Gaye Davis
A HUGE computer database, capable of cross-checking names, dates and incidents, will be the truth commission’s most powerful tool. It will allow for fast checks on the truth of victims’ claims. It will also ratchet up the pressure on perpetrators to come forward — and come clean.
Building the database is central to the commission’s mammoth task of uncovering, as far as possible, the suppressed and unwritten history of the past 33 years. One spin-off from the research operation about to kick into gear is it could expose the extent to which official records of acts done in the name of apartheid were destroyed by the previous government.
Truth commission workers are to start taking statements from thousands of victims across the country on March 25. This information, along with details of amnesty applications, will be fed into the database.
Protected by a security system described as virtually state-of-the-art, the database will be primed with police and court records, historical and research data, and details of apartheid abuses gathered by lawyers and human rights’ agencies.
Sophisticated software and search techniques will enable researchers and investigators to cross-check details, link individuals to incidents and pick up any patterns that emerge.
“We will be able to check victims’ allegations, ensure that those seeking amnesty are making full disclosure and also provide the scientific underpinning for the commission’s final report,” said truth commission consultant Paul van Zyl.
“The database will allow us, in as scientific a way as possible, to manage the information at our disposal. It will also be a way of preventing the commission from being used as a means to make unfounded allegations.”
In overall charge will be University of Cape Town social scientist Professor Charles Villa-Vicencio, named this week as the commission’s director of research.
While computer specialists will run the database — including United States expert Patrick Ball, who has worked on similar databases used by truth commissions elsewhere in the world — Villa Vicencio will head a team of 12 additonal researchers spread countrywide.
The research team will give commissioners background detail on violations they deal with — information on the ANC’s detention camps, or covert security force operations, for example. They will assist the commission’s investigative unit and, ultimately, draft the commission’s final report.
Lawyers and human rights organisations were already busy clearing issues of confidentiality with clients so that records could be made available, Villa-Vicencio said. Minister of Safety and Security Sidney Mufamadi recently agreed to make police records available. Attempts would also be made to get access to national intelligence archives and other state records.
Sophisticated cross-referencing techniques will enable researchers to input a policeman’s name, for example, and call up information relating to other incidents he had been involved in. “We will be able to pick up patterns of violations, including instances where particular torture techniques crop up repeatedly,” Villa-Vicencio said. “At the end we will put together the pieces of the puzzle.”