Readers of the Mail & Guardian‘s predecessor, The Weekly Mail, may remember a July 1991 front page picture of then law and order minister Adriaan Vlok sporting a Pinocchio proboscis with the headline, “Oh dear, Mr Vlok, you lied”.
Vlok claimed to have accounted for every cent of the covert funding of the Inkatha Freedom Party by the police at the height of the dirty war in Kwazulu-Natal, which was, of course, not true. The lies multiplied as he and his colleagues tried to cover up the crimes they had committed in defence of apartheid.
So it is not very surprising that not everyone accepts Vlok’s foot-washing rituals as a sign of true contrition. It has not helped those unmoved by his gesture that he still insists he had no idea what Eugene de Kok’s Vlakplaas death squad were up to, or of cross-border police raids, despite the fact that he was political head of the police at the time.
There can be no gainsaying that Vlok has gone further than any other apartheid Cabinet minister or general in humbling himself before his Âvictims. But that simply cannot be the end of the matter.
Coming from a someone like Vlok, who was so central to apartheid’s most brutal machinery, the foot-washing episode has a complex ripple-effect. Whether you find it clumsy, moving or self-serving, it at once obscures and reminds us of what the Truth Commission set out to achieve: truth for those who wanted most to know what happened to their loved ones, reconciliation for a divided nation, and justice for the victims whose persecutors failed either to seek or to win amesty.
Vlok’s gesture to Frank Chikane certainly goes some way towards reconciliation. It also serves as an object lesson that reconciliation will not be achieved by merely sticking to the minimum legalistic definitions imposed by the Truth Commission.
But for the extraordinary national experience of the TRC to find its full expression, the National Prosecuting Authority must be true to its threat to prosecute those denied amnesty. Prosecution of those who failed the test of amnesty, or who were too defiantly unapologetic to apply, will bring some kind of justice not only to their victims, but also to those who did make full disclosure. It will also impose a stern test on anyone who thinks symbolic acts of contrition are enough to get them off the hook.
The legal process must begin not to provide some kind of cheap “closure” to our appalling history, but to keep the endless work of confronting it alive.
Wall of sound
The real disgrace is the barrage of hysterical invective from the pro-Israel lobby across the world, of which we print a fraction on our letters pages this week.
Most of it comes straight from the gut — there is little evidence of engagement by the cerebral cortex. Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils is accused of lies and misinformation by people who, for the most part, offer no counter-arguments. He is accused of ignorance by some who clearly do not know he is Jewish and that he played a prominent role in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. One letter-writer thinks he is a journalist. Many letters are laced with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice; others trash South Africa.
With friends like this, Israel needs no enemies. The recurrence of the same text in letter after letter — with a photograph of Kasrils, as if lifted from a police file — suggests rapid response networks primed for total onslaught immediately Israel is criticised anywhere. If so, it is a mistake. Israel’s cause is discredited by lobbyists who know nothing of South Africa or the Mail & Guardian, and who make their bigotry and anti-democratic instincts plain.
For that is the most disgraceful aspect — the persistent demand that Kasrils should be denied his democratic right to express his opinions, justified by the persistent canard that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Accused of being “complicit”, the M&G is ordered to apologise, retract and never again give Kasrils (or, presumably, any anti-Zionist) a platform.
The M&G will not be bullied by any of the world’s teeming enemies of intellectual diversity and free expression. We will not print real hate speech and racist or anti-Semitic propaganda — and in this, we are guided by our Constitution. But taboo areas do not include harsh criticism of governments, including the government of Israel.
The M&G has battled for years to create space for real debate about Israel/Palestine, and to explode the self-serving myth that radical critics of Zionism are “Islamo-fascists”, anti-Semites or “self-hating Jews”. We have carried a full spectrum of opinion from the views of the South African Zionist Federation, through the left-wing Zionism of Gush Shalom to the “secular state” perspective of radical Jews in Not in Our Name. This week, we carry a Zionist reply to Kasrils. No “wall of sound” tactic, and no quantity of personal abuse, will deflect us from this policy.