The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established with the single statutory purpose to promote reconciliation. The truth-finding exercise, amnesty process and reparations were conceived in law as a means to achieve this end. Your newspaper’s coverage of the out-of-court settlement between the TRC and the Inkatha Freedom Party, and its leader, shows that the TRC has dismally failed to promote national reconciliation and has, in fact, become one of its major setbacks.
The TRC was so structured as to become a receptacle of the lies and propaganda used to vilify Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the IFP during the armed struggle. It was conceived to keep that hatred alive, to fuel post-liberation politics and cover the predictable deficiencies in fulfilling the aspirations generated by liberation itself. The reported statement of TRC commissioner Yasmin Sooka in your article titled “The nailing of Buthelezi” (January 31) proves that yesterday’s politics of lies is still utilised to promote the vacuum in today’s political debates, along with complicated ideological connotations and labels.
Sooka’s statement that Buthelezi collaborated with the most senior echelons of the apartheid state security organs is an outright lie and equally defamatory. Nothing in the TRC report supports such statement. In fact, even the original TRC report merely stated that Prince Buthelezi could be held politically accountable for actions taken on an individual basis by members of the IFP, or those working for the erstwhile KwaZulu government.
It is equally preposterous for Sooka to state that “there was overwhelming evidence that Buthelezi worked closely with the apartheid government to destabilise liberation movements”. This is simply a lie. Over four years of litigation the TRC failed to produce one reliable shred of evidence to support such a statement, which, incidentally, does not appear at all in the TRC’s original report. This is also a defamatory statement.Â
The TRC was not held to the standard of proof. Its enabling legislation allowed it to report lies as its findings so long as it received corroborating statements under oath. The TRC’s set-up prompted a number of people to say under oath what they thought the commissioners wanted to hear.
Thus the lies of the past were transformed into the lies of the future. In terms of law, self-confessed murderers could rescue themselves from the imminent threat of decades of incarceration only by confessing their crimes and making a “full disclosure”, which effectively means implicating as many other people as possible and placing their own actions within the context of others’ alleged crimes.
Furthermore, they were specifically requested to prove a causal link between their crime and the policies and political directives of an organisation involved in past conflicts. Obviously, many people could have come forward saying that their crime was part of IFP policies and was ordered by the IFP’s leader.Â
However, no one stated under oath that any crime they committed was in any way directly or indirectly authorised, ordered or ratified by Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi. They did however say that they thought committing their crimes would please the IFP leader, or that they thought it was the IFP leader’s “desire” that such crimes be committed. This shows how easy it was to lie and misrepresent and how such lies and misrepresentations effectively became the basis on which findings were made. Such statements were taken with no independent or adversarial verification of evidence, such as cross-examination, and the general rules of evidence did not apply. Even hearsay and personal opinions and illusions were, in the end, regarded as evidence.
The TRC also relied on some unauthenticated state security minutes of dubious origin, which would never cross the evidentiary threshold in any court of law or serious academic research. Two of these documents indicate that unnamed officials in the state apparatus hoped that Inkatha members could help the state apparatus to achieve its purposes. That might have been their perception, but it was not the historical reality.Â
The entire TRC case hinges on the training of VIP protection security guards in the Caprivi Strip, which was requested of the South African government by Prince Buthelezi because he did not have the power to fulfil his legal obligation to protect the lives of people threatened by terrorism. This matter was extensively covered in an eight-month trial in a proper court of law. However, the sensationalist circus of horrors that the TRC ended up becoming decided to reach its own conclusion, disregarding the judicial one.
The measure of flaws in the TRC’s reasoning is given by its blatant ignorance of fundamental legal realities, such as the fact that as the minister of police, chief minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi had no control over the police. At the time there was an arrangement similar to the present one, in which a commissioner appointed by and responsible to Pretoria had control over the deployment, organisation and all other aspects of the KwaZulu police. Similarly, the modalities of training of the Caprivi trainees were entirely chosen by the then South African Defence Force and, when such trainees were integrated into the KwaZulu police, they fell under the control of the Pretoria government.Â
The life and actions of Prince Buthelezi have been scrutinised for decades. His viewpoint has been clearly spelt out in hundreds of thousands of pages of written speeches delivered throughout South Africa and across the world. His campaign of defiance of apartheid is what eventually caused the demise of that system, as was readily acknowledged by former state president FW de Klerk. Yet your vicious and vitriolic editorial “Time for Buthelezi to own his deeds” (January 31) echoes some of the worst United Democratic Front-style Buthelezi-bashing of the late 1980s. It shows little or no understanding of the genesis, dynamics and real purpose of the black-on-black conflict, and bridges a huge gap of ignorance by resorting to superficial simplifications, such as believing in a bilateral conflict that would force Prince Buthelezi into the National Party’s camp.Â
I know well that Buthelezi was never “in bed with the National Party” and therefore I fall within the category that you refer to as the “dimmest cretins”. As one of the “dimmest cretins” I wish to reciprocate the view: your editorial is one of the greatest expressions of cretinism ever read in your newspaper. There are no clouds in the life of Mangosuthu Buthelezi and, to this day, there is not one single shred of credible evidence that detracts from the proposition that he never ordered, authorised, condoned or ratified any gross human rights violation.
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The TRC has admitted several pages of crucial mistakes. Among these are calculations of the estimated number of gross human rights violations. Because of the court settlement, the TRC no longer has any basis on which to state that the IFP was the major perpetrator of human rights violations. It has realised that its methodology was flawed by its insufficient understanding of the black-on-black conflict and its not having had the benefit of hearing the IFP’s side.Â
Musa Zondi is an MP and national IFP spokesman