TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 1

Subsection 5

57 A last word to those who have made it their obsessive business in life to discredit and vilify the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It has been wonderful to see the high regard in which the Commission is held in the international community. Almost without exception, foreign heads of state visiting this country have insisted on paying a visit to the Commission. The royal couples of Norway, Sweden and Denmark have been among such visitors. Presidents of the German Republic, Portugal, France and most recently of the Swiss Confederation have met with the Chair of the Commission, as did the First Lady of the United States and the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr Kofi Annan. The international community has supported our work financially, and through staff secondments and generous donations to the President’s Fund.

58 Some of us have been awarded the highest decorations of some of these countries; others have received honorary doctorates, and some of my colleagues have gone on from the Commission to take up prestigious appointments. One, for example has been appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Durban-Westville; another as an acting Judge of Appeal. Others have been given fellowships to eminent universities.

59 Surely, if the institution were so thoroughly discredited, nobody respectable would want to touch us with a bargepole. The opposite is clearly the case. The world is waiting expectantly for this report because the world has marvelled at how we South Africans have gone about trying to deal with our past. Many are wondering whether they can learn from our experience. In December 1998, Switzerland will host a seminar to consider the contribution of truth and reconciliation commissions in other post-conflict situations in the world. We have been asked to contribute to this by sharing our unique experiences with other countries.

60 I have been at great pains to demonstrate the Commission’s independence and lack of bias because we are concerned that its work and report should gain the widest possible acceptance. This could well prove to be a futile exercise if those who think that the best way of responding to a report they suspect is going to be less than favourable to them is to come out with all guns blazing to attack the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and hope thereby to discredit it and its report.

61 This would be a shortsighted approach - what one might call the Esau option, seeking a short-term advantage at the cost of a longer-term but greater benefit. Thus, when the Commission declares apartheid a crime against humanity, its most ferocious critics will say: “What did we tell you; what did you expect from such a skewed Commission packed with ‘struggle’ types, hell bent on a witch-hunt against Afrikaners and so obviously biased in favour of the ANC?”

62 Mercifully the international community, and not just the Communist bloc, has already declared apartheid to be a crime against humanity. For the international community, indeed, this is no longer a point of debate. The world Christian community has declared that the theological justification of apartheid is a heresy. Closer to home, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk has said that apartheid is a sin. Some of the most senior judges in our country - who could not by any reasonable person be described as demagogues or lackeys of the ANC - have called apartheid a gross violation of human rights. Thus, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a latecomer in this area. The world would indeed be surprised if the Commission had not found apartheid to be a crime against humanity.

63 This means that we cannot hope properly to understand the history of the period under review unless we give apartheid and racism their rightful place as the defining features of that period. People would be surprised if anyone wanting to describe or understand the post World War II period were to ignore Soviet Communism or not give it a central, indeed pivotal, place in the geopolitics of that period. We know that nations defined themselves in terms of their relationship to Communism. That is what determined the politics, economics and foreign policies of the different protagonists at the time. It is what determined the nature of the Cold War period. The attitude towards Communism defined who one’s allies and enemies were, what sort of defence budget was necessary and which surrogate states to support. The threat was seen as so serious that the world’s greatest Western democracy saw nothing wrong with supporting some of the world’s worst dictatorships - for example, Pinochet’s Chile, other Latin American military dictatorships and Marcos’ Philippines - simply because these declared themselves to be anti-Communist. The USA was ready to subvert democratically-elected governments by supporting internal dissidents in their efforts to overthrow legitimate regimes - such as the Contras in Nicaragua and UNITA in Angola - because the elected governments were Communist-influenced or fellow-travellers. The West did not seem to care too much about the human rights records of their surrogates. What we are underlining is that, to understand this Cold War period, one has to acknowledge the key role of Soviet Communism.

64 I want to suggest that apartheid and racism played a similar defining role in the history of the period under review. The vast majority, if not all, of the gross violations of human rights that were perpetrated in this period happened at the hands either of those who sought to defend the unjust apartheid and racist dispensation or those who sought to resist and ultimately overthrow that system.

65 This is not the same as saying that racism was introduced into South Africa by those who brought apartheid into being. Racism came to South Africa in 1652; it has been part of the warp and woof of South African society since then. It was not the supporters of apartheid who gave this country the 1913 Land Act which ensured that the indigenous people of South Africa would effectively become hewers of wood and drawers of water for those with superior gun power from overseas. 1948 merely saw the beginning of a refinement and intensifying of repression, injustice and exploitation. It was not the upholders of apartheid who introduced gross violations of human rights in this land. We would argue that what happened when 20 000 women and children died in the concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War is a huge blot on our copy book. Indeed, if the key concepts of confession, forgiveness and reconciliation are central to the message of this report, it would be wonderful if one day some representative of the British/English community said to the Afrikaners, “We wronged you grievously. Forgive us.” And it would be wonderful too if someone representing the Afrikaner community responded, “Yes, we forgive you - if you will perhaps let us just tell our story, the story of our forebears and the pain that has sat for so long in the pit of our stomachs unacknowledged by you.” As we have discovered, the telling has been an important part of the process of healing.

66 To lift up racism and apartheid is not to gloat over or to humiliate the Afrikaner or the white community. It is to try to speak the truth in love. It is to know the real extent of the sickness that has afflicted our beloved motherland so long and, in making the right diagnosis, prescribe the correct medicine. We would not want to be castigated as the prophet Jeremiah condemned the priests and prophets of his day (Jeremiah 6:13-14):

For from the least to the greatest of them, every one is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.

67 It is to give substance to our cry from the heart that politicians should really stop playing ducks and drakes with our future - for the greatest sadness that we have encountered in the Commission has been the reluctance of white leaders to urge their followers to respond to the remarkable generosity of spirit shown by the victims. This reluctance, indeed this hostility, to the Commission has been like spitting in the face of the victims.