SA’s slavish "liberal" media has, predictably, generally lauded the "final," 3,500-page report of Desmond Tutu’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Does the report indeed present a nuanced, balanced picture of events in what was, after all, a civil war? We think not. The TRC proved highly selective in its "search for the truth." Most of the jumbo report is devoted to "abuses" by the security forces. The TRC showed little desire or determination to examine the atrocities committed by its own comrades. Apparently, human rights are not an issue when Blacks brutalise Blacks. It speaks volumes for the fundamental dishonesty of the report that the TRC failed to carry out a full investigation into one of the most shameful blots on the ANC record: the bestial cruelty of the organisation’s approved method of execution by necklacing. In 31 months the TRC could only find time to devote one afternoon to this, suggesting that they were more interested in concealment than disclosure. |
According to figures given 591 people were murdered by necklacing, while some one thousand people were physically set alight. Little or no effort was made to obtain full information on these brutal and barbaric acts: who conceived or instigated the necklacing method, who ordered the –campaign. Asked by the TRC’s chief legal adviser Hanif Vally why it took the ANC so long to condemn necklacing, Mac Maharaj made the extraordinary statement that "… it would have been extremely foolhardy for an ANC leader in 1984 or ’85 to say ‘this is wrong’ outright." (Star, 13.5.97). So much for his morality. It is vital omissions such as this that suggest a serious effort on the part of the TRC to ensure important parts of the revolutionary period would be buried for ever. And which also explains why so many who have been engaged in similar post-war investigations overseas become deeply disillusioned. Please read on. |
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| TUTU’S "TRUTH" REPORT: A FRAUD AND A HOAX |
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ASKED many years later to assess his role in the Nuremberg trials, Robert H Jackson, Chief US Prosecutor at the trials, said he had many mistakes in his life … "Nuremberg was the worst. I don’t think the trials served any purpose at all." His reflective opinion, shared by many of the British prosecutors, was that there was blame and to spare on all sides; that justice would have been better served by closing the book all round, letting bygones be bygones. The widely hostile opposition reaction to Tutu’s highly contentious, immensely costly TRC suggests they, at least, share Jackson’s sentiments. At its inception, it was stated that the TRC’s prime function was to seek racial reconciliation and unity between Black and White. Unfortunately, the TRC instead became a racial witch hunt: as Business Day commented, not so much a Reconciliation Commission as a Humiliation Commission. |
In the event, hundreds of men named in the document – mainly Afrikaners from the old security forces – have had their lives for ever ruined: identified in this major, if gravely flawed, report as guilty of involvement in murder, torture and other atrocities. Not at all a desirable memory to bequeath to your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Main rebuke of the Nuremberg trials was that they signally failed to observe two of the most cardinal principles in the Western idea of justice. One, that the accused is never tried by his accuser, that he is tried in an impartial court. Two, that at all times the court observe the old rule of tu quoque ("thou too" or, more simply, "so are you"). What, by its barely concealed manipulation of the process from start to finish, immediately discredited SA’s TRC process was that here the ANC/SACP alliance became prosecutor, judge and jury: "victor’s justice." |
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