SouthAfrica TRC(1) by David Philips
05/06/2011 19:18
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_____________
See erratum in
adjacent box,
submitted by
WARWICK HOJEM
who was a witness to
one of the violent
attacks cited by
Philips.
_____________
CLICK BELOW FOR
David Philips
on
The Freedom Charter
and
David Philips on the
TRC Part 2
and
TRC Part 3
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Politics and Society
SOUTH AFRICA
The Truth & Reconciliation Commission (part 1):
a reassessment
by
DAVID PHILIPS
When South Africa became a democracy in 1994, its new constitution was judged internationally as
the most progressive in the world. Inscribed in this remarkable document was a commitment to
ensuring reconciliation between the peoples of South Africa. But what was meant by “reconciliation”,
and was it achieved? The historian, the late Professor David Philips who died suddenly in August
2008, studied the course of the TRC from its inception. He addressed these and other questions in
the first of a three part series for London Grip.
________________
A cartoon from a South African newspaper in
1997 shows Bishop Tutu, accompanied by the
media and various members of the Truth &
Reconciliation Commission, with a Map in his hand,
standing on the edge of a steep cliff labelled
“TRUTH”. He’s looking across a deep abyss to
another steep cliff labelled “RECONCILIATION” –
unreachable from where he is. And he’s saying,
“OOPS!”
The TRC took as its motto “Truth: The Road to
Reconciliation” – but, as the cartoon suggests, the
route from one to the other is neither simple nor
straightforward.
In terms of the negotiated Interim Constitution,
South Africa was able to hold its first free and
democratic election in April 1994. Included as an
afterthought to this document, commonly referred
to as its ‘Postamble’. This was an agreement
between the governing Nationalist Party (NP) and
the imminent government of the African National
Congress (ANC), which committed the new,
democratically elected South African Parliament to
legislate to provide some form of amnesty, in
pursuit of “reconciliation between the people of
South Africa and the reconstruction of society”.
The NP were anxious to protect themselves and
their subordinates from prosecution by the new
democratic government; the ANC - knowing that
they were not in a sufficiently powerful position to
insist on prosecution and punishment of all the
leaders and main functionaries of the apartheid
regime, and anyhow wanting amnesty for some of
their own people - made a virtue of necessity.
They embraced their leader Mandela’s language of
forgiveness, ubuntu (a feeling of common
humanity), reconciliation and reconstruction. The
new democratic Parliament passed the Promotion
of National Unity and Reconciliation Act in 1995;
and its implementation began in December 1995.
Models for Punishment, Truth-finding and/or
Reconciliation
The National Party had been in power for 46 years,
an
authoritarian
regime
based
on
racial
discrimination. It had maintained itself in power,
particularly in the final decade, by brutal
oppression and allowing its security forces to
commit numerous atrocities. When Mandela’s new
Government took office in 1994, a means had to
be found to deal with the past conduct of the
preceding government while still managing the
delicate process of transition to a new political
system. Similar transitional issues have affected
many countries and in the future probably will
affect many more, such as East Timor, Indonesia,
Northern Ireland, and Israel/Palestine.
Since 1945, two major models have evolved to
deal with this such circumstances, and have
become enshrined in International Human Rights
Law: the Nuremberg Model and the Latin
American Model.
The Nuremberg Model:
Trials before a
Tribunal
At the end of WWII, tribunals were established at
Nuremberg and Tokyo to try individuals in the
leadership of Germany and Japan for war crimes,
both crimes against the peace and crimes against
humanity.
Initially it was assumed that a
permanent
international
tribunal
would be
established to handle similar future situations, but
the Cold War put an end to such hopes. Not until
1993 was another such international tribunal set
up by the UN Security Council, for the former
Yugoslavia, followed in 1995 by a similar tribunal
for Rwanda. In South Africa the Nuremberg model
was never a realistic option: Germany and Japan
had surrendered unconditionally in 1945 whereas
the apartheid regime had negotiated its transition
from its original position while still possessing
substantial strength.
