African Defence Force - the apartheid army - are being recognised. They too were victims of apartheid."

The names of thousands of South African soldiers - among them white teenage conscripts who died in the South African intervention in Angola 30 years ago this month - will be inscribed on a huge memorial wall at the 52 hectare Freedom Park in Pretoria.

The names, too, of the fallen Boer dead in the two Anglo-Boer Wars fought at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century will also be recorded on the wall, as well as black and white people who died in the fight against the apartheid system and racial discrimination.

"The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was largely Christian inspired and led by Bishop Tutu and we felt that a more indigenous approach was also needed - a more African design to reconciliation. Freedom Park was commissioned because the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended symbolic reparations," said Callinicos after the three day conference ended on 19 October..

"Apart from recommending smallish amounts of money, it also said that people need to be compensated symbolically - hence this Wall of Remembrance which was partly inspired by the Wall of Remembrance to the dead of the Vietnam War in the USA," she noted. "This is a generous reconciliatory gesture," said Callinicos, who is also a board member of the 350 million rand (US$53 million) Freedom Park, a brainchild of President Thabo Mbeki after his predecessor Nelson Mandela in 1994 ushered in an age of political, racial and religious reconciliation in a land divided for decades by the racist policies of apartheid.

"The Boers who died in the Anglo Boer Wars were fighting against British Imperialism," said Callinicos referring to tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed in those two wars. "Freedom Park is close to the Voortrekker Monument [that commemorates Afrikaners killed in conflicts]. It's set on a hill full of indigenous plants and the design is indigenous, recommended by traditional leaders and many others," she noted. "The Voortrekker Monument is still there, of course it is. Right from the beginning, President Mandela emphasised reconciliation."

Callinicos said, that rather than pull down statues and monuments put up by whites, it was decided "we would reinterpret them".

South Africa's National Heritage Council is a statutory body formed by the National Heritage Council Act.

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