| Time | Summary | |
| 19:32 | You are a great person and you don’t know how your greatness would be enhanced if you had to say sorry, things went wrong, forgive me. I beg you. | Full Transcript |
| 19:53 | I am saying it is true things went horribly wrong. I fully agree with that and for that part of those painful years when things went horribly wrong and we were aware of the fact that there were factors that led to that, for that I am deeply sorry. | Full Transcript and References |
| 20:28 | What difference does it make when a perpetrator does seem to be genuinely remorseful? In the 1980s Eugene de Kock was the commander at the notorious Vlakplaas and one of the security police’s most powerful and efficient operatives. He is now serving life plus 212 years in Pretoria Central Prison. De Kock testified for the first time last year at the amnesty hearing of the Motherwell bombers. | Full Transcript |
| 20:54 | Is it so that you have a need to show your sympathies for the families? // Yes, Chairman, for what it will help because I have an understanding of their feelings, their pain and loss of family members because I find myself in the same situation, although not as traumatic as their situation. | Full Transcript and References |
| 21:26 | I feel terrible for De Kock, you know, because I can hear he feels so sorry about everything he did. | Full Transcript |
| 21:32 | I feel relieved especially for mister De Kock, he has impressed me really. In fact he impressed from day one of the trial because he speaks the truth. | Full Transcript |
| 21:45 | An apology, when it comes along with apparent truthfulness clearly has powerful meaning for the victims and survivors, but if it seems that the perpetrator is still lying then no amount of apologizing helps. This was highlighted three weeks ago when Gerhardus Lotz, one of the killers of the Cradock Four, testified. | Full Transcript and References |
| 22:06 | I’m sure the only thing that one can say is I’m sorry. I don’t think it would be accepted. I’m sorry about what happened. | Full Transcript |
| 22:18 | My first impression was that this guy looks really sorry, but as time went on I thought no, no he’s not yet coming closer to the truth and that now destroyed all the sympathies that I had for him. | Full Transcript |
| 22:33 | Well if they truly showed remorse I’m sure the family would accept their apology, but now they are telling lies. They are making us more angry. | Full Transcript |
| 22:45 | But remorse and apparent truthfulness don’t always earn forgiveness. | Full Transcript |
| 22:51 | There’s one thing that I will have to live with till the day I day, it’s the corpses that I will have to drag with me to my grave, of the people whom I’ve killed. Remorse, I can assure you a lot, a hell of a lot. | Full Transcript |
| 23:06 | My brother was butchered like a beast in a butchery you know for doing nothing. An innocent victim. So you can just imagine the word ‘forgiveness’ in as far as Dirk Coetzee is concerned does not exist in our dictionary. | Full Transcript |
| 23:27 | I don’t expect the Mxenge family to forgive me because I don’t know how I ever in my life would be able to forgive a man like Dirk Coetzee. | Full Transcript |
| 23:39 | But the real test of remorse is what perpetrators do to show they are sorry. In 1996 police captain Brian Mitchell was granted amnesty for the killing of eleven Inkatha supporters attending a night vigil in Trust Feed, Kwazulu-Natal. Last year he went back a free man to face the survivors of a community he shattered. | Full Transcript |
| 24:01 | I’d just like to thank the community for allowing me to come here today and for gathering together in this fashion. Without your goodwill to allow me to come here none of this could have taken place. I have come here because I know it’s the right thing to do. I cannot financially help my family and I cannot financially help anybody at this stage. I just want to take this opportunity as I did at my amnesty hearing to say to the community I am sorry for what has happened to them. | Full Transcript and References |
| 24:41 | Remorse, like reconciliation, may take years of processing but even a simple ‘sorry’ can mean a lot as Tshidiso Motasi discovered when last year he met Paul van Vuuren, the man who murdered his mother and father. | Full Transcript |
| 24:58 | Listen, let me tell you all the people, all they say, we must say sorry, we must say sorry. Are you sorry, are you sorry? And just to say I am sorry is an empty word. You know what I mean? Can you really be sorry? It’s the third time in my life that I meet you but sorry … I’m not the type of person that come and say I’m sorry, I don’t even know you. You know what I mean? // If I look back at what happened, at apartheid and now then I am sorry about what happened to your parents and to you, because it was a waste of human life. I’m sorry for that. | Full Transcript |
| 25:52 | Today, it’s like it’s my day because I just saw a person who killed my father and my mother. It means something to me. // What’s that meaning? // A person who killed my father came to me and said sorry. | Full Transcript |