The Latin American Model:
a ‘Truth
Commission’
The second model – for a country in transition
from a dictatorship which committed atrocities
against its own citizens, to a democracy – was
pioneered by some Latin American countries,
notably Argentina, Chile, El Salvador and
Uruguay. This was a 'Truth Commission' as an
alternative to the prosecution of individuals before
a criminal tribunal. For some of these countries,
the transition to democracy was a fragile and
delicate process in which the military retained
considerable power and the ability to disrupt the
whole transition process. Often the military could
extract a promise of amnesty for their past
misdeeds as part of the price of a return to
democracy.
WARWICK HOJEM wrote to
London Grip, as follows, to
correct a detail in David Philip’s
article which can alter
interpretation of the event. (See
section below, “The Case in
Favour of theTRC”).
Tutu cited the case of Mrs Beth
Savage, a White woman, badly
injured by a grenade in the
Azanian People’s Liberation Army
attack on a New Year’s Eve dance
at a King Williams Town golf club.
She said that the experience had
enriched her and that she wanted
to meet the perpetrator and
forgive him.
A minor correction from somebody
who was there: it was not a New
Year’s Eve dance but an end of
year Wine Circle dinner, held on
28/11/92. I was present in my role
as the Wine Circle's secretary.
I witnessed the deaths of the four
people killed by the grenade - Mr
and Mrs MacDonald and Mr and
Mrs Davies. I think that Beth
Savage’s main injury was not by a
grenade but rather by an R4 bullet
that pierced her heart. She
was airlifted to Bloemfontein and
had open heart surgery there. I
think the surgeon was a Dr.
Penold.
Although the TRC claimed to have
tried to contact all victims, neither
I nor my wife (who received a flesh
wound from the hand
grenade) were contacted but this
could have been because we
emigrated mid-1996 as a direct
result of the violence we
experienced that night and
because of some events after that
date.
In terms of whether the TRC was a
success or not, I do think that the
country was poised for civil war,
with a small minority of wellarmed right-wingers,
predominantly Afrikaners, in one
camp and a bunch
of aggrieved (the majority of
victims came from their
side) poorly armed militant blacks
in the other. The TRC’s
introduction and handling of the
situation neutralized the tense
situation that existed.
Would I have forgiven the
perpetrators of the attack at the
golf club had I been at one of the
hearings? Definitely not. We were
the first soft target that was
attacked after the Bisho
massacre on 7/9/92 and the
breakdown of the Codesa talks. It
was a cowardly attack performed
by cowards who tried to create
maximum mayhem
(they even tried to set fire to eight
gas cylinders that were used to
heat the clubhouse shower’s
water) but fled after one of
their automatic rifles
jammed. Their second grenade
was also kicked to one side and
the 13 occupants of the bar (in an
adjoining room) managed to dive
to the ground prior to it exploding,
with no injuries being sustained, in
contrast to the 23 injuries from
shrapnel in the dining room.
And for the record, I was
chairperson of the Democratic
Party in KWT (Alex Borraine’s
party) and was as much against
the National party government as I
was against perpetrators
of cowardly hit and run attacks on
innocent civilians.
I was also co-chair of the Border
Peace committee from early 1993
through to early 1996 and my
choice at the time was to work for
a peaceful transition towards black
majority rule or to align with
the white right wing who had been
the main cornerstone of the
apartheid era. Admittedly, by mid93 we had decided to leave but I
wanted to make it a better country
for those who chose not to leave or
didn’t have the resources to do
so. I felt that I could contribute
more actively towards a better
society following the path I
did take than by taking up arms
(which I had been appropriately
trained for in the mid-70’s courtesy
of compulsory conscription).
The South African Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC)
The South African Parliament opted for a version of the
'Latin American model'. The
©2011 Warwick Hojem
TRC Act set up a TRC with seventeen Commissioners. Its brief was to achieve four
major objectives:
- To establish as complete a picture as possible of 'gross violations of human rights'
in the period between March 1960 and 10 May 1994.
- To grant amnesty to people who applied, on certain conditions.
