TRANSCRIPT: HE’S STARING AT ME; I’M STARING AT HIM
Another moment when my heart is beating: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I’m a newly appointed judge. I’m in my chambers. Telephone rings. There’s a man called Henri here who says he has an appointment with you. I say, ‘Send him through to security gate.’ And Henri has just phoned me to say that he was the person who put the bomb in my car that blew me up. He’s going to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the TRC. Can he see me before he goes there? I open the door. Henri, tall and thin like me, younger than me. He’s staring at me; I’m staring at him. He commented afterwards: when he saw my arm, that shook him. He was an assassin, but it’s now the person speaking to him. That shocked him. So, this is the man who tried to kill me. I see in his eyes; this is the man I tried to kill. We walk to my chambers. We talk, we talk, we talk, we talk, we talk. He tells me his whole story about the bomb. And when we leave, I say, I can’t shake your hand. Go to the Truth Commission, who knows? And he goes back like a defeated soldier. And I say goodbye.
Now, what was this TRC, how did it come about? A fierce meeting of the National Executive of the ANC, 1993, before our first democratic elections. What to do about a report that says we, the ANC, treated captives brutally in the camps during the struggle period? We had a fierce debate in the NEC. And some people say, ‘No, you’ve got to understand the circumstances.’ Others say, ‘No, we’ve got to follow through.’ They recommend we take action against those responsible. And eventually someone says, ‘What would my mother say?’ His mother: African woman, little learning. She’d say, ‘We’re looking at our own errors and faults, but what about all the violence against us over centuries? Where’s the balance?’ And Kader Asmal says, ‘Comrades, we need a truth commission in South Africa. Not just to examine what we did in our camps, but what the regime did as well, on an across-the-board basis. It’s not just an ANC problem; it’s a South African problem.’
Sometime later, we’ve completed a draft of a constitution. I go to London to report to a body that had given us support. And there’s a knock on the door, ‘Excuse me, Advocate Sachs, but we’ve received a very urgent fax from ANC headquarters.’ The fax says there’s a crisis. The generals and security leaders claim De Klerk had promised them amnesty. There’s nothing about amnesty in the new draft constitution. They will defend the elections, but it’s asking too much for them to defend the elections and then go to jail afterwards for what they did as part and parcel of the apparatus beforehand. They’re demanding a general amnesty. I turn over the fax. And I write at the back, ‘Can we link the amnesty to a Truth Commission?’ We can’t give a general amnesty. We can’t just ignore the deaths of so many people, tortured to death, assassinated, secret burials and so on. But let the people come forward one-by-one and acknowledge what they did and then we can have amnesty. And that gets accepted by the ANC. The Constitution is amended to have a post-amble, I called it. And the post-amble acknowledges the injustices, the divisions, the untold hardships of the past. But they will be dealt with not in a spirit of vengeance and retaliation, but in the spirit of reconciliation and Ubuntu. This gave our Truth Commission a unique quality. I don’t think any other Truth Commission in the world has balanced out amnesty for truth.
And that provided the basis for the new ANC-led government to set up the TRC. It took a year. There were fierce debates. Should it be in public? I said, no, it can’t be in public, it should be in private. If you ask the killers, the torturers, the assassins and others to testify in public, they’ll never do it. You’ll never get the truth. And so we should have secret hearings. And civil society said, we don’t like this TRC thing at all. We feel there ought to be punishment, accountability for those who did terrible things. But if you’re going to have it, let it be in public. I’m glad they did that. I’m glad I was proved wrong because that became the foundation of the TRC, its public impact.
It had three sections. The one headed by Desmond Tutu, traveling around the country, singing hymns, the people speaking about the pain they’d suffered. The loss of close family members, the tortures they’d been subjected to. Just people speaking the truth. It came pouring out. Their lamentations were heard and seen throughout the nation. That was the one section. The other section granted amnesty. And that had two judges and laypeople on it. And they refused amnesty for the killers of Chris Hani. They refused amnesty for the killers of Steve Biko. Why? Because they didn’t tell the whole truth. But they gave amnesty to other people who’d done horrible things. The third section was reparations. That was the one that I felt didn’t use its remit to the best. It ended up with a lump sum of money for each person. It shouldn’t have been based on money. It should have been based on human repair. Things that were emotional and warm and lasting. That would have done more than lump sums being paid out.
