TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 7

Subsection 8

Violence of the powerful and the powerless

56 As Frantz Fanon recognised some forty years ago, violence of the powerful and the powerless is not equivalent. An unhappy characteristic of oppression is that violence is often committed by the powerless against other oppressed groups. Bishop Peter Storey expressed this succinctly in a Commission hearing into the activities of the Mandela United Football Club:

The primary cancer … will always be the apartheid oppression, but the secondary infection has touched many of apartheid’s opponents and eroded their knowledge of good and evil.

57 The phenomenon whereby the oppressed turn their violence against each other was expressed in many forms in South Africa: between the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) and the UDF, between township vigilante groups and more youthful ‘comrades’, between township groupings in the enforcement of boycotts, in the case of the gruesome ‘necklace’ murders which numbered many hundreds from the mid-1980s onwards, in the case of violence by the Mandela United Football Club, in the case of askaris, and most prominently in the murderous violence between Inkatha on the one hand and Charterist groupings – ANC, UDF, SDUs – on the other, all of which often took the form of cycles of revenge. An IFP amnesty applicant in respect of the Boipatong massacre, Mr Victor Mthembu, expressed it as follows:

We would not have done these things if the people of Boipatong did not terrorise IFP members, if the comrades had not killed IFP members. If it had not been a war situation between the IFP and the ANC I would not have participated.

58 Violence among the oppressed has often been described as ‘black on black’ violence. This is an unfortunate and potentially racist depiction since it camouflages the role of the state in orchestrating or steering such divisions. It is common knowledge that the state provided covert support for homeland leaders and for Inkatha. The security police gave support for conservative, anti-UDF ‘vigilante’ groupings. In its submission to the Commission, the UDF said:

The State repeatedly distributed leaflets all around the country in the names of various organisations with the aim of causing confusion and fermenting violence between the UDF and AZAPO. Unfortunately we say that this sometimes succeeded in doing precisely that.

… attitudes of intolerance … had to be seen against the background of a climate of suspicion and intolerance that was created by the regime … People who are constantly fearful of attack or arrest not surprisingly develop attitudes that are not only intolerant but also undemocratic in such a climate.

Even-handedness

59 There is a final major area regarding the problem of perspective: the question of even-handedness in understanding perpetrators from the multiple and varied sides of the struggle. Perpetrators of gross violations of human rights came from all sides: the security forces, military conscripts, the liberation movements and their armed wings, Inkatha and the UDF, from askaris and kitskonstabels, from township vigilante groups, youth organisations, from torturers and assassination squads, from the far-right, and from township crowds responsible for ‘necklace’ killings. It is probably not possible to provide a neat, tidy or exhaustive classification of perpetrators.

60 In this respect, the Commission wishes to state that:

a It is important to recognise unequivocally that perpetrators came from all sides of the struggle.

b The motives and causes of violence are not the same for the different groupings; understanding the actions of perpetrators requires recognition that the multiple forms may have differing explanations.

c Perhaps most significantly, it is vital to state that, although the Commission recognises perpetrators from all sides, it simultaneously recognises that it was not an equivalent struggle – in terms of forces deployed, members, or justice¹¹ . To be even-handed in understanding the motives of perpetrators also requires full recognition that violence of the powerful, the South African state, was not necessarily equal with violence of the powerless, the disenfranchised, oppressed and relatively voiceless black majority. While each side may put forward reasonable and quite understandable explanations or justifications for such actions, the task of the third perspective, that of the Commission, is to recognise that these accounts are not necessarily equivalent. This non-equivalence means that protagonists in the thirty-year conflict were motivated by quite different political perspectives.