Jennifer Galvin: A quick content note before we begin. This episode includes discussions of violence and trauma. Some of these descriptions may be difficult to hear. Please take care while listening.
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There were many people part of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s organization, the other liberation movements, and democratic forces who believed that there would have to be a day of reckoning with the people who introduced apartheid in South Africa, and what they wanted to have were Nuremberg style trials. That’s what they wanted.
The thing about Nuremberg trials is that there were clear victors. The allied forces had defeated the Nazis, and the Nazi government had collapsed. In the case of South Africa, the South African apartheid government did not collapse, and in fact, its military force was clearly capable of continuing with the old system.
The African National Congress and the liberation movements had not in fact emerged as victors. What you had is that the Nelson Mandela side of the story had global legitimacy. They had moral authority, and they had popular support, but they did not have the [00:01:47] industrial military power to defeat the apartheid government. So it was a stalemate. And the solution to that stalemate was to negotiate a settlement. And you don’t negotiate a settlement with an incumbent government by threatening people with Nuremberg Trials. It would simply be a non-starter. So the question was, in a situation where you have a negotiated settlement between two forces, how does one then create a mechanism for accountability for those who were responsible for egregious human rights violations, and how do you create a set of circumstances where you can actually honestly reckon with the past by telling the truth of what happened? In the case of South Africa, what emerged as that entity was something called The Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When I was director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, IDASA, I was part of the discussions for setting up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. My [00:03:00] predecessor at IDASA, Alex Boraine, became the deputy chair of the Truth Commission. He was really the one doing the setting up of having a Truth Commission and he was the person who organized the first series of meetings funded by the Scandinavians and funded by George Soros at the time.
You may recall that South Africa was declared, apartheid was declared a crime against humanity by the United Nations and therefore there had to be some kind of accountability for that. So it’s really vital to share the story about the Truth Commission because it’s an example of how you deal with issues of accountability and justice, when there is a negotiated solution to a political crisis. It was a vital instrument of modern South African history and transformation, and that’s why I need to tell the story.
The deal was that essentially white people could keep everything they had. Nobody was going to take their property away, nothing was going to be [00:04:11] confiscated, in exchange for guarantees that they will not be harmed and that made negotiations possible, otherwise it would not have been negotiated. But the question is, who’s accountable for the egregious human rights violations? And the Truth Commission was one answer to that.
It was set up to look at egregious human rights violations between 1960 and when apartheid ended in 1990. South Africa during apartheid had a secret police who did things outside of the law. They followed people. They spied on people. They arrested people. They did all kinds of things. I was one of their detainees. But they also killed people. They assassinated people both inside the country and outside the country. They had a special hit squad that was run by somebody called Eugene de Kock, whose job was to take out individuals. There were layers of protection that kept the senior [00:05:17] politicians sort of isolated from the individual decisions, but clearly this has to be politically authorized, and they were busy since the 1960s doing this. So people were killed, people were thrown off buildings, people disappeared. Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, had offices globally. Some of the individuals were assassinated. So, some mechanism of accountability had to be set up.
The Truth Commission itself was set up as a body of individuals led by Archbishop Tutu, and it had two components, and one is creating a platform for South Africans to tell their stories.
[Archival news clip]: Desmond Tutu: We all stand in need of healing. We on the commission are no superhuman exceptions. We too need forgiving. We too need to forgive.
[00:06:22] Community hearings were held across the country. Typically they were held in black townships, but sometimes in white areas as well. It could be a church hall, it could be a school hall, some venue in a community, and The Truth Commission would be assembled there, and they would then identify people ahead of time. You can imagine coming out of a dark period in South African history where all of this happened and suddenly people had the chance to come forward and tell that story.
[Archival news clip]: They had pulled all his hair out. Then they pulled his tongue out.
There were heart breaking stories coming from that experience but deeply meaningful. So there was a lot of crying. It was deeply emotional thing that happened.
[Archival news clip]: Then they went about cutting his fingers off.
The moms who lost their children, moms where their sons and daughters disappeared, the husbands who lost their wives to assassinations. My brother-in-law was tortured, my wife’s youngest brother, very badly. Lots of people were killed in jail. Lots of people died in jail. Family members just disappeared. Gone. You don’t know where they’re buried. They weren’t seen for a long time. They were on the run. Family members were assassinated. Many were tortured.
