Special Report Transcript Episode 86, Section 4, Time 32:13

I didn’t think I would be very surprised by what I heard. I think all of us on the Commission have, in fact I think the whole country has learnt much more about what happened. Prepared in other ways I think I was very reluctant to accept nomination for the Commission. I didn’t want to do this work. I didn’t think I was capable of doing this work because one of my characteristics is to be able to see both sides of the question and I thought that that would be weakening. That one needed people with great tenacity to pursue issues and not to be affected by being able to consider all points of view. Now I believe that in fact if we are going to achieve reconciliation that it is essential that all South Africans are able to see each other’s points of view. To me that would what reconciliation would really be. If could you take, say a young white man and a young black man and let them both understand what motivated the other to do what they did in those years. That would be a symbol of reconciliation for me. And I think also trying to make sense out of it. At the end of the day that was something that I tried consciously to do. Here we stood in these halls all over the country hearing these terrible things done on all sides of the political spectrum with often quite young policemen and women guarding the hall. I tried to listen with their ears as well. I tried to understand what was going on in every body’s heads. And trying to say this is terrible but are we just going to leave it here? Are we going to hear all these terrible stories and then just walk away at the end of the day? We all worry about the imperfections and the compromises that we have to live with all the time. The compromises that create it, the questions that are asked, the criticism that is made of the Commission, but also just the short time that there is. The difficulty of doing the work really well, of paying proper attention to everybody, it’s very frustrating. One wants to take each case and somehow solve each person’s problems and there just isn’t time to do that.

Notes: Mary Burton

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