I think I was informed that Henri had applied for amnesty formally. And if I had any comments to make, I was at liberty to do so. I connected with George Bizos who was there representing a number of people. George Bizos was a natural person to represent me at the Truth Commission. He’d been sent with Arthur Chaskalson, another top lawyer, to serve on the Constitutional Committee of the ANC in the late struggle days. And he was a very highly respected barrister advocate at the bar in Johannesburg. So, I felt I’m safe. So, I didn’t say I support the application, I just said I have no objection to the application. They gave amnesty to Henri. He told the truth. He had the courage or the chutzpah or whatever you like to call it, to come and see me. He acknowledged what he’d done. He was accepting the new institutions, our new way of doing things. I heard afterwards, he was actually helping our security forces in different ways in helping to create a new security force.
So, I feel the TRC played an immense role in our country – at that time. Was it successful? An American scientist summed it up by saying its main job was to convert knowledge into acknowledgement. We knew about deaths in detention. We knew about the crimes of apartheid. Remember, it wasn’t about apartheid. Apartheid was a crime against humanity. This was about violence, torture, assassination, not permitted even under apartheid law. To bring that out into the open. It was important: the deepest pain of our people should be acknowledged. But it gave voice to those who’d suffered. It was an important, symbolical phenomenon in our society, an acknowledgement of horrible things that had happened. There was acknowledgement from the people who’d done awful things. They didn’t tell the whole truth. They read from statements. But it’s unique in the world. They weren’t acknowledging it because they were being tortured. They were acknowledging wrongdoing that they’d done. It was acknowledgement by the nation. We saw on TV; we heard it on the radio. It reached into the hearts and souls of South African people. There’s no scope for denial and denialism – that these things didn’t happen. Because the perpetrators themselves had acknowledged. That was immense.
And I came up with this theme of there are four kinds of truth. There’s evidential truth, whether it’s scientific or forensic. Then there’s logical truth, the truth in a statement – doesn’t need evidence. And most court proceedings are based on evidential and logical truth. But there’s also experiential truth, the truth of things you go through and examine. And this was experiential truth, phenomenological truth. It was very emotional. And there’s also dialogical truth, the multiple forms of truth colliding with each other. And the strength of our Truth Commission is not in its report, although it’s a fine report; not in its fact-finding, although it’s still burgeoning with information; but in the impact it had at the time, at the phenomenological, experiential level. It was so rich and so human in so many different ways.
Did it transform South Africa? No. People today, many are angry. Those who didn’t apply for amnesty weren’t being prosecuted in spite of prosecutions being recommended. To this day, now, inquests have been reopened into people who died in detention. But I think the main concern people have is our society hasn’t changed enough. And to some extent, they put the blame on the Truth Commission, that the Truth Commission somehow didn’t remedy the massive injustices and inequalities. It wasn’t their role. It wasn’t their function.
Later on, hot day, summer, end of year, I’m invited by a friend to a party. Band is playing loudly. And I hear a voice saying, ‘Albie. Albie!’ I turned around, it’s Henri at the party. He’s beaming! We get into a corner so that I can hear him. And he said, ‘I went to the Truth Commission. I told them everything. And you said that maybe one day…’ I said, ‘Henri, I’ve only got your eyes to tell me that what you’re saying is the truth.’ And I shook his hand. I almost fainted. He went away beaming. But they told me afterwards, he went home, and he cried for two weeks. I don’t know if it’s true. I want to believe it’s true. I’m not even checking up to find out if it’s true because maybe it’s not true. But for me, it’s more important that he cried than that he’s sent to jail… which won’t help my arm at all.
So, he’s not my friend. I don’t phone him up and say, ‘let’s go to a movie together’. But if I’m sitting in a bus and he sits next to me, I’ll say, ‘Oh, Henri, how are you getting on?’ We’re living in the same country. It did something good for me. Instead of the enemy, the system, that dark external ugly nemesis out there, it’s this guy who’s now kind of meek in terms of what he does. He’s got a name. He came to see me. We shook hands. I’m glad, I’m pleased for that.
I don’t even use the term forgiveness. Forgiveness is a kind of a power you’ve got to forgive. I forgive you. You know, you’ve come down and been humble. I don’t feel… It’s transcendence. It’s much more powerful than that. And it’s the triumph of our values and what we believed in. It’s the triumph of having values. I don’t want to say thank you for blowing me up, Henri, I wouldn’t have had these powerful experiences. That’ll be pushing it a little bit. But that… that’s been my journey and continues to be my journey.
