Washington, D.C. — AllAfrica's Charles Cobb asked John Allen, former Secretary of Communications for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and long-time Press Secretary to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to reflect on the Commission's work.
Question: What value has the commission been to South Africa?
Answer: For me principally, it is illustrated by the fact that, unlike some of the earlier Latin American commissions who held hearings, the vast majority of the TRC hearings were held in public. In the crucial early days of the commission, they were televised or took up extensive sections of television news bulletins. The process was covered comprehensively and at times was broadcast live on radio and had huge press coverage.
Now in a sense, for a democratic country, it seems unusual to imagine the media dominated by historical stories, but in the case of South Africa - where so much of what had happened in the past had been buried, censored or obscured - the fact that some of the real history was being put out into the public arena, and that the telling of that history was dominated by the stories of so-called ordinary people, had a dramatic effect on the country.
For South Africans, radio is very important throughout society, in a country where press readership is not very high compared to a more economically developed country. Black South Africans knew their stories, they knew their suffering, but because of the censorship and the way that society was controlled, they didn't always hear the detail, and especially with ordinary people, they didn't always hear the details of what was happening to other communities elsewhere in the country, because the major medium - radio - was in the hands of the state.
So for black South Africans, the way Archbishop Tutu has expressed it, has been that they learned about their whole story - not only about their own corner, their own patch, but about what was happening across the country. And for white South Africans, it was incredibly important, because in the future they can't deny what happened.
At first, the victims told their stories and many whites referred to it as "the Kleenex commission". Then, as amnesty applications began to be heard and as you'd have policemen up to the rank of general admitting the atrocities they had committed - including atrocities against other policemen, if it was thought they were going to be turned to support the ANC - then the evidence of what had happened became overwhelming.
Richard Goldstone, who is a South African constitutional court judge who was the chief prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal at the Hague, wrote recently in a book that if you look at Yugoslavia, the Serbian truth commission process gives him hope, because it drastically reduces the future potential for communities in a country, and for people of different sides of the struggle, latching on to different parts of their country's history. He was saying that when you moved in different communities, you heard completely different histories about the same space of land. Now when you're trying to build a common society, it's important to have a common reference point and a common understanding of your history and where you come from, and the Truth Commission in South Africa has improved considerably the chances of developing one nation with a common history.
Q: You've described the "truth" part of the Commison; are you saying the "reconciliation" part is underway because of the truth part?
A: There've been different views; there are wildly different views about reconciliation. It was intended to be an eighteen-month process, but it has proven impossible to do in under about five years, largely because of the massive number of amnesty applications that came in. If any of us believed at the beginning of that process that within eighteen months - or even within five years - you would achieve reconciliation, then we were being starry-eyed. But what's indisputable, I think, is that you can't have reconciliation on the basis of a lie, that the truth is a precondition for reconciliation, and so to the degree that considerably more truth about the past has been discovered and made common knowledge among people, it improves the chances of reconciliation. It's not sufficient to achieve reconciliation; it's a necessary precondition for reconciliation.
Q: During the time of your involvement, did anything surprise you either in the dynamic as it unfolded at the commission or in the stories that were given to the commission?
A: I was with Archbishop Tutu during some of the years that a lot of very controversial assertions were made by anti apartheid leaders which white south Africans and many other people who didn't suffer - including sympathetic diplomats, who were a little removed from the situation but were trying to assist it - regarded with skepticism, saying it can't be that bad, that's just propaganda, you haven't got any proof of it.
To a degree, anti-apartheid leaders were making statements, and those involved in the churches and the unions and the political movements were making statements, about what was going on based on their feel for the situation, on the logic of the situation, on how wide-spread torture was and how the stories coming out of police stations were the same stories from different parts of the country from people who had had no contact with one another. And I think for me, what was surprising was the extraordinary degree to which those judgments and statements being made during the apartheid years was accurate as to the responsibility of the state, the police, and the military.
I mean, if you were speaking to people and they said, "This happened to me," you believed them and you knew that they were happening, but you didn't know exactly what was happening, or where people were being killed, because nobody was alive to tell the tale. The torture was one thing, but when people were being killed, and you were supposing and speculating on what had happened, even if we didn't have the detail then, the evidence now would stand up in a court.
Q: Does an example come to mind that illustrates that?
A: Let me say this. Maybe there's one thing that's more surprising - that there were some things that were happening that were far worse than we suspected. For example, when Frank Chikani, who is now the director general in President Mbeki's office [and former head of the South African Council of Churches] fell ill repeatedly, it turned out that it happened whenever he put on a particular set of clothes in which had been traveling within Namibia. He was diagnosed at the university in Madison, Wisconsin, that [former US Housing and Urban Development Secretary] Donna Shalala was president of at the time, as having been poisoned. Well, we could say he must have been poisoned by agents of the state, it must have been a deliberate poisoning, but to hear subsequently the range and the extent of the activities of the chemical and biological warfare program operatives was not only surprising, it was shocking. Nobody thought it was that bad.
It was recently revealed - and I don't know why a bigger outcry wasn't made of it, except that people were just too overwhelmed with revelations over the past five years - but to learn that people were being thrown out of helicopters into the Atlantic off the Namibian coast, that was something new I'd never heard that before.
Q: Is five or six years long enough for such a commission to probe apartheid South Africa?
A: It's not long enough to probe apartheid South Africa. One of the difficulties that the commission labored under were the enormous expectations that were projected onto it. In fact it wasn't even established to deal with apartheid South Africa. It didn't look at forced removals [of blacks from their land]. It didn't look at the myriad of issues which were quite critical to the operation of apartheid and formed the fabric of the apartheid state and the apartheid-dominated society. All it was established to do was to look at gross human rights violations, which were defined narrowly in the law as killing, abductions, and something that was called severe ill-treatment.
Parliament's intention was that the process was meant to cover those narrowly defined areas, especially looking at tortures and killings and severe harm done to individuals. They gave the commission an eighteen-month period. They made provision in the law for that to be extended. And it was meant to be wrapped up after two years. So from the perspective of Parliament's initial expectations, the commission went on too long.
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The way the law establishing the Commission was worded, it was the "promotion of the national reconciliation" act. If it was to achieve reconciliation, it was too short. If it was to comprehensively examine and write the complete history of apartheid states and apartheid society and how the fabric worked, it was obviously too short. But it wasn't given that mandate. They had more than twenty thousand people approach the commission as victims; they managed to give five thousand a public hearing. Many of those who didn't get to a public hearing would have wanted to put their cases in public. The public hearings weren't designed to give every single person a hearing; they were designed to show in public a cross-section of the kind of abuses that had happened.
Q: I have the impression looking at it from here that in South Africa there is some resentment around the question of amnesty for some of the people who did these deeds. Is that going to linger in the society do you think? Is it a political danger?
A: I wouldn't want to put myself in people's shoes; I can't say. It's probably fair to say that the process was more admired outside the country. That's because inside the country you either benefited from apartheid or you suffered. In very many cases, as in responses to decisions on amnesty, the country was split up and down as to whether you benefited or whether you suffered. Immediate expressions of the responses to amnesties in the heat of the moment were highly partisan. But I'm not aware of any instances, and certainly none have gained any kind of publicity, of private revenge attacks as a consequence of refusals of amnesty.
It is important to note there were cases, such as the killers of [ANC official] Chris Hani or [black consciousness leader] Steve Biko where those people were refused amnesty. There was a mixture of approvals and refusals of amnesty, which would leave anyone hard put to say that everyone got off without penalties.
