Landmark Study Lays Bare Abuses of Apartheid Era

In a public damnation of the evils perpetrated under apartheid, South Africa’s truth commission Thursday released its final report after the ruling African National Congress lost an eleventh-hour court battle to keep it under wraps.

The milestone document lays blame for killings, beatings and torture on the former, white-minority regime, which it identifies as the No. 1 villain of the country’s racist past. It says the apartheid state’s “criminal misconduct” spanned the tenures of Presidents Pieter W. Botha and Frederik W. De Klerk, the country’s last white rulers, and flourished in a “prevailing culture of impunity.”

In equally incriminating language, the commission accuses several liberation groups, including the ANC, of gross human rights violations in their armed struggle to end white rule. While acknowledging the insurgents were “motivated by a just cause,” the commission concludes that they used unnecessary violence and recommends that they apologize to their victims.

“We have not been facile or superficial, for we have heeded the cry of the prophet against those who healed the sickness of their people superficially, crying peace, peace, where there was no peace,” retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said in releasing the document.

“Many will be upset by this report,” Tutu said. “Some have sought to discredit it preemptively. Even if they were to succeed, what is that to the point?”

Almost everyone agrees that the commission did not foster reconciliation, the second part of its mandate, during its review of crimes committed during apartheid.

However, the report includes a series of less sensational but still controversial recommendations about achieving reconciliation that may in the long term prove more significant than its verdict on the past.

In an effort to close the “intolerance gap” between rich and poor, it urged the government to consider new taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. One suggestion calls for companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange to contribute 1% of their market capitalization.

Other money-raising ideas include retroactive surcharges on corporate profits and on “golden handshake” retirement packages paid to senior civil servants from the apartheid era. The commission also recommends that the government consider reneging on the previous regime’s debt payments, using the money instead for reparations, reconstruction and development.

“It will be impossible to create a meaningful human rights culture without high priority being given to economic justice by the public and private sectors,” the report said.

The commission also called for measures to strengthen the independence of the media, train judges and other court officials in constitutional and human rights issues, and improve education for the country’s poorest students.

The 2,739-page report, posted on the Internet at www.truth.org.za, was presented to President Nelson Mandela at a Pretoria municipal building in a low-key ceremony noticeably dampened by the frantic ANC court action. The formal handover came just two hours after a Cape Town judge dismissed a bid by the ANC to block the report because of findings that the ANC committed human rights abuses, including torture and murder both before and after the party was legalized in 1990.

The ANC leadership complained that the statements were inaccurate and effectively criminalized a just liberation struggle. Judge Wilfred Thring threw out the case after deliberating for less than half an hour. The judge did not give reasons for the ruling but ordered the ANC to pay the costs of the truth commission’s lawyers.

Among the ANC’s apparent concerns was the report’s lengthy discussion of Mandela’s ex-wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was once the darling of the liberation struggle but was convicted in 1991 of kidnapping.

The report says Madikizela-Mandela lied in her kidnapping trial about her whereabouts on the night that a young Soweto activist, Stompie Seipei, was murdered by a gang of bodyguards known as the Mandela United Football Club.

ANC defenders of Madikizela-Mandela say the report misrepresents her activities by failing to put them in the context of the troubled times. The commissioners showed little sympathy for such objections.

The truth panel was equally harsh on some top leaders of the white-minority regime, although its findings about De Klerk were blacked out because of a court challenge by the Nobel laureate. However, the report made clear--without mentioning De Klerk by name--that the former president served during a period when “the South African state ventured into the realm of criminal misconduct.”

The report is largely a synthesis of 140 public hearings and 20,000 written and oral submissions about human rights abuses committed between 1960 and 1994, when the country held its first free, multiracial elections. Most of the documentation includes little new information. In fact, a commission investigator said, most of the disputed findings about the ANC came from the ANC itself.

What’s new is how the panel compiled the information, the conclusions it drew and the recommendations it made. Although the document has no legal standing, it will be debated by Parliament and will serve as the foundation for possible criminal prosecutions against those who have not been granted amnesty. The commission will consider thousands of amnesty applications well into next year.

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Targets of the Truth Commission

The final report of South Africa’s truth commission singles out several prominent apartheid-era figures for criticism.

Pieter W. Botha

Head of government and, later, state: 1978 to 1989

Age: 83

Finding: Held responsible for ordering the bombing in 1988 of Khotso House in Johannesburg, which housed an anti-apartheid church group.

Excerpt: “Botha contributed to and facilitated a climate in which . . . gross violations of human rights could and did occur, and as such is accountable for such violations.”

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Frederik W. De Klerk

Head of state: 1989 to 1994

Age: 62

Finding: Deleted because of a pending court challenge.

Excerpt: “The period during which the South African state ventured into the realm of criminal misconduct stretches from P.W. Botha’s accession to power in 1978 into the early 1990s, including a part of the period in which his successor held office.”

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Magnus Malan

Minister of defense: 1980 to 1991

Age: 68

Finding: Held accountable for killings and beatings by a “hit squad” set up in 1986 by the South African army and the Inkatha Party.

Excerpt: “The deployment of the paramilitary unit in KwaZulu led to gross violations of human rights, including killing, attempted killing and severe ill treatment.”

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Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

Wife of Nelson Mandela: 1958 to 1996

Age: 62

Finding: Initiated and participated in at least four assaults at her Soweto home by the so-called Mandela United Football Club, including that on murdered activist Stompie Seipei.

Excerpt: “The commission finds [Madikizela-Mandela] politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the Mandela United Football Club.”

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Mangosuthu Buthelezi

Head of Inkatha Party, now the Inkatha Freedom Party and minister of home affairs

Age: 70

Finding: Held accountable for gross human rights violations committed by members of his party and the government and police of the former KwaZulu homeland between 1982 and 1994.

Excerpt: “Violations formed part of a systematic pattern of abuse which entailed deliberate planning on the part of the [party].”