The scramble to gag the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report has soured what should have been a crowning moment for South Africa. We had wanted to show the world and ourselves that we could take our violent and dehumanised past, stare it in the face, acknowledge it and move on. Instead, we have been made to look foolish and petty.
The African National Congress must bear a large portion of the blame.
No observer of the TRC proceedings could doubt that it was the testimony of the victims and their tormentors – apartheid’s murderers and torturers and chemical weapons manufacturers – who held centre stage. It could, in fact, be argued that the testimony destroyed for ever the National Party’s aspirations of being a serious political contender in the new South Africa. No equivalence was ever suggested between the violence and immorality of the apartheid regime and the activities of the liberation movements, and in fact the report – when not read out of context – makes this distinction clear.
That the ANC, as a consequence of the war against apartheid, committed human rights abuses in its own detention camps and killed unarmed civilians, is something we imagined it had already accepted with humility and acknowledged with regret.
The only thing that put the ANC on the same moral level as former president FW de Klerk was its attempt to gag the report. And while De Klerk is history, the ANC’s defensiveness and extreme sensitivity towards criticism is something we still have to live with.
None of this ought to detract from the massive work done by the TRC in compiling this report. We just need to keep our perspective. Where the politicians have it wrong is that they are behaving as if the TRC is delivering the final word on all that went down in the apartheid era.
The arrest in London of Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, reminds us that the past is not forgotten when politicians agree among themselves to forgive. Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter, is still scouring the smallest villages of Bolivia for the last geriatric remnants of Hitler’s Third Reich. The pain of Marius Schoon and Nomonde Calata and a thousand others has not been laid to rest.
For all the fine work the TRC has done it will take generations to wipe the slate clean. The TRC is one important link in an ongoing process of uncovering the truth that began with journalists like Jacques Pauw, Martin Welz, Eddie Koch, David Beresford and Kitt Katzin, and continued through the Goldstone commission, the work of the Transvaal attorney general’s office and the marathon trial of Eugene de Kock.
The historical record remains incomplete. The De Klerk gagging saga, for instance, points to what the TRC has not been able to tell us. He is challenging the commission’s conclusions that he was an accessory after the fact to the bombing of Khotso House and Cosatu House, events that essentially took place before he became a central actor on the political stage.
A more intriguing question concerns the third force violence that occurred after De Klerk took power in 1989 and that went hand in glove with the political power play and negotiations of that era.
What has the TRC added to our knowledge of De Klerk and the leadership of the NP’s relationship to the hidden hand behind the drive-by shootings in the Vaal Triangle, the train massacres, the hostel attacks and the slaughter at Boipatong? What security forces were involved, what was their relationship to Inkatha and what was the chain of command linking them to the politicians?
Another massive blind spot is the military. What more do we know about the human rights abuses and invasions in Angola? What about support for Renamo, the Frankenstein monster that devastated Mozambique? How was aid channelled? Who among the politicians knew about it? When did it cease?
Nor did the TRC ever really get to the bottom of the KwaZulu-Natal civil war, partly because the adversaries did not want to jeopardise the peace by reopening old wounds. We can understand that while the ANC is assiduously wooing Mangosuthu Buthelezi as an ally, it would not want him placed under too much scrutiny, but why was he never summoned by the TRC to testify and answer the damning indictment of his leadership that the final report has delivered?
No, the TRC has not closed the book on our past. The process of national healing, uncovering the truth and even prosecuting the offenders must go on. But it has performed an extraordinary service for this country which the pettiness of the politicians has only thrown into relief. We salute TRCchair Desmond Tutu and his team for the way they breathed life into their strange and cumbersome task. It is, at the end of the day, a magnificent achievement.