A healing truth in South Africa
This week South Africans were treated to the spectacle of former Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk calling the apartheid policies he once served "deeply mistaken" and apologizing for the pain they caused. The next day, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki apologized for the African National Congress's far more limited crimes, including the execution of 34 men in A.N.C. training camps.
It is shameful that de Klerk decided to blame rogue soldiers for the hundreds of killings of anti-apartheid activists. The evidence indicates that such violence was condoned by government ministers and considered necessary to impose apartheid on South Africa's black majority. But that the two leaders came forward at all is remarkable. It is hard to imagine Chile's Gen. Augusto Pinochet or the East German Communist leader Erich Honecker admitting they were wrong and asking their victims' pardon.
The two statements were made to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace laureate. The commission began its two-year tenure in April. Its mission is to uncover the truth about crimes committed under apartheid, recommend restitution for the victims, encourage healing and reconciliation among all South Africans and build a new political culture based on human rights.
Other countries, notably Latin American nations that shed military dictatorships in the 1980s, have had truth commissions as well. But South Africa's is different. It has financing and leverage, such as subpoena power, that the others did not. It will give South African citizens detailed knowledge of past crimes in full context, described on television by the victims and perpetrators themselves.
While the Latin American commissioners conducted interviews in secret and published only final reports, South Africa's victims and the relatives of the murdered can tell their stories in churches and township halls around the country. The tear-drenched sessions give victims great satisfaction and inform South Africans about crimes that many had chosen not to see.
The most innovative and controversial part of the Truth Commission is its amnesty program. While abusive officials in many other nations were able to win blanket amnesties, South Africans who committed crimes on all sides must apply for amnesty individually by confessing their acts in full detail. Those confessing to serious crimes must do so on national television.
The amnesty process is just beginning, but more than 2,000 people have applied so far. A group of former apartheid policemen have admitted to a series of bombings that the apartheid government always attributed to the A.N.C. Some families of murder victims bitterly oppose the program, contending it deprives them of justice. But it may aid justice in other cases, as the amnesty statements will provide evidence for use in trials of those who do not apply for or are denied amnesty.
No country can truly put dictatorship behind it until the victims can hear an official acknowledgment of their suffering and the state's role in it, and society learns how the dictatorship worked and how it won the complicity of ordinary citizens. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission promises to go further than its predecessors toward those goals and its nation's healing.
-- The New York Times