OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday
THE Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has refused to comment on a book in which the body’s deputy chairperson, Alex Boraine, published the commission’s proposed findings on former president FW de Klerk.
The TRC said in a statement the fact that Boraine had chosen to publish the findings against De Klerk was a matter “over which the commission has no control”. The findings appear in a book on the TRC’s findings by Boraine, “A country unmasked: Inside SA’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission.”
In October 1998, a day before the TRC’s final report was to be handed over to then President Nelson Mandela, De Klerk obtained a court order which prevented the body from publishing any of its intended findings against De Klerk. The section on De Klerk was blacked out in the final report.
The TRC said the matter was still subject to court action, and was therefore sub judice.
In the meantime, De Klerk’s representative Dave Steward said Boraine’s book was damaging to the former president’s reputation. “We find the allegations in the book most damning,” Steward told independent broadcaster e-tv in an interview.
In his book Boraine accuses De Klerk of covering up his role in the 1988 Khotso House bombing. De Klerk was a senior member of the National Party at the time. While De Klerk did not order the Khotso House bombings, Boraine maintains that he was fully aware of then Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok and police commissioner Johan van der Merwe’s involvement in the bombing.
Boraine says that De Klerk displayed a “lack of candour” in his testimony to the TRC and that he was an “accessory to the commission of gross violations of human rights”.
He was “morally accountable” for concealing his role as an accessory when he was obliged to “disclose the truth known to him”.
The TRC finding focused on the bombing in September 1988 of Khotso House, headquarters of the SA Council of Churches, in which 23 people were injured and the building rendered unsafe for further occupation.
The bombing was done under instructions of Vlok, and according to Vlok’s testimony to the TRC, then President PW Botha.