Indications that the African National Congress is intent on having the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report rewritten is one aspect of last week’s parliamentary debate on the report which the media appears to have overlooked. A clear hint of this was the repeated reference made in President Nelson Mandela’s speech to the document as the “interim report”, instead of the widely-used characterisation of it as the “final report”.
Technically, the president may be right; the amnesty committees are still at work and the TRC itself only in a state of suspension, so a “more final report” is anticipated. But these additions to the report — taking into account the more recent amnesty decisions — were expected to be dealt with by way of codicil. Judging by the speech made by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, the intention now may be to secure a more general rewrite.
The deputy president’s contribution to the debate was curious, smacking more of a stand by a partisan nationalist than the sort of statesman-like offering one might have expected — or at least hoped for — from the man who is already, in practice, the leader of the nation.
In essence, it was an attack on the (not- quite-final) report, on the familiar grounds that it lumps together “various actions” of the liberation forces and the apartheid state as “gross human rights abuses” — thereby “delegitimising”, or “criminalising”, the freedom struggle.
The issue of moral blameworthiness is obviously a complex subject, but it is one which is tackled — as might be expected of a body led by churchmen — comprehensively, as well as with an admirable command of historical and international principle, by the TRC itself.
We will not attempt to even summarise that material here, but we would like to add, by way of common-sense observation, that the term — “a gross violation of human rights” — is a deliberately broad one encapsulating a wide range of undesirable behaviour. Littering and mass murder may be lumped together as “criminal offences”, but nobody would suggest this made of them acts of comparable immorality. The TRC is a commission of inquiry, not a court, and it would have been quite inappropriate for it to have offered judgment on the relative seriousness of individual abuses identified.
We would also point out to Mbeki that, if anything, the TRC has already had the effect of giving greater, not less, legitimacy to the liberation struggle. There must be far fewer now than at the outset of the TRC’s life who would dispute the fact that the majority population was oppressed and justified in going to war.
The deputy president also fails to appreciate a central point about the TRC report — that the “findings” of the commission as such are almost irrelevant to its value. The power of the document lies in the anecdotal evidence it offers of far greater verities, such as man’s inhumanity to man, man’s capacity for self-sacrifice in the name of higher values, and the temptations inherent in the exercise of power.
It is a “people’s report” in which the nation has spoken to the nation out of its suffering, presenting this country with a glorious opportunity to strike for unity across the racial divides of the past. The commissioners themselves are mere handmaidens in the process, facilitating this outpouring of a collective experience, ordering and contextualising it.
In this respect, a major task still faces the country’s writers, publishers and broadcasters — to make the report more accessible, particularly to our children, the next generation to whom the report is a painful gift from this generation.
The deputy president’s partisan approach undermines this achievement. And it is worrying, because it reflects what appears to be a wider philosophical approach. That is one which holds that “reconciliation is dead”; that the racial divides of the past must be preserved, because the injustices of the past are too great for them to be forgotten in the future.
Justice demands reparation, which in turn requires the identification of the “victims” and the “guilty”. So the cause of reconciliation espoused by Mandela and TRCchair Desmond Tutu must be abandoned in favour of what are described as the politics of “national consensus” founded on the “hard realities of enlightened self-interest”.
In every respect we would see such a philosophy as a betrayal of our history, a contradiction of the lessons of the TRC which to us is a testament to the equality of man and the abominable nature of racial discrimination, as well as the corrupting effect of self-interest and the authoritarian tendencies latent in enforced consensus.
It is a particularly dangerous philosophy at this stage of the country’s history — when the wounds of racism are so raw — because it preaches collective guilt.
The deputy president chose to draw parallels in his speech between the suffering of the townships and those who died at Babi Yar and suffered at the hands of Nazi doctors conducting medical experiments in the concentration camps. The parallel is a provocative one which we would try to quietly answer by pointing out that blood libel is a concept familiar to the preaching which gave rise to the Holocaust.