Hundreds of South African prisoners who have been in jail since the apartheid era are hoping to reclaim their freedom by convincing the government that their crimes were politically motivated.
Some of the prisoners, ranging from die-hard defenders of the whites-only regime to members of the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), concede they were involved in serious crimes, including killings and bomb attacks.
But they now hope that President Thabo Mbeki will agree to draw a line under the past, 12 years on from the downfall of apartheid, and grant them a pardon.
Although no decision will be announced until next year, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Brigitte Mabandla has hinted the applications for clemency from a total of 1 107 prisoners will be considered favourably.
”We must find a way of closing the matter and let ourselves move forward,” Mabandla told members of Parliament recently in response to repeated appeals from opposition parties for some of their followers to be released.
Although many perpetrators of rights abuses were granted amnesties by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that sat in the late 1990s, opponents of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) say the process was deeply flawed and failed to fully take into account the circumstances of the time.
While some of the prisoners now applying for a pardon had their original applications turned down, others never even applied either out of ignorance or contempt for the body chaired by Nobel prize-winner Desmond Tutu.
According to Themba Godi, a deputy for the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a breakaway from the ANC, it was incumbent on the government to show mercy towards ”those who fought for freedom [and] sacrificed everything.”
”We don’t take the TRC to be the paragon of struggle morality,” said Godi, whose party is calling for the release of 122 of its followers.
”Yes, indeed, we were fighting an armed struggle against an oppressive system. Some of them have killed people but it was part of the armed struggle.”
At the other end of the political spectrum, the small Afrikaner-based Freedom Front Plus party is pushing for the release of about 40 white prisoners who were jailed for crimes committed while ”defending” apartheid or trying to derail the transition to democracy.
”All these things happened before 1994 in the turmoil and the emotion of these days,” said party leader Pieter Mulder.
He cited the case of ”a boy of 18” who was still in prison after being caught up with the extreme right-wing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) group led by Eugene Terre’blanche.
”Regardless the cause, terrible things have been done on both sides. The only question is: What was their motive, whatever they did? If the motive was political, they should be released,” he added.
The IFP, whose clashes with the ANC at the tail-end of apartheid cost thousands of lives, wants 384 of its followers to be freed.
”Some of them applied to the TRC and their applications were refused, some of them did not apply because they considered the TRC as an instrument of the ANC,” said the IFP chief whip Koos van der Merwe.
”I think that each application must be considered and that the president must close the book on the past by releasing as many as possible, provided that they committed a crime with a political mandate.”
According to John Daniel, an analyst at the Human Science Research Council (HSRC), some of the parties now pushing for the release of their supporters had only themselves to blame for their ”rather scornful” attitude towards the TRC.
”Clearly, the TRC process was not a perfect one, but it was pretty clear-cut what you had to do to have a possibility of amnesty,” said Daniel.
”On various grounds, there is a case for looking at these people’s release. They have done a considerable [amount of] time,” he added. — Sapa-AFP