The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In the new South Africa there has been established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Tell us about that body and what you think it's achieving for South Africa.

I think the first point that must be recognized is that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was, in fact, a political compromise rather than a moral agreement. It was a compromise between two poles. The African National Congress, if it had its way, would have liked Nuremberg-style trials of Apartheid leaders. On the other hand, the former Apartheid leaders, the then government, wouldn't have agreed to a settlement, wouldn't have handed over, if they knew they were going to then face trials and possible imprisonment for life. The former government wanted blanket indemnity. So those were the two very contradictory poles. The compromise was to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission where there was a trade-off. For truth you would get an indemnity, subject to certain conditions. The conditions are important. There had to be a political motive for the crime, for the human rights violation (and they go back to 1960). And secondly, there had to be a proportionality. That's a difficult area because, by any decent person's lights, to murder somebody is not proportionate to anything. But the context is that reality had to be recognized.

So the Truth Commission has had, I think, tremendous success. There have been thousands of applications for indemnity. One of the conditions for the indemnity is full disclosure. If the commission's not satisfied that there's been full disclosure then there can be no indemnity. A lot of information, the sort of information that began to come out during my commission days, has now accelerated apace and more and more information is coming out -- the identity of people who murdered anti-Apartheid activists, and I saw in The New York Times this morning a report that Archbishop Tutu announced that, as Chairperson of the Truth Commission, he's issued subpoenas against two leading African National Congress activists to come and say who gave them their instructions, and in particular a man called Robert MacBride, who was indemnified before the Truth Commission by the previous government as part of the political horse trading that was going on then. But he let off a bomb in a pub, in a bar on the beach front in Durban that killed a number of innocent people. So the Truth Commission is looking at all human rights violations committed by whomever.

You wrote recently, in an Aspen publication, "When serious human rights violations have occurred, they must be responded to in a way that will engender a sense of justice and which will enable the victims to heal, reconcile, and to move forward with building a peaceful future." And that's really what the Truth Commission is trying to do.

Indeed. Absolutely. And you know, like anything of importance in life, whether it's one's personal life or the life of a nation, it's not all in one direction. For every important situation, there's a cost. The cost of the Truth Commission is denying justice to some people who are demanding it. And that's difficult. The murderers of Steve Biko, the policemen who were responsible for beating him to death in the '80s, have now come forward asking for an indemnity. The Biko family want them prosecuted. They want them punished. They want them imprisoned. But if the Truth Commission grants them indemnity they won't get that. So there is a cost to victims. My own view is that the Biko family, but for the Truth Commission, wouldn't know who these people were anyway. So it's not a choice between prosecution and truth. It's a compromise between truth and nothing. And I think it's in that light that the Truth Commission's successes must be judged.

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