[Archival news clip]: I was forced to remain naked in a cell and then I was tortured brutally, beating me every day, and then I was hit with the butt of a gun on my head, pulling me with my private parts, and all these horrible things were done to me.
One session, a memorable session where Archbishop Tutu just howled in tears [00:08:10] because of the failure of Winnie Mandela to actually tell the truth in his view was extraordinary. They were painful experiences that you would associate with a public confessional dealing with very horrible things people do to one another. It’s very hard. This is not an occasion for joy at all, but an occasion for deep human reconciliation where people had to show how contrite they were by speaking the truth and staring at families in their eyes when they killed a member of their own. It was very hard to watch that happen.
The second part was that if you were seen to be a perpetrator, an assassin or somebody involved in egregious human rights violations, and you came forward to the commission, and you told the truth, and the commission regarded what you’ve told as accurate, it’s a judgment call they had to make, they would give you amnesty. They would absolve you.
[Archival news clip]: We believed we were doing good. We believed that we were doing right. We believed that we were justified, that the moral high ground was ours.
If they didn’t accept your [00:09:41] testimony as truthful, you’re subject to prosecution. And if you didn’t come forward at all, you’re also subject to prosecution.
[Archival news clip]: It happened so easily because if one had believed that or been told, look what you’re going to do now is actually evil, it’s nasty, it’s terrible, but go and do it, you would have thought about it, but that never crossed your mind. We believed we were right.
It’s a mechanism by which there is accountability, but it did rely on people to come forward and many people just didn’t, and they evaded prosecution.
So when I was head of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, the person who ran the Pretoria office came to see me one day to say that a member of the hit squad, they were secretly financed by the state, and they would target people and assassinate them. Take them out is the language they would use. So one of the assassins wanted to tell his story, his name was Chappies Klopper. And he was quite senior. I think in the end he was just scared that he was going to get thrown into prison and he wanted to see whether he can get protection and get amnesty. It was not an act of conscience.
So he came forward and he wanted to give testimony to Judge Richard Goldstone, who at the time was a special judge looking at crimes. But he had conditions: speak to the judge and he needed witness protection. It was the job of the organization I ran to provide that.
Judge Goldstone then said witness protection should be given to Chappies Klopper and his colleague and their families, and they be shipped to Denmark, placed in seclusion in Copenhagen. The Dutch embassy put up money and Denmark offered to take them in for six weeks so that we could collect their testimonies in utter secrecy, and their stories were used to convict the head of the hit squad, Eugene de Kock, and sentenced to life in prison.
So that was [00:12:01] a part of the Truth Commission that resulted in actual prosecution. He was the highest-level official that was actually prosecuted. But clearly it had to go way up to the top.
So the question is, did FW de Klerk know about the hit squads? So I asked President FW de Klerk whether he in fact knew about this program. I got to know him reasonably well towards the end of his life and felt comfortable enough to ask him that question. He said no that he didn’t know, but that he should have known. He, after all, was the head of the country and he should have known, but he didn’t. And I must say, I believed him, for a range of reasons. The first is that he ordered the dismantling of the nuclear program. South Africa had six and a half nuclear weapons. That was executed, that was done properly. He also ordered the dismantling of the biological and chemical weapons program. That was not properly executed, but [00:13:14] he ordered that, he wanted that dismantled. So I believed him. I believed him. You know, should I have? I mean, was I naive to believe him? I mean, this is a kind of thing that happens only with high level authorization, but it’s entirely possible that this was genuinely a rogue initiative, and he actually was not made aware of it.
So the bigger question is, did the Truth Commission actually bring the political leaders to account? And I must say, that was one of its weaknesses. It didn’t. It managed to get some of the foot soldiers. It managed to get some of the middle level people involved, but the politicians who authorized this, they were not brought to book for what they did.
The success of the Truth Commission was the fact that ordinary people were given a chance to talk in public about what happened to them. South Africa’s not used to public confessions, but that’s what it was. It was a confessional, [00:14:30] almost Catholic style, and the storytelling part on the part of victims and families of victims gave them the dignity that otherwise would not have been there. South Africa actually reckoned with its past, it wasn’t a complete reckoning, but it also provided a chance for their stories to go on the record.