- To establish the fate of the victims of such violations, restore their dignity by
giving them or their families the opportunity to tell their story, and to recommend
measures of reparation for victims or their dependents;
- To compile a report of the TRC's activities, with recommendations of measures to
prevent future violations of human rights.
The TRC was given powers to conduct investigations and hold hearings, normally in
public, to subpoena witnesses, and to compel witnesses to answer questions or
produce any article, even if it might incriminate them.
To achieve its objectives, the TRC set up three Committees - on Human Rights
Violations (HRV); on the Reparation and Rehabilitation of Victims; and on the
granting of Amnesty.
Of these, inevitably, the most controversial was the Amnesty Committee. It was the
most formally legal of the committees and unlike the other two Committees, was
appointed directly by President Mandela. It was chaired by a Judge who was not a
Commissioner, it comprised two other Judges, and the two Commissioners
appointed to it had to be lawyers. Subsequently, more judges were added to it.
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Anyone seeking amnesty had to apply before the deadline, upon which the
Committee then investigated the application and if it found that the application
complied with the requirements, the Committee granted amnesty to that person for
that act, rendering him or her neither criminally nor civilly liable for such act.
The three main criteria to be satisfied for the granting of an amnesty were that the
act took place during the period March 1960 - May 1994; that it was associated with
a political objective; and that the applicant was judged by the committee to have
made full disclosure of all relevant facts.
The Commissioners first met in December 1995 and held their first HRV hearings in
April 1996. The TRC was originally supposed to last for just eighteen months with a
possible six-month extension but the deadline was extended - a number of times to October 1998. The original Report in 5 vols. was presented to President Mandela
at the end of Oct. 1998 but the work of the Amnesty Committee continued to 2001.
In 2003, the Government finally announced the Reparations to be paid, and the TRC
issued two more volumes of its report, volumes 6 and 7.
The TRC’s struggle
The TRC made a considerable effort to advertise the hearings, both to encourage
victims and their families to come forward and to disseminate to the South African
public the evidence given at hearings. It set up a database of about 22,000 cases of
alleged human rights violations, and put a TRC website online to disseminate
information about its activities and the results it was achieving. It encouraged
national and international press and radio coverage, allowing TV cameras to film the
HRV hearings. The South African Broadcasting Corporation gave the TRC two hours
of live TV coverage on its opening day, featured it prominently in news bulletins,
and presented a much watched 45-minute summary every Sunday following each
week's hearings.
The TRC carried a heavy burden of national and international expectation.
Apartheid had gained huge international attention and condemnation, and the TRC
arrested the attention of the world’s media, more than any previous truth
commission. It was also bigger, in terms of its resources and the scope of its
inquiries, than any previous truth commission.
Given the impossibly heavy weight of expectations placed on the TRC, it’s not
surprising that some were disappointed. The real question is whether, on balance,
its work will be regarded as having been a success. Initially, the TRC could draw on
a huge groundswell of popular support for the Mandela Government, and for the
general objectives of discovering and publicizing the truth and working actively for
reconciliation. And it benefited from its formal leaders - its Chairperson Archbishop
Tutu, the charismatic anti-apartheid clergyman, Nobel Peace Prize winner and skilled
media performer, as well as its Deputy-Chairperson Alex Boraine, a former White
liberal politician who was generally praised for his handling of the role.
But, from the start, it also faced considerable opposition from diverse groups, from
right-wing Whites, especially Afrikaners, who claimed to fear a partisan witch-hunt –
and the Afrikaner press hammered home this theme; from significant parts of the
old White liberal establishment, as well as Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, who
attacked the TRC as a puppet of the ANC government; and from some radicals,
mainly Black, but including some Whites, who regarded its terms as too evenhanded, too lax in its amnesty provisions, and too favourable to the old
beneficiaries of apartheid, especially in its investigation of only gross human rights
violations and not the gamut of the apartheid regime’s oppressive actions.
So - what did it achieve?
