We, the People. Albie Sachs
but in a spirit of ubuntu and reconciliation. Ubuntu is a word derived from African culture that that means ‘I’m a person because you’re a person’. My humanity is dependent on the recognition of your humanity. It implies that we don’t exist as isolated human beings; though each of us is an individual person, we live in a society with other human beings. So my acknowledgment of your humanity enriches my humanity and does not diminish it. The word ubuntu was used in the epilogue to the Constitution, which said that the new parliament would establish the processes for dealing in the spirit of ubuntu with the crimes of the past committed in the course of the political conflict.
The Truth Commission as it emerged, then, had both a constitutional and statutory foundation. In drafting the law, we drew very heavily on Chilean experience. José Zalaquett, a famous human rights lawyer from Chile, came to South Africa to share that country’s experiences with us. We learnt a lot from him about what they had done in his country, but we didn’t copy the Chilean model and then add a few South African ingredients. Instead, we created our own Truth Commission, building on their experience.
It was structured around three different bodies. It was important that they functioned separately. The first was the one that heard the testimonies of people who had suffered. They came from all sides. This structure travelled around the country, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It didn’t just sit in beautiful rooms, town halls. It went to little school rooms, church halls, into the communities. And it heard the stories of people who had suffered terrible trauma themselves, or who told of the loss of people close to them. It was so important for our country to listen to them. Ten thousand people testified, gave oral accounts. Another ten thousand sent in written testimonials. Overwhelmingly, they were people who had suffered at the hands of the apartheid regime. But it also included people who had suffered as a result of being placed in captivity by the ANC, or from injuries produced by bombs that the ANC had used. As Tutu said, ‘it enabled the little people to speak.’ This was for the people who had never been listened to. It’s so much part of human dignity to have your pain, your suffering, the things you have gone through, the trauma you felt you could never get beyond, acknowledged. And we had very, very, telling testimony. It is important to note that you weren’t relating your story to get damages, on the basis that the more you suffered the more you’d get. Nor were you telling your story to send someone to jail. You were telling your story just to tell your story. That was the one section of the Truth Commission.
The second section dealing with granting amnesty, was more formal. It had two judges and I think three lay people on it. The criteria for the granting of amnesty were laid down. Basically it dealt with conduct, usually secret, that had violated the law as it stood at the time. However bad apartheid law had been, it had never openly allowed the use of torture. It had never formally permitted assassination. In order to get an amnesty, you had to come forward and you had to reveal the truth of what you had done. And your actions had to have been related to the political conflict. Several thousand people applied. Most of them were in prison for things like robbing banks, who said, we were black people fighting the white racists, and we robbed the bank to help our people. They didn’t get amnesty; their conduct might have had a political background, but it wasn’t undertaken as part of the political conflict. The majority of the people who testified came from the security forces.
I still remember vividly Sergeant Benzien in Cape Town, my city, asking for amnesty.
This man had once had the power of life and death over his captives. Someone he had tortured said simply to him: ‘Sergeant Benzien, show us how you put a wet bag over our heads’. An orderly went on the ground, a bag, not a wet one, was put over his head, and the sergeant kneeled on his back.
Tony Yengeni, formerly an underground operative of the ANC, now a member of parliament, told the Truth Commission: ‘I thought I was suffocating, drowning’. And as Sergeant Benzien stood up, he started crying. We saw it on television, we saw his tears. This man who’d had power of life and death, was now crying. And he was crying because he’d been asked by Tony Yengeni, ‘How can one human being do this to another human being?’ Now the whole nation was asking this question, ‘How can one human being do this to another human being?’ The sergeant was crying because his whole world had collapsed. Before, he had got a medal, promotions. Now, he suddenly realised, ‘No, this was not the way, I was doing it in defence of apartheid, and the very people whom I was torturing, are now giving me an opportunity to carry on with my life through telling the truth. And I thought I was doing this to evil terrorists who had to be destroyed.’
The third structure of the Truth Commission was the section that dealt with reparations. My own view is that it was the least successful of all three. It focused too much on money, identifying who the ‘victims’ were, and indicating how much money should be paid. I’m sorry to say, I don’t think the South African government responded graciously and generously. The attitude was, ‘we all suffered under apartheid, millions and millions over the centuries. To give a huge hand-out just for this one group that had come forward, somehow, we don’t feel that’s appropriate’. I feel they underestimated the moral, symbolic significance of the special form of suffering,
… but the real problem wasn’t even about the money and the timing. The real problem was that reparations should have been in the form of actions that reached into the imagination, the soul, the spirit of human beings. There will never be enough money.
You can never pay it quickly enough, and the money is soon spent. But gardens of remembrance, and assistance for people who have been disabled because of what had happened to them, and stipends for their children to get schooling to make up for loss of breadwinners, and creative things like libraries, and a bridge – these things are memorable things. One beautiful example was a bridge used by workers to get over the railway lines, named after one young guy who’d fought to the death as part of the freedom struggle. In Chile, President [Patricio] Aylwin [1918–2016], who wasn’t even from Pinochet’s group, sent a personal letter signed by himself to everybody who’d suffered under General Pinochet’s military dictatorship, saying in the name of the new democratic Chilean government, ‘I express my emotional feeling for you who have suffered so much in the conflicts of the past’. That was imaginative. It might seem like just a little piece of paper, but it’s different from just money, just cash. I think we didn’t equal the Chileans in that particular regard.
The value of the Truth Commission is contested in South Africa. People on the more radical side say that we allowed criminals to walk free – how could we let that happen? Or they say, ‘You make the Truth Commission sound as if the only aspects of apartheid worth examining and exposing are the violations of rights by the security forces.’
But what about the system of apartheid itself that dislodged people from their land and their homes? And the deep systemic forms of economic exploitation? I think that’s a powerful consideration, but an unfair critique. It wasn’t the function of the Truth Commission to deal with the systemic violence and injustice of apartheid. The Truth Commission was there to deal precisely with atrocities. That was all.
If you can’t get these extreme sources of pain out of the way, there’s so much continuing rancour, so much pain, so much anger, so much emotion, that you can’t even reach a proper historical analysis of the structured and institutionalised injustices. As for the deeper, more enduring transformations required, that’s what the vote is designed to correct, and what parliament is for. It’s the function of parliament then, of the whole society and civil society organisations, to deal with systemic structured forms of domination. But the secret, hidden atrocities of the past, that was for the Truth Commission to expose and manage.
Then there were people from a more conservative side who had a different critique. Their principal contention was there hadn’t been due process of law in the Commission proceedings. Yet the strength of the narratives came precisely from their spontaneity. People could tell their stories without interruption. We did indeed introduce some due process elements. Thus, anybody mentioned negatively in a witness’s statement had the right to bring counsel to question the testimony. But overwhelmingly the power and the glory of the process came from the manner in which it permitted people to stand up and tell their stories in their own voices in their own way.
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