South Africa should have prosecuted apartheid-era perpetrators of atrocities who refused to repent, retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Thursday as the country prepared to mark a decade since the creation of its truth commission.
Tutu, who chaired the historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), said in an interview with South African Broadcasting Corporation radio that those who refused to take part in the process should have been forced to account for their actions before a court of law.
”We have probably not done as well in regard to … those who thumbed their noses at the truth commission,” Tutu said.
”We probably should have done what the legislation requires and really prosecuted people,” he said.
South Africans on Friday will mark a decade since the establishment of the TRC, set up in December 1995 by former president Nelson Mandela to lift the lid on atrocities committed under the white minority regime.
Tutu said the failure to prosecute could undermine the rule of law.
”We are allowing impunity,” he said. ”It does mean that there are those who are able to say, ‘Hahaha, what can you do to us?’, and it makes people possibly have a slightly less regard for the rule of law,” said the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
The TRC wrapped up its work in March 2003 when it presented a seven-volume report to President Thabo Mbeki.
Tutu also said that the victims of apartheid-era brutality were not adequately compensated for their losses.
”I think that we as a nation have been less than generous in the money reparations that we have offered to the victims,” he said, noting that those who agreed to testify before the TRC also gave up the right to seek damages in a court of law as part of the reconciliation process.
Tasked with investigating human rights abuses between 1960 and 1994, when apartheid officially ended, the commission heard the harrowing testimony of about 21 000 victims and perpetrators.
Mbeki is due to make an address on Friday at an event marking the 10-year anniversary of the TRC in Pretoria. — Sapa-AFP