An important part of the TRC’s task was to gather information about atrocities, and
to publicise them to the South African population and the rest of the world. This
began with public hearings by the HRV Committee, held in various centres around
South Africa, at which victims of such violations, or their families and dependants,
gave evidence about what had been done to them.
The evidence from the HRV hearings is striking and chilling. Used in conjunction
with some of the evidence from the perpetrators, given in the Amnesty Committee
hearings, it confirms in substantial detail a saga of countless incidents of torture,
abduction, ‘disappearances', and murder - mainly, but not exclusively, committed by
the security forces. These included some notorious incidents, such as the death in
police custody of Steve Biko in 1977; the assassination, by police death squads, of
anti-apartheid activists such as Griffiths Mxenge in 1981 and his wife Victoria
Mxenge in 1985, Fabian and Florence Ribeiro in 1986, and David Webster in 1989;
the Security Police abduction and assassination of the ‘Cradock Four’ in 1985; the
killing by police of the ‘Gugulethu Seven’ in 1986; the abduction, killing & disposal
of the body, by chopping it up and throwing it into a river, of student activist
Siphiwo Mtimkulu by Gideon Nieuwoudt of the Port Elizabeth special branch police.
And there were great numbers of less publicized but equally atrocious assaults on,
mainly Black, South Africans.
The Amnesty Committee
The most contentious part of the TRC's activities concerned the powers and
decisions of the Amnesty Committee. By the deadline of 30th September 1997 they
had received 7,127 applications for amnesty. Most of the applications were from
convicted criminals in prison, trying their luck, who were turned down without a
formal hearing. Only 1,146 (16%) were successful in getting amnesty.
Let’s examine one such application, that of notorious 'death squad' security
policeman Captain Dirk Coetzee. He was an officer in the Security Police, in
command of the security police unit at Vlakplaas, a farm near Pretoria which the
Security Police used as a base for hit squads. He was told by his superior to 'make
a plan' with Griffiths Mxenge, a well-known Black lawyer and anti-apartheid activist,
described as a 'thorn in the flesh' of the authorities. The order to “make a plan”
with someone, always given verbally, never in writing, was understood to be an
instruction to murder that person. Coetzee and his two African askaris (captured
guerillas made turncoats) David Tshikalange and Butana Almond Nofomela, planned
Mxenge's death, and, with the aid of two others, carried it out in November 1981.
Coetzee was told not to shoot him, but to make it look like a robbery, so after they
had abducted him in his car, they stabbed him - 45 times - as well as hitting him on
the head with a spanner.
Coetzee and his men also abducted, interrogated and tortured Sizwe Kondile, a
young law student and anti-apartheid activist. He sustained such serious brain
injuries that they decided that they couldn’t release him; so they poisoned him and
then burned the body on an open fire in the veld. Coetzee testified that it took
about seven hours for the body to burn fully; and, while they were attending to
this, he and his men were having a braaivleis (barbecue) next to the burning body.
Coetzee, Tshikalange and Nofomela requested and were granted amnesty for these
and other killings, as political acts, done on the orders of the Security Police.
Coetzee, aged 51 when he testified to the Amnesty Committee in November 1996,
told them that his beliefs were shaped by his family being "typical Afrikaner
conservative National Party members" and by his religious upbringing in the Dutch
Reformed Church.
He had been a member of the Voortrekker Youth Movement
(the Afrikaner equivalent of Boy Scouts), “a youth movement wearing para-military
uniform, based on the traditions of our forebears, the Voortrekkers - going on
camps, singing typical Afrikaans songs, being educated in the history of our
forebears.”
He said that he believed that politics and religion were "100%"
connected in the form of "the National Party and the Dutch Reformed Church"; and
that "God had in fact given this country for the Afrikaners as its own". He said, “I
was born into this environment, grew up in this environment, where we were made
to believe that we were God's own people. We were the last southern Christian tip
on the southern tip of Africa, that we were threatened with a communist
revolutionary onslaught from the north, which if it was ever to succeed would
plunge the southern tip of Africa into chaos.”
