Truth, but is there reconciliation?

TV debates replace warfare, but South Africa has far to go, writes Mary Braid

IT SHOULD have been a triumphant moment. But when Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, handed his five-volume report on apartheid to President Nelson Mandela it almost seemed as if they were the only public figures who still believed in the Rainbow Nation.

Though he managed a trademark jive later, President Mandela, 80, entered Sammy Marks Hall in Pretoria looking glum. His old anti-apartheid ally, the 67-year-old archbishop, who completed the two and half year investigation into apartheid atrocities while struggling with prostate cancer, looked uncharacteristically unsure.

Perhaps both were reflecting on how much had changed since the heady days when the TRC, was dreamed up to expose the horrors of the past and point a healing way forward.

If the commission was created to unite a divided country it had failed, as far as the politicians are concerned. Outside the hall they were spitting blood. The ruling African National Congress had just failed to block the publication of the report. Their over-reaction to findings that the ANC tortured and murdered alleged spies in Angolan training camps went against President Mandela's wishes, but had full support of his heir, Thabo Mbeki.

The president and the archbishop, veteran pillars of the liberation struggle, might have been forgiven for wondering what they had fought for, and who would carry on their vision, which once thrilled the world.

If anything, the political bitterness has increased. Almost every party claims that the report has damaged reconciliation between whites and blacks. The National Party, predictably, insists that people are even further apart. The ANC is still furious that the TRC allowed newspapers to lump the likes of Ronnie Kasrils (deputy defence minister and the ANC's former intelligence chief, responsible for the Angolan camps) and Winnie Mandela, still a prominent party member, with apartheid regime villains like ex- president PW Botha, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, which the TRC claims trained hit squads with the National Party, and assorted rabid right-wingers. Mr Kasrils is taking legal action, while the ANC argues that the media, like the TRC, failed to point out that Mrs Mandela was a victim of the apartheid regime's human rights violations.

As the TRC's guilty consider suing, South Africa waits to see who will be prosecuted as the commission recommended. Few white perpetrators "grasped the olive branch" offered by the amnesty process. Mr Botha, Mr Buthelezi, Mrs Mandela and senior members of political parties were among those who missed a chance of indemnity from future court action. Bulelani Ngcuka, national director of public prosecutions, says he is studying the TRC report, but that certain prosecutions might be contrary to the spirit of national unity.

The political parties, meanwhile, are forming a huddle. Miraculously, the TRC appears to have united old champions of apartheid and former freedom fighters in a push for a general amnesty. The secret talks are said to involve the ANC which, ironically, created the TRC to scupper National Party demands for a blanket pardon.

The political parties' claim that clogging the courts with prosecutions would hamper reconciliation has brought about another small South African miracle, a brief alliance of blacks and whites. Callers to one radio phone-in, whatever their colour, were appalled at attempts to gag the report or shape its findings One exasperated Commissioner, Yasmin Sooka, said the process was about people, not politicians, and the public seems to agree.

It is hard to see how the stories of the 21,000 victims who contacted the TRC have not made a lasting impression on the national psyche.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence, such as the collapse of National Party support, that people have been deeply affected by the process. But the commission was clearly disappointed with white reaction, concluding that it had not overcome widespread hostility and indifference. A few Afrikaners have even trekked into the wilderness to set up communities from which blacks are banned; in Country of My Skull, a personal account of the hearings, Afrikaner poet and journalist Antjie Krog recalls how white listeners to her radio reports on collective white guilt saw no connection between themselves and the security police who murdered and tortured in their name. But some Afrikaner commentators claim that their community may in fact have travelled furthest, so that "It did not happen" has become "I did not know".

What of the black viewpoint? Makwena, a 20-year-old beautician, recently moved from a township into a white area of Johannesburg. She now knows five mixed couples in a country where sex between the races once led to jail but Makwena remains suspicious of change and thinks the commission was a waste of time. "It did not get enough truth, and I did not believe the killers were sorry for what they did, even when they cried," she says, pointing to the cynical game most played, waiting until they were implicated by others before applying for amnesty. Yet she has been affected by the endless public debate. "I saw some Afrikaners on television saying that they felt they had been scapegoated for the past. And I thought, 'It's true. They were not all bad'."

South Africa is a highly religious nation, but Archbishop Tutu's intensely spiritual approach to the TRC appealed particularly to blacks. The ANC should have been prepared to admit it also did things wrong, said one office worker: "After all, we are all human and no one is without sin."

Mr Mbeki insists there can be no real reconciliation until economic inequalities narrow, but Archbishop Tutu asks South Africans to look at what they have achieved so far, not just at how far there is to go.

In 1994 the country was still racked with violence, four years later there is something comfortingly ordinary about public cynicism over politicians. Instead of taking up guns, people pile into TV studios to argue.

But Mr Mbeki's authoritarian actions last week added to concerns, even within the ANC, about his intolerance of criticism, moving Archbishop Tutu to warn that yesterday's oppressed can so easily become oppressors. Whether Mr Mandela shares this concern about the man he championed as his successor is not clear.

VOICES FROM THE RAINBOW

Archbishop Desmond Tutu: "Reconciliation is not about being cosy; it is not about pretending that things were other than they were. Reconciliation based on falsehood, on not facing up to reality, is not true reconciliation and will not last." - in his foreword to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report.

Deputy president Thabo Mbeki, of the commission's findings that the African National Congress was morally and politically responsible for human rights abuses: "They are wrong, wrong and misguided."

Former President FW de Klerk: "I cannot be held morally accountable for matters which were brought to my attention long after they occurred ... Moral accountability for concealing the truth is, in any event, not a gross violation of human rights."

Marthinus van Schalkwyk, leader of the National Party: "[The report] has been compromised so many times, including the day before its release, that it has no credibility left." - 29 October, referring to allegations that he covered up the role of security forces in bombings

General Constand Viljoen, leader of the Freedom Front and former chief of the South African Defence Force: "It is clear from both Archbishop Tutu and President Mandela that the whole liberation side was right and the others were wrong. Ninety per cent of the commissioners were supporters of the ANC."

The chief of the section that typed the transcripts of the hearings: "As you type, you don't know you are crying until you feel and see the tears falling on your hands."