Johannesburg - Two bomb threats, sniffer dogs and court bids to halt proceedings did not detract from the deep emotion attached to the first day of the TRC hearings, 20 years ago on Friday.
That’s when Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu stood in front of a packed East London city hall – with 1 000 people inside – to begin what many hoped would be the final step in the transition to democracy.
Security was the major issue. Witnesses had to be protected. But there were also legal threats to the long-awaited commission.
Members of the apartheid security forces tried to stop the proceedings in the knowledge that they would likely be named as perpetrators of human rights violations. And there was a Constitutional Court challenge by the families of four murdered anti-apartheid activists against the TRC’s constitutionality. But none of this would stop Tutu.
Speaking during a sermon in Mdantsane, outside East London, the day before the hearings began, he said the commissioners believed they were acting in accordance with the interim constitution. But anxiety had gripped the hearts of those who’d been on the wrong side of history – and those who they had targeted.
The week before it started, the TRC had begun informing people who were likely to be named by victims of serious human rights violations, and cautioned witnesses who planned to name those who they alleged were guilty, to be “very careful”. Commission vice-chairperson Alex Boraine said this was because those individuals would not have an immediate right of reply, and that could be dangerous.
However, “it is the victims’ right to speak out”. Witnesses were kept in “safe places” under guard.
This was 1996, less than a decade after state security agents had brazenly hanged, burnt, strangled, shot and buried alive many South Africans whose crime had been to stand up for freedom.
Who was to say the old agents of the apartheid regime wouldn’t now, more than ever, try to silence the voices of those victims and their families?
Those were, however, very tough times politically. It was Azapo which had spearheaded the Constitutional Court challenge, arguing that the amnesty clause in the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act – which underpinned the TRC – precluded victims from seeking legal redress.
Also in opposition was Steve Biko’s family – a particularly sorrowful aspect for the commission as it had started the hearings in the Eastern Cape where the Black Consciousness leader had spent most of his life. Equally, there was some push-back, apparently fuelled by Azapo, from the families of slain activists Griffiths Mxenge and Fabian and Florence Ribeiro. IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi weighed in too, saying his party would not participate in the hearings but would, instead, make available a dossier of crimes committed against it.
The IFP had, of course, been accused of many acts of brutality and blood-letting.
Meanwhile, the anger of others was palpable. Marius Schoon, whose wife Jeanette and six-year-old daughter Katryn were killed in northern Angola by a police letter bomb, wrote to newspapers saying: “Tutu has no right to use his position of power to call for victims to forgive. I am a victim of heinous abuse.
“There is no feeling of forgiveness in my heart.”
Still, forgiveness remained an overwhelming theme.
At the same time, there was no doubt that Tutu, along with other commission members, was determined to give an outlet to the thousands of victims of apartheid whose stories had remained underground for far too long.
Perhaps we have, for instance, forgotten a particularly painful aspect of the apartheid regime’s war on South Africans: rape by police and security forces. But at the time of the start of the TRC, this was still very fresh for many women and girls.
Rape counsellor Nozipho Ncaphai and others described how women detained during the Struggle were routinely attacked in the cells by their arresting officers.
“There were also those who were threatened with arrest if they didn’t consent to sex with a policeman,” said Ncaphai, while an 82-year-old woman – not named in reports – said: “My husband was killed in my presence and I was then gang-raped by police.”
The woman’s rapists might well have been among the about 2 000 people who approached the TRC for indemnity. These included NP politicians and members of apartheid’s security forces, including Vlakplaas commander Dirk Coetzee and his successor at the helm of that hit squad, ex-police colonel Eugene de Kock.
Coetzee, who was given amnesty, died in hospital in 2013, while De Kock, who was not, is now on parole.
The case which pushed Tutu and others over the edge was that of Babalwa Mhlauli, whose father Sicelo was murdered together with fellow Cradock activists Matthew Goniwe‚ Fort Calata and Sparrow Mkhonto in 1985.
Babalwa was only eight when her father was killed.
Nearly 20 years after she testified, on March 26 this year, one of the security policemen who confessed to his role in the murders of the Cradock Four shot himself dead in his home.
Gerhard Lotz, who was a 24-year-old warrant officer at the time, told the TRC in 1998 that he and five other policemen had murdered the men at St George’s Beach in Port Elizabeth. “I took one of the persons out of the vehicle while he was still cuffed and made him walk ahead of me‚” Lotz said. “I had a steel spring with me which I brought along. While the person walked ahead of me, I hit him on the back of the head with the spring‚ after which he appeared to be unconscious or dead‚ he wasn’t moving… The black members then stabbed the person with knives…”
Calata’s sister Peggy said she had never forgiven him or the other policemen.
“I don’t even want to know why he killed himself‚ but he did the right thing. It was long overdue. At least he took his own life unlike them (the Cradock Four). They killed husbands and brothers and our lives were never the same.
“I’ll go back to Cradock to visit my mother’s grave and tell her to rest in peace now because Fort‚ Goniwe‚ Mkhonto and Mhlauli are calling them (the apartheid police).”
The Star