Coetzee volunteered for military service, to defend South Africa against the
‘communist onslaught’, and then joined the police.
In August 1980 he was
appointed commander of Vlakplaas, a unit which he turned into a base for hit
squads.
Asked whether he thought the unit operated above the law, he replied,
"Absolutely". One of the unit's operating instructions, known as "the eleventh
commandment", was, "Don't get caught".
Coetzee’s most famous successor as commander of the hit squads at Vlakplaas was
Colonel Eugene De Kock, a much-decorated hero of the Security Police. In May
1994, just after the elections, De Kock was put on trial for a series of offences. He
was eventually convicted of 89 charges, including six of murder, two of attempted
murder, plus many others, and in August 1996 he was sentenced to two life
sentences plus 212 years' imprisonment. From prison, De Kock then applied for
amnesty, and freely revealed details of his activities, including implicating his
superiors in the police force and members of the Government in giving the orders
for these killings. Coetzee was granted amnesty for all of his killings, and walked
free; De Kock was granted amnesty for almost all of his offences - including an
attempt on the life of Dirk Coetzee. He was refused amnesty in just five cases,
where the committee found that there was no clear political objective in the killing,
or the killing was seen as disproportionate to the objective. So De Kock also
escaped punishment for most of his atrocities though he is still currently in prison,
serving one of his life sentences.
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De Kock made a point of stressing that his orders for hit squad killings and other
activities came from police and army generals who in turn got them from President
P.W. Botha and his successor F.W. de Klerk.
The generals, confronted with this
evidence, mostly denied that they had given such orders, or claimed that the
Vlakplaas people had misunderstood what they meant when they ordered them to
‘eliminate’ people such as Matthew Goniwe of the Cradock Four.
Yet P.W. Botha refused to testify to the TRC; and De Klerk succeeded, by legal
action, in getting the section referring to him removed from the final TRC Report.
Botha was eventually prosecuted for refusal to testify but the magistrate only
imposed a fine and a suspended sentence – and even that was overturned on
appeal on a technicality.
So the end result is: Botha and De Klerk got off scotfree; Coetzee got amnesty for everything; and De Kock got amnesty for most of
his crimes.
You don’t, I think, have to be unduly cynical, nor a committed opponent of the TRC,
to feel that this is not a very just result. And there are other such examples, as I
shall indicate below.
So the dilemma remains as to where to place the emphasis.
forgiveness? On justice or vengeance?
On punishment or
Let us consider the cases for and against the TRC’s performance.
The Case in Favour of the TRC
An important part of the argument favouring the TRC’s activities is that it has
facilitated a national catharsis for a society traumatised by all the killings, torture
and disappearances. It can be said to have achieved this in at least three ways.
First, by offering the victims and their families the opportunity to tell their stories in
public, thus helping relieve them of an appalling mental and emotional burden.
Second, by requiring full disclosure of the applicants for amnesty, which put
confessions of their shameful actions on the public record. Third, the TRC provided
reparation and rehabilitation for those who in its terms qualified as “victims”, and
their dependants.
The TRC originally recommended that each victim receive
between R17,000 and R20,000 per year for six years; by 2003 it was decided to
increase the upper limit to R30,000 for each victim.
There is a conventional argument that a truth commission serves a national purpose
in forcing a society to confront, and come to terms with, its atrocious past; that it
can deter such conduct in the future; and that it can do so at least as well as the
alternative, namely prosecution of a few individual perpetrators.
Many non-South Africans expressed the hope that the TRC, positive and optimistic,
would offer a model for other countries facing similar problems of transitional justice
and dealing with past atrocities. Amongst South Africans, no-one projected this
notion better than the TRC's Chair, Archbishop Tutu, who loved to portray the TRC,
and his 'Rainbow nation of God' of the 'new South Africa', as offering new moral
hope and guidance to the world. He did this in countless media interviews and press
releases, and in his Foreword to the TRC Report. Tutu had his own ideal vision of
how the TRC should work, as a form of ‘restorative justice’, as opposed to
‘retributive justice’.
