John Pilger cannot be accused of understating his case, either in his film or this article. Which is fine, but then he musn’t expect others to endorse his polemical views and interpretations. Hence the disclaimer.
He says the old SABC sometimes ran critical documentaries by foreign TV journalists and accompanied them with disclaimers like the one I scripted for his programme. I can recall no critical TV documentary by a foreign journalist that the old SABC ever ran. Not one. Which is one measure of the change in our country Pilger claims hasn’t happened.
The “Kafkaesque internal memorandum” he quotes from wasn’t a memorandum at all, but rough briefing notes, suggesting possible questions, that I gave to Max du Preez, who anchored the debate after the film.
A few other points. Pilger wriggles over my observation about his Sharpeville statement. Here’s what he said in the film, over scenes of the massacre: “This atrocity was a clear sign to Western business that the population was being disciplined and opposition crushed. Foreign capital poured in.”
That is a gross misstatement of fact. As everyone who was around at the time knows, there was a massive outflow of capital after Sharpeville. Only when the gold price began to soar to an astonishing $800 an ounce later in the decade did foreign investment recover.
Incidentally, the massacre was in 1960, not 1962 as Pilger says here in an attempt to show that the recovery was quicker than it really was.
Pilger denies that his film denigrated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Quote: “How is it possible for the victims of a genocide to reconcile with their oppressors? One of the deals was amnesty for the killers, torturers and collaborators. All they had to do was take part in a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a kind of public confessional, in which they didn’t have to say sorry and there was no justice and people got away, literally, with murder.”
I know of no Cabinet minister to whom the film was shown before screening. We didn’t invite Pilger on to the discussion panel because he had left the country and we had no idea he had returned on the day of the screening. When we knew he was back we invited him to appear on News Hour the following night. He declined – very rudely, according to the executive producer who phoned him.
Pilger says he challenged me to debate the issue with him on News Hour. In fact, he never spoke to me at all, before or after the film, and no such message was communicated to me by anyone else.
John Pilger, like many of us in the journalistic trade, makes a living out of excoriating others on screen and in print. But he shows an unseemly sensitivity when faced with any criticism of himself.