Despite reopening old wounds, the truth commission has shifted public attitudes from denial to acknowledgement, reports David Goodman
THE nine burly white policemen filed into the packed hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Cape Town and took seats in the front row. One of the policemen tapped his foot uncontrollably; another was sweating profusely.
The cops, many of whom now hold senior positions in the South African Police Service, had been subpoenaed to testify about the ”Guguletu Seven”, the name given to seven young men killed in a shoot-out with these very policemen on March 3 1986.
The hearing began with a gruesome police video of the scene, complete with close-ups of bullet-riddled heads and contorted corpses. Commissioners and the audience let out involuntary gasps of revulsion. I had to look away more than once.
As the video rolled, mothers and relatives of the dead youths could take no more. Suddenly, a mother sitting next to me shrieked in grief, grabbed her shoe and threw it at the policeman seated just three metres away from her – the man who may have killed her son.
When I came to South Africa nine months ago from the United States and began observing and reporting on the truth commission, I was deeply moved by the testimonies I heard, and deeply sceptical of the process. On its face, the commission’s deal is preposterous: just tell the truth, and your crimes will be forgiven. And so mass murderer Brian Mitchell, a former security policeman involved in killing 11 people in a 1988 massacre, is now a free man thanks to his truth amnesty.
The commission is the bastard child of realpolitik. The nation will learn the truth about the past, most perpetrators will get amnesty if they tell all, some victims will get reparations, and, with any luck, this whole process will somehow bring about reconciliation.
It’s easy to find the ethical holes in this bargain with the devil.
South Africans are trading justice for truth. Perpetrators are getting away with murder. Killers get freedom, while victims seem to get nothing. Whites ignore the hearings, and tears are confined to the victims, just like the past.
But now I’ve come to a surprising realisation about this flawed, compromised national process of introspection and confession: it is working.
Halfway through the two-year life of the commission, it has succeeded in exposing the truth behind many major massacres and high-profile political assassinations. Just as striking are the many witnesses who told me they feel a weight has been lifted from them by airing their story before their community.
And yet most whites have turned a blind eye to the testimonials of injustice, just as they did in the past.
But it would be misleading to say their attitudes have not also changed in important ways. Daily news reports about the commission have worked like water on a stone. Slowly but surely, a rough historical consensus has emerged about injustices perpetrated under apartheid. This shift from denial to acknowledgment is crucial. There can be no reconciliation in the future without basic agreement about what happened in the past.
Of course, for some South Africans, truth is not enough. I asked the sister of Christopher Piet, one of the Guguletu Seven victims, how she felt about the amnesty plan. It was February 17, and we had just emerged from a second round of truth commission hearings on the incident.
”I don’t support amnesty,” said Piet’s sister, her eyes still moist and swollen after seeing a photo of a smiling policeman standing next to her dead brother’s body. ”They should be punished. They don’t look sorry for what they did. Now we have just opened the wounds again.”
”What good is truth?” The question has nagged at me since I attended my first commission hearing.
Then recently I saw a story about Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Every week for two decades, these mothers have held a grim vigil to remind their compatriots about the unresolved cases of their ”disappeared” children, who were victims of the country’s ”dirty war” of the 1970s.
In South Africa, there will be no Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, because the truth will be known about what happened.
The importance of this point was driven home to me a few weeks ago when another group of mothers and victims of state violence marched, this one in Guguletu. It was the 11th anniversary of the killing of the Guguletu Seven. Cynthia Ngewu, mother of Christopher Piet, addressed the small crowd.
”I want to thank the truth commission because although it has opened up wounds, through that process we were able to know the truth,” she said.
”Now we know the perpetrators. I am asking God to forgive those people. We don’t want them to go to jail, but we do think they should help support these children.” Then the crowd broke out into a surprising chant. ”Long live the TRC!”
That’s when I understood what the value of truth is in a nation struggling to deal with its painful past.
Truth heals.
David Goodman is an American freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book about South Africa’s transition from apartheid