In the ideal case, it would go like this: the victim/survivor gives evidence to the
HRVC about the violation; the perpetrator applies for amnesty, and comes forward
to disclose everything about it before the Amnesty Committee; the perpetrator
apologises to the victim and the victim’s family, and asks their forgiveness; the
victim comes forward to embrace and forgive the perpetrator in full view of the TV
cameras.
Tutu repeatedly cited and praised a few cases which fitted in well with this model, as
if they were the norm. He cited the case of Babalwa Mhlauli, the daughter of one
of the Cradock Four who were abducted & killed. She said at her HRVC hearing,
"We want to forgive but whom should we forgive?" He cited the case of Mrs Beth
Savage, a White woman, badly injured by a grenade in the Azanian People’s
Liberation Army attack on a New Year’s Eve dance at a King Williams Town golf
club. She said that the experience had enriched her and that she wanted to meet
the perpetrator and forgive him.
Tutu suggested that these cases were common – but in fact, they were far from it.
Many victims felt pressured by the TRC to forgive their perpetrators but felt no
necessary inclination to do so.For example, there was Mrs Charity Kondile, the
mother of Sizwe Kondile who was murdered and his body burned by Dirk Coetzee.
Coetzee publicly asked her forgiveness. Her lawyer replied on her behalf, “You said
that you would like to meet Mrs Kondile and look her in the eye. She asked me to
tell you that she feels it is an honour ... you do not deserve. If you are really sorry,
you would stand trial for the deeds you did.” Mrs Kondile added to this: “It is easy
for Mandela and Tutu to forgive ... they live vindicated lives. In my life nothing,
not a single thing has changed since my son was burnt by barbarians ... nothing.
Therefore I cannot forgive.”
The families of three sets of victims, Steve Biko, Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge, and
Fabian & Florence Ribeiro, applied to the new Constitutional Court to have the
amnesty clause of the TRC Act
set aside as unconstitutional.
The Court
unanimously rejected their application, mainly on the grounds of public policy:
without the promise of amnesty, perpetrators would have no incentive to come
forward and make full disclosure.
The families still objected to perpetrators of
atrocities against their family members going free.
November 2007
Similarly, Marius Schoon, whose wife and six-year-old daughter were killed by a
parcel bomb sent by the team of security policeman Craig Williamson, who was
granted amnesty, said,
“There can be no indemnity, no forgiveness, without
remorse. We see no signs of Craig being sorry. I mean, are we going to have a
situation where people can qualify for indemnity just by saying, as if they were
reeling off a grocery list, ‘I killed this one and poisoned that one and beat the shit
out of the third one’. It seems untenable to me, morally and philosophically.”
Craig Williamson’s team also sent the letter bomb which killed Ruth First. Her
daughter Gillian Slovo described how repelled she was by hearing Williamson freely
talk about sending those letter bombs, and how little desire she felt to forgive him
or shake his hand.
I’m not suggesting that Tutu and the others are dishonest, or even naive, in their
attitudes.
They acknowledge that there is good reason to want to see the
perpetrators of the violations punished, both for fundamental reasons of justice and
from an understandable human wish for vengeance. The strongest argument in
favour of their position - which they have frequently made - is an essentially
pragmatic one: without the offer of amnesty for acts committed under apartheid,
there would have been no negotiated settlement at all, and South Africa would have
faced the alternative of continued internal conflict, possibly leading to bloody racial
civil war. And, after the free election and new government, the nation's greatest
need is healing and reconciliation, rather than vengeance for past wrongs which
would simply prolong the bitterness and conflict.
But not everyone accepts this argument as a complete solution to all the problems.
The Case Against the TRC
A major problem with the Tutu view is that many people who would reluctantly
accept criminal amnesty as preferable to a bloody racial civil war, still can’t see why
that should also include amnesty against being civilly sued for damages. And many
understandably object to the way in which this pragmatic argument – amnesty
reluctantly accepted as the lesser of two evils – often became in Tutu’s mouth a
very different argument: namely, that amnesty was morally preferable to
prosecution, preferable as a form of ‘restorative justice’ instead of ‘retributive
justice’.
