Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu said on Thursday he would retire from public duties later this year.
Director Bobby Rodwell began to think about making drama out of apartheid atrocities in the Nineties when she investigated perceptions of the TRC.
A Solomon Islands TRC to be launched by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu next week will ease lingering ethnic tension.
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/ 2 September 2008
In spite of all the hullabaloo and accusations from Zuma backers, their grounds for the call for a deal don’t hold much water.
A former Liberian warlord, whose drugged fighters appeared on camera holding up a human heart, dodged questions on Wednesday before the country’s TRC.
Former law and order minister Adriaan Vlok has applied for a presidential pardon for the attempted murder of Reverend Frank Chikane.
The proceedings of the Hlophe hearing must not be distorted by TV cameras and lights.
The government’s knee-jerk reaction to the pogroms that swept across the country speaks volumes to the politics of African nationalism. We were told they were ”criminal” acts in the service of a ”third force” agenda. This last term has a particular saliency in the South African context, writes Ivor Chipkin.
Anton Krueger assesses <i>Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of ‘the People'</i> by Ivor Chipkin (Wits University Press).
The blackened fragments spread out on the table look at first glance like no more than a scattering of charcoal, left over from a long-dead fire. But on closer examination one sees that the fragments are grouped, and that each group has its own printed label. In one corner, in a plastic lunchbox-type container, are the smallest fragments of all.
South Africa is honouring her for helping it overcome the legacy of apartheid, but Linda Biehl says she is simply doing what any parent would after the death of a child: trying to find meaning in loss. She was speaking on the eve of a ceremony at which President Thabo Mbeki is to grant her one of the country’s highest honours.
African National Congress (ANC) veteran Andrew Masondo died on Sunday, the ANC said on Monday. ”Masondo dedicated his life to the cause of the South African people, having served as a soldier since the early years of Umkhonto weSizwe,” the party said.
Partly prompted by Andrew Feinstein, there appears to be influential support for an amnesty-based approach to dealing with the unresolved questions of the arms deal. This idea should be nipped in the bud. It has a superficial attraction, but it is ill-conceived. This country has had enough amnesty; it is time for some justice, writes Richard Calland.
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/ 27 February 2008
South Africa’s early democracy after 1994 reached out too far with a policy of reconciliation at the expense of transformation, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) said on Wednesday. ”We focused too much on reconciliation in the first years of our democracy,” said SAHRC chairperson Jody Kollapen.
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/ 7 February 2008
Lawyers for the Citizen newspaper will appeal against a Johannesburg High Court order that the newspaper has to pay Ekurhuleni metro police chief Robert McBride R200 000 in a defamation claim. ”We are definitely going to appeal,” the newspaper’s acting editor, Martin Williams, said.
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/ 21 January 2008
The decision to re-open an investigation into the Anton Lubowski murder has not yet been taken, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said on Monday. Lubowski, a Stellenbosch University-educated lawyer, a Namibian anti-apartheid activist and a prominent South West Africa People’s Organisation member, was assassinated 18 years ago.
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/ 18 January 2008
Director General in the Presidency Frank Chikane met representatives of political parties in Pretoria on Friday to discuss the subject of presidential pardons. The discussions at the Union Buildings dealt with applications from perpetrators of alleged political crimes committed before June 16 1999.
Liberia President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf appealed for honesty on Tuesday as her war-racked West African country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began its public hearings. ”I call upon all Liberians to respond to the TRC when they are invited,” Johnson-Sirleaf said at the start of proceedings in an opening ceremony in Monrovia.
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African National Congress president Jacob Zuma’s innocence or guilt should be decided by the courts and not through rhetorical statements from his detractors or supporters, retired chief justice Arthur Chaskalson and one of South Africa’s top lawyers, George Bizos, said on Saturday.
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/ 7 December 2007
The Pretoria High Court has reversed a temporary ban on the book White Power: The Rise and Fall of the National Party. Judge Willie Seriti on Friday discharged an interim court order granted last month to Eugene de Kock to recall the book and stop its further publication, distribution and sale.
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/ 5 December 2007
…Two areas of new interest are in the fields of business magazines and technology. Business Today, Business World, the Economic Times, and Technocrat, launched fairly recently, are doing well … Bhutan, with less than 1 million population, can now boast of publishing its own national newspaper.
Authors: Anju Chaudhary and Anne Chen, in the book Global Journalism.
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/ 21 November 2007
President Thabo Mbeki’s announcement on Wednesday of a ”window of opportunity” for people convicted of alleged political offences before June 16 1999 has been warmly welcomed by most political parties. Pan Africanist Congress leader Motsoko Pheko hailed Mbeki’s announcement as an act of courage against odds.
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/ 21 November 2007
People convicted of alleged political offences before June 16 1999 will be able to apply for a presidential pardon during a three-month ”window of opportunity” from January 15, President Thabo Mbeki said on Wednesday. He said consideration had been given to using presidential pardons to deal with the so-called ”unfinished business” of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
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/ 15 November 2007
A new process of presidential pardons for people who have committed alleged political offences appears in the offing, it emerged on Thursday. President Thabo Mbeki has asked Parliament’s presiding officers to convene a joint sitting of the two Houses next Wednesday for him to make an announcement in this regard.
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/ 8 November 2007
While replying to questions in the National Assembly, President Thabo Mbeki on Wednesday again dismissed suggestions that the government participate in a class action in the United States against 23 multinational corporations that did not disinvest during apartheid.
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/ 16 October 2007
Lawyers acting for Chris Hani’s killers said they would proceed with an application to the high court, asking it to compel President Thabo Mbeki to make a decision on their application for a presidential pardon. Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis unsuccessfully sought amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1999 for the 1993 assassination of Hani.
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/ 7 September 2007
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No issue must be ”taboo” for debate in South Africa if its people want to succeed with reconciliation and nation-building, African National Congress (ANC) deputy president Jacob Zuma said on Thursday. ”Debate in the country must be promoted,” Zuma said in delivering the annual public management commemorative lecture.
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/ 4 September 2007
The Gauteng branch of the South African National Civic Organisation (Sanco) will go to the police to find out whether Sunday Times editor Mondli Makhanya applied for amnesty over political activities during apartheid, the organisation said on Monday. Earlier this month, Sanco asked the National Prosecuting Authority whether Makhanya had applied for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Indications that the African National Congress is intent on having the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report rewritten is one aspect of last week’s parliamentary debate on the report which the media appears to have overlooked. A clear hint of this was the repeated reference made in President Nelson Mandela’s speech to the […]
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/ 12 September 1997
<em>Katizas Journey</em> records how, at one point in his career as a petty thief, he stole 50c from a blind beggars tin cup. and recon