Comment: Ronald Suresh Roberts
THE apartheid state killed 68 political prisoners in police detention, while apartheid’s mines killed 69 000 people this century. Yet the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is largely ignoring apartheid business.
By law, the commission must investigate ”gross violations of human rights”, including ”severe ill treatment” that was ”part of a systematic pattern of abuse”.
So why is mining, which treated human beings like profit-fodder and entrenched the migrant-labour system, being ignored? If apartheid’s lawyers, doctors and media must face a reckoning, why not business? We are told business did nothing ”unlawful”. But did the media, lawyers, doctors?
In fitfully limiting its focus to activities unlawful under apartheid’s own laws, the commission ignores parts of its statutory mandate: the systematic severe ill-treatment, often ”lawful” and committed by private parties, that was apartheid’s bedrock.
Upon his appointment as the commission’s vice-chair, Alex Boraine, formerly an Anglo American-funded liberal in the apartheid Parliament, said a major goal of the truth body was to ”restore” the rule of law.
He apparently envisages a return to a Smutsian golden era, when the rule of law supposedly prevailed. Such liberal assumptions hang like a blight over the commission’s work.
What gave apartheid its particular face in the rogues’ gallery of 20th-century inhumanity was precisely its legalised infliction of severe ill-treatment on blacks. By emphasising activities that were previously unlawful, the commission is ironically erasing apartheid’s distinctive horror: the legalised and systematic infliction on blacks of severe ill- treatment by a state and its (un)civil society.
In this familiar liberal bias, no horror is a real horror unless a legal system, however atrocious, says it is. Even where that legal system itself comprises a crime against humanity, the liberal response is that two wrongs don’t make a right: one must resist by only those ”lawful” methods that the criminals against humanity themselves condescend to allow.
Conversely, if a crime against humanity is implemented by ”lawful” means, by methodical parliamentary criminals, it disappears from the radar screen of gross human rights abuse, however real the human suffering may have been.
This liberal line of reasoning is explicit in Jill Wentzl’s The Liberal Slideaway, published by the Institute of Race Relations in 1995. Wentzl argues that apartheid’s ”structural violence at least had the quality of being structural, with its own bureaucracy, rules, reports, files, trials and inquests”.
Instead of realising she is describing the same camouflage of orderliness that historians of the Nazi regime call ”desk murder”, Wentzl thinks her argument mitigates apartheid’s evil, compared to less orderly violence.
Within the truth body, such bias has undermined the plain language of the commission’s statute, which requires that all severe ill-treatment, whether legal or illegal under illegitimate apartheid ”laws”, be investigated.
Many apartheid desk murderers were in the private sector. Former prime minister PW Botha sought to ”unite business leaders behind the South African Defence Force” and, by the end of the 1970s, approximately 5 600 private businesses were linked to his murderous defence establishment. Meanwhile, military spending boosted ”non-military” sectors like textiles, electronics and construction.
Yet when, rarely, the commission notices corporate complicity, it is of a non- systematic kind. As in the Tongaat-Hulett case now in the news, the commission apparently believes a company must find the bodies of security force victims on its property before the commission need take note.
Systematic ill-treatment of blacks – apartheid’s monument of public-private co- operation – has disappeared in a fog of liberal bias.
Ronald Suresh Roberts is co-author of Reconciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance