We, the People. Albie Sachs
One of the worst features about covert atrocities is that the people responsible, and often their children and grandchildren, deny that they happened at all. They continue the denial for generations, and this keeps alive the pain, which never goes away. The society remains psychically divided. There’s a kind of continuing insult and agony through the refusal to even acknowledge that these terrible things happened. Fortunately, no one in South Africa can now say that apartheid was simply a failed experiment. No one can deny its deep cruelty because we’ve heard about the evil things done in its enforcement from the mouths of the defenders of apartheid themselves. They testified in person, not because they were being tortured, not because they were being offered plum jobs, but simply because they wanted to come forward and tell the truth and get amnesty. It was vital to have at least the elements of a common understanding emerging about basic themes of our history. We couldn’t have had a nation in South Africa without that. If you have a black memory and white memory, the whites saying, ‘Well it wasn’t so bad. We had a few bad apples, the system was unfair. But now, that’s the past, let’s move on’. And black people remember that it was their fathers, and aunties, and mums, and so on, who suffered terrible pain that’s not even being acknowledged. It was a deeply cruel way in which human beings were treated by other human beings. If you don’t acknowledge that, it becomes hard for us to find the generosity we are longing to express. Part of the freedom we fought for was to have freedom from anger. It is not easy to move forward if the pain remains with us.
In South Africa we have never had even a pretence of a common history. Even our history books were different; the history books for white kids, the ones I had in my school, were quite different from the history books for black kids. How can you build a nation, have a common citizenship, if people’s memories are so totally divided, and there aren’t points of commonality in the way we understand our past? At least let there be the ingredients of a common narrative, common appreciation. Otherwise the imaginative separation continues apartheid in our minds forever. So that was one aspect of the Truth Commission that is of enormous significance for us.
Can we say the Truth Commission brought about reconciliation in South Africa? Yes and no. Yes, it removed a huge impediment and blockage. We’re beginning to live in the same country, to be on the same map. Getting the vote was a fantastic ingredient and symbol of common citizenship. But more was required. We needed to feel that the country belonged to all of us, and that we all belonged to the same country.
We’re beginning to inhabit that same land, where the pain of some is the pain of all, where injustice is injustice, racism is racism, and cruelty is cruelty. That has been important. Because if you’re living with suppressed rancour in your heart, you can’t start passing legislation based on inclusive and comprehensive transformation. Everything you do is going to be coloured by your anger.
Whichever side you’re on, you can’t be objective, you can’t have a nationwide vision. In that sense the Truth Commission process helped remove huge impediments to developing that nationwide vision. That sense of facing our history was extremely important and we had the courage and strength as a nation to do it. It’s not a sign of weakness to have a Truth Commission. It’s a sign of strength. A sign of great moral strength, that we have the capacity to examine, explore, come to terms with unacceptable things that we did, and to acknowledge what we, on all sides, had been responsible for, in varying degrees. So in that sense, it played a huge role in allowing processes of reconciliation to move forward.
And yet, and yet … At the end of the hearings, overwhelmingly the people who had suffered the most would have to walk back to their homes, often shacks. And the security officials who’d done most of the torture, even if it wasn’t easy for them to stand up and acknowledge on television what they’d done, would afterwards hop into their Toyotas and drive home. There’s still a massive sense of inequality in our country, directly associated with race, reflecting who was advantaged and who was disadvantaged in the past. Until we really overcome those inequities, we’ll never have full reconciliation.
Pride in our nation’s achievements came out very strongly at the time of Mandela’s death. But massive problems still remain. Many we inherited but others we have made worse ourselves, and we’ve got to take responsibility for that.
What would I say were the key elements of our Truth Commission experience that could be replicated elsewhere? The first potentially transportable element is that no participants in a situation of conflict should automatically be assumed to be wholly without fault. The process has to be across the board. I might mention that when, many years ago, a truth commission for the former Yugoslavia was being proposed by civil society organisations, I suggested that it would be hopeless to simply look into the crimes of the Serbs, or the Croats, or the Muslims. Rather, the truth-telling had to be across the board.
The second possible exportable aspect of the process related to the public nature of the Truth Commission’s proceedings. I tell the following story against myself. Following on the Chilean experience, I had argued that evidence should be given behind closed doors, otherwise you’d never get the truth, you’d never get the torturers and the killers and the assassins to come forward. However, civil society people like yourselves responded by saying: ‘We don’t like this Truth Commission thing, we want accountability; we want people to go to jail. But you seem to be insistent on having it, and if you’re going to have it, at least let it be in public.’ And fortunately, Albie Sachs was overruled, and fortunately, I repeat, the legislation provided for the proceedings to be held in public. That turned out to be absolutely vital. The report of the Truth Commission came out afterwards. It’s a beautiful report, well worth reading. It’s well written, it’s vivacious, and not just a dull technocratic report. But, nobody reads it. Everybody remembers Sergeant Benzien crying, and moments like that. It was our people expressing themselves in memorable and totally recognisable ways, that’s what we recall.
Even the security people giving evidence in their suits, with their little moustaches, intoning their words robot-like as if giving testimony in a court of law – I wished sometimes they’d been more relaxed, and more open, and more warm, and more human – even they were true to form as they delivered their statements in a stiff and formal way. It was important that they did bend the knee, and make some acknowledgement that they’d done awful things.
Participation in the Truth Commission processes was expressed in the body language of our people, we saw our nation there. It was like a huge drama unfolding in front of our eyes. I would say that’s the second crucial element.
A third essential element that could travel well was good leadership. It was important to have people of the calibre of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, supported by Alex Boraine, who had also been a minister of religion conducting the Truth Commission. Their team was broadly based. It excluded prominent political activists, but included persons from many faith communities as well as people who were not religious at all. Parliament chose very carefully.
As Tutu would say, the commissioners were not neutral – you can’t be neutral on torture, you hate it. But you’re impartial in the way you listen to everybody.
You don’t make up your mind about anybody in advance. The diversity and the balanced and wisely led nature of the Truth Commission was crucial to its success. The credibility of any truth commission will, accordingly, be dependent not only on the terms of its remit, but on the care with which its members are chosen, the integrity and wisdom of its public representatives, and the impartial manner in which it functions.
And the last and possibly the most important transferable feature of the Truth Commission was that it was not expected to carry the whole burden of our history and function in isolation from other processes of transformation in our country. If there hadn’t been political transformation in South Africa – universal suffrage, the reconstruction of our vision of parliament, a whole new constitutional order that completely reconceived and reimagined South Africa – the Truth Commission would have got almost nowhere. Overall, what gave it its very special meaning in South Africa was that it was part of a wider process of dealing with the root problems that had led to the conflict.
So it’s the end of the year, a hot day like today here in Colombo, and I’m tired. A friend of mine says