THIS might be seen as the week of the killers as victims. The amnesty committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been hearing five former members of the security branch confess to atrocities they carried out during the apartheid era. And SABC has been broadcasting a two-part documentary on the life story of Eugene de Kock.
Both the documentary and the amnesty application seek to do much the same thing – offer some understanding of the factors which led the perpetrators of human rights abuses to their present predicament: De Kock, as “Prime Evil”, facing justice in the Pretoria Supreme Court, and the Vlakplaas Five fleeing Nemesis in the form of Transvaal attorney general Jan d’Oliviera. But there the similarity ends.
The initial presentation, at least, by the Vlakplaas Five to the truth commission smacks of hypocrisy. The absence of any fresh disclosures as to the activities of the Vlakplaas unit strengthens the impression that all the applicants seek to do is explain away the crimes for which they have no hope of escaping responsibility. The supporting statement by former commissioner of police Johan van der Merwe is of a piece with that: his assurance, for example, that care was taken by police to avoid acting as agents provocateurs when they supplied booby-trapped grenades to anti-apartheid activists is, to put it politely, mendacious.
The outstanding SABC documentary, by contrast, came straight from the heart of its producer and director, Jacques Pauw – an Afrikaner who was in effect examining his own sense of guilt for the atrocities of the apartheid era as well as the culpability of the likes of De Kock. He pulled no punches; Vlakplaas – where men were strung upside down by their ankles and had burning sticks thrust up their rectums – was clearly a place of the utmost depravity.
And it is in the production of the film that Pauw in effect answers the excuses made by the Vlakplaas Five – the familiar pleas of social conditioning and obedience to higher authority. In the admirable tradition of the likes of Bram Fischer and Beyers Naud, Pauw – whose grandmother was born in a Boer War concentration camp – demonstrates that the circumstances of one’s birth are not the determinants of the moral quality of one’s life.
The spirit of reconciliation which has accompanied the transition to democracy has seen something of a stampede to extend “forgiveness” to those responsible for the horrors of apartheid. Nelson Mandela has in effect called a halt to that by his firm stand in refusing the truth commission’s appeal for an extension to the amnesty cut- off date. We would support him in that. Killers cannot be seen as victims.