forgiveness
There was something awfully satisfying about that klap Gideon Nieuwoudt got on the back of his head this week.
For those who missed the story as told by the South African Press Association, Nieuwoudt – a former security policeman particularly notorious in the Eastern Cape – had gone to the Port Elizabeth home of Siphiwe Mtimkulu, whom he has confessed to murdering, in search of forgiveness. Instead he was belted over the head with a vase by Mtimkulu’s son. Nieuwoudt reportedly expected the sort of blessings which Amy Biehl’s family had bestowed on her killers.
The Nieuwoudt incident must raise the thought in the minds of many South Africans that a touch of fine, old- fashioned retribution would be nice where the crimes of the apartheid era are concerned. Not exactly an eye for an eye, but at least a few more klaps.
It reminds one of the no-nonsense approach Winston Churchill is said to have taken in private when the Nuremberg process was discussed. “Let’s take 10 top Nazis,” he is supposed to have urged the Allies, “give them a fair trial and shoot them.”
Looking back over the activities and achievements of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – which began winding up last Friday when its writ ran out where hearings on human rights violations were concerned – one cannot help but feel that we could have arranged it better.
There has been something unnecessarily distasteful about the process by which we have dealt with what might well be considered our war crimes, whether the atrocities of a Nieuwoudt or those of the gunmen who had the audacity to ask for (and the outrageous reward of being granted) forgiveness for opening fire with automatic rifles on a multi- racial congregation of worshippers praying on their knees.
Not that any criticism of Desmond Tutu and his team is intended. If there was ever a cleric who embodied a denial of Karl Marx’s aphorism that religion is the opium of the masses, it is the archbishop. The truth commission was given a job to do and discharged it admirably, with courage and integrity for which it is deserving of the nation’s heart-felt gratitude.
Nor should the commission’s contribution to a comparatively peaceful political settlement be underestimated. The role it played in defusing right-wing militancy – by bringing home to Afrikanerdom that theirs was the true terrorism, more worthy of the Anti-Christ’s cause than that of the God they sought to follow – cannot be quantified, but can be assumed to be considerable.
The truth commission was, of course, intended as an educative instrument and it is there that its failings, as well as the above-mentioned achievements, are to be found. Its title, for a start, was unfortunate, suggesting the “truth” was discoverable. As it is, there are major holes in the fabric it has uncovered.
The military, in particular, appears to have effectively called the commission’s bluff by their non-co- operation. Problems of jurisdiction have prevented the story of South African atrocities abroad from emerging – such as political assassinations in Europe and experiments in the use of poison during the Rhodesian bush war.
PW Botha’s obduracy and the destruction of secret files by the National Party government have helped frustrate attempts to pin down the culpability of senior politicians. Jurisdiction has also prevented the African National Congress camps scandal – the reverse side of the racial coin where apartheid-era atrocity was concerned – from being ventilated.
The quality of the “truth” which the truth commission has uncovered must anyway be questionable. In general terms, its final report will no doubt be a reasonably fair representation of the crimes committed in the name of apartheid and of the liberation struggle.
But the findings will be heavily dependent on confession and, while it may pass muster when subject to the scrutiny of the Almighty, there is good reason for the hostility of the common law towards this form of evidence.
The contribution of the commission to the cause of reconciliation must also be questionable. There are grounds for suspicion that racial polarisation has worsened in post-apartheid South Africa and the commission may well have contributed, unintentionally, to that mood.
Most seriously, the amnesty process, with its requirement that applicants show a political dimension to their atrocities, has undermined the principle of personal responsibility so central to the lessons of Nuremberg. This has given rise to perceptions of collective responsibility which translate into damaging generalisations concerning racial innocence and guilt.
It is argued that amnesty was necessary to unlock the “secrets” of apartheid. But it could be argued equally that if the millions spent on the commission had instead been allocated to the admirable work of such as Transvaal Attorney General Jan d’Oliveira and his professional investigators, they could have achieved as much in a manner which would not have so compromised the rule of law.
In future we should, perhaps, be more content with the judicial process which has so painfully evolved over the centuries. Such instruments do not have the same dramatic impact as a “truth” commission. But that only tells us how far we have progressed since Salem.