One critic, Richard Wilson, has called this the TRC’s “religious-redemptive
narrative”: amnesty is presented as a positive good of Christian forgiveness, and
the wish to prosecute perpetrators through the criminal justice system is portrayed
as a nasty wish for vengeance. Of course, Tutu was an Anglican Archbishop, and it
was his job to urge Christian forgiveness on people. But not everyone involved with
the TRC was either Christian or religious, and there was no reason why everyone
else should have to share Tutu’s view of reconciliation and forgiveness; the TRC Act
talks about reconciliation, but says nothing about any requirement of forgiveness.
The TRC was also criticised by some for its brief to investigate all atrocities
committed in this period, those
committed by supporters of the liberation
movements as well as by supporters of apartheid. The Nuremberg Trials were
criticised as exhibitions of “victors’ justice” – punishing the crimes of the Germans
but not those of the Allies. The new South African Government was keen to avoid a
similar criticism, that the TRC was simply a “witchhunt” against White Afrikaners
who had supported apartheid.
So Tutu stressed the “even-handedness and
independence” of the TRC.
But this angered many supporters of the liberation struggle, who objected to
treating acts committed in the course of the fight against apartheid in the same way
as acts committed by defenders and enforcers of apartheid. They argued that the
struggle against apartheid – apartheid having been confirmed by the UN as a “crime
against humanity” –
should have been assessed as a “just war”, and acts
committed by anti-apartheid activists treated more leniently.
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This was not, however, what the TRC Act said, nor what the TRC did, which brought
them into conflict with many of the leaders of the ANC who objected to having to
apply for amnesty along with agents of the apartheid state.
In a sadly farcical last–minute action, those ANC leaders, headed by Thabo Mbeki,
tried to get a Court order to stop publication of the TRC Report. Fortunately, their
request was refused, but it didn’t make the ANC look good, nor did it bode well for
getting the ANC Government to pay the reparations which that Report
recommended.
Truth versus Reconciliation
A Dutch observer of the TRC said that the Commission could not but fail because its
task was simply too demanding: but “even as it fails, it has already succeeded
beyond any rational expectations”. This seems to me to be the right, complex,
conclusion to come to.
The TRC was assigned a massive political, social, and moral role. Natural justice
suggested that victims and their families had a right to expect both prosecution and
reparation. International Human Rights Law demanded that, as with Pinochet in
Chile, the leaders of the apartheid regime such as P.W. Botha, should be punished,
to deter others from running similar regimes. Yet political prudence suggested that
all the conflicting groups in South Africa should try to live together in the future,
hence the need for national reconciliation. Perhaps it was the most sensible course
to take – to trade amnesty for perpetrators in return for their putting their misdeeds
on the public record. This could be rationalised as an essential reconciliation to
which was added a gloss of religion and morality, by invoking the virtues of
Christian forgiveness and indigenous ubuntu.
Many South Africans are not happy at the thought that many of the guilty
perpetrators (White ones, in particular) have escaped prosecution. But, in its
favour, the TRC has also left a permanent historical record of detailed disclosures
by some of the perpetrators of atrocities which the forces of 'law and order'
committed in defending apartheid South Africa, thus at last confirming what many
people claimed in the face of repeated official denials during the apartheid years.
The TRC didn’t – it couldn’t - satisfy all the high hopes placed on it by both South
Africans and the international community. Its brief was to produce both 'truth' and
'reconciliation'. But perhaps you can’t have both at once, and it may have served
truth at the expense of reconciliation – as in the cartoon I cited at the start.
In South Africa’s circumstances, a perfect solution was never a serious option.
What the TRC did may be the least bad outcome of a difficult and complex process
of transition to a free and democratic society.
In the longer term, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and all the evidence it
collected and placed on the public record, offers a valuable contribution towards
building up a new “human rights culture” in the new South Africa – and provides a
deep, if harrowing, repository of primary materials for future historians.
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