I think it softened the transition. Arthur Schlesinger said, “leadership makes the world go round, but love smooths the way.” This smoothed the way towards a country where people at least reconciled and embraced a kind of restorative justice.
In 1999, I published a book called After the TRC focusing on the unfinished business. After the Truth Commission was held, the individuals who were victims of the apartheid regime’s egregious human rights violations had to receive some level of compensation. So the full range of possibilities where the democratic government would see how they can help the families. And that didn’t work. There was just [00:15:37] no follow through on it.
There was supposed to be a series of public monuments. If you go to Chile, for example, Pinochet’s victims, their names are inscribed in perpetuity on a massive wall outside of one of the graveyards. We see with U.S. and the Vietnam War the kind of public recognition of people who fell in the line of duty. So there was a failure to do the hard work afterwards. Even the African National Congress, their military veterans have not been looked after properly. So there’s some unfinished business here still.
The final chapter of that story is still unwritten. There were two programs that South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk, terminated. The first was the nuclear weapons program. South Africa had made six and a half Hiroshima style atom bombs. We believe that they did so in order to make sure that if they were attacked by the Soviet Union, which is what they always feared, the [00:16:50] West would come to their rescue because they held nuclear weapons. They never intended to use it. So FW de Klerk ordered the termination of the nuclear program in order to bring South Africa back into the global world, and that was certified by the United States and the entity responsible for this, the Atomic Energy Commission in Austria. So that was well done.
FW de Klerk also ordered the dismantling of the biological weapons program, but that was never certified. The head of South Africa’s biological and chemical weapons program, Wouter Basson, a cardiologist. He’s still alive. He was never, ever convicted of any crime. Doctor death, right. And he was one of those who said that he was a soldier in the war and so on. So the accountability around the biological weapons program is still an outstanding question and there’s a real interest in getting to the bottom of it.
One twist to the Truth Commission, there were people in the African National Congress who didn’t like the Truth Commission report. Mandela was fully supportive of it. Accepted the report, as an excellent report and in good fashion of governance said that they will act on it. But there were elements in ANC that did not like it, so it was quite controversial. And they didn’t like it because to be even handed they looked at human rights transgressions committed by the African National Congress in its gorilla camps, in particular the one in Angola, where people who were accused of being spies ended up being [00:18:33] executed. Mandela was furious about that, and in fact, he refused to see Jacob Zuma, who was the head of African National Congress military intelligence in exile, for allowing that to happen. And so the Truth Commission looked at what the ANC did in addition to the apartheid government. But the ANC leaders, including Thabo Mbeki, didn’t think that there was moral equivalence between what they did and what the apartheid government did, and they objected to it.
As we were working our way through the Truth Commission, it became very clear how important it is for countries with bad histories or bad aspects to their histories to come to terms with it by confronting the honest truth of what happened. In this case, in South Africa, we confronted the egregious violations of human rights, assassinations, people disappearing, with our eyes wide open, and we understood what people are capable of doing.
It is important for countries to reckon with their past so that they [00:19:46] understand what happened and acknowledge it, but not to get stuck in it either. I mean, the truth is, if it wasn’t for The Truth Commission, the negotiations would not have worked. If the Truth Commission wasn’t a mechanism to get whites to participate in handing over their power voluntarily, it wouldn’t have worked.
We were not the first country to do this. [00:20:11] Germany did this by confronting the history of the Holocaust and reminding citizens today by having proper museums what in fact happened, confrontation with the truth. We haven’t done that, in many other instances, for example, confronting the history of slavery in South Africa and in the U.S.
So every country has to ask that question: have you reckoned with your past honestly? It’s really important to do that. Otherwise, you will be imprisoned by your past and it will come back to haunt you. And so for us to go through an exercise of confronting the past with the facts of what happened means that we have better understanding of how good we can be and how bad we can be as a people. That will also set us free, and that’s what’s really important is to be forward looking in terms of creating a better society and having justice and freedom so we can look to building a future that is very different to the past. [00:21:16]