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HUMAN, HSAge Description focus to the hearings at Phokeng, in North West Province. // The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is divided into 3 committees: The Committee on Human Rights Violations, the Committee on Amnesty, and the Committee on Rehabilitation. The Committee on Human Rights Violations listens to victims ... By lunchtime as the hearings draw to a close the Committee looks back at the Human Rights Violations hearings which started in April last year. // Over these past months we have been taken by victims like yourselves today, we have been taken into what I can only describe as the very heart of ... ... there was a long public selection and nomination process. I think 3 or 400 people were nominated by various organizations. I was nominated by the Human Rights Committee and it came as a great surprise that I should have been nominated and I never for a moment believed that I would have been ... Welcome back. The Truth Commission has the task of investigating gross human rights violations in our past. Some of these violations happened to communities and are hard to investigate as individual human rights violations, like the forced removal of black people who lived in areas where the ... ... that this week’s health hearing was just a small step in a long process of healing, which should be followed up by the medical profession and human rights organisations. // If we achieve anything through this process I do hope that we insure that human beings are never again treated like ... We certainly can expect a greater sense of urgency from the Truth Commission from now on. Perpetrators of human rights violations go to the Truth Commission to ask for amnesty, but what is in it for the victims? Everyone appearing at a human rights violations hearing requests something of the ... ... and Rehabilitation Committee says the state has a moral obligation to compensate each and every South African who qualifies as a victim of a gross human rights violation. While human rights violations and amnesty hearings dominated the headlines in the past year and a half the Reparation and ... What did happen? That’s what we don’t really know. What are the sorts of circumstances that’s conducive to human rights violations? What makes a doctor get sucked into the system in such a manner that he finds himself either complicit or actually directly involved in some sort of human rights ... Most of the evidence brought to the Truth Commission in the last 11 months concerned human rights violations in the 1980s. But resistance to white minority rule started many decades ago and we as South Africans should remember the early struggles of our people. That is what the Truth Commission’s ... Before the break we saw what those who violated human rights stand to gain from the Truth Commission process. But certainly those who survived these violations and the families of those who did not are more important. The new democratic government, actually we as a nation, has a moral ... have this capacity to forgive, this magnanimity and the dignity that is being affirmed. We are asked by the Act to help in the rehabilitation of the human and civil dignity and I have seen it happen and it has been a great privilege to be part of this process. // These are people who for so long ... ... have, they are there, they are symbols, but they represent a particular history and a particular past that has not been associated with respect for human dignity and human rights, they are integrated. What we need are new symbols. // … And I think we should be able to use our tragedies, if we ... ... on high profile cases like you are doing with the police? // Yes, I must correct the view that we have not been doing any investigations of those human rights violations cases that have been brought to our attention relevant to ANC people. There have been ongoing investigations. In fact, as you ... ... has respect for justice you would have long been locked up and probably even hanged. // I think Joe Mamasela is an animal. I don’t think he’s a human being. Because to stab a person 45 times as he did; I don’t think he belongs to the world of the human beings, he belongs to one of the ... Evil is the power to subvert everything which is good and moral in the life of a human being. It is a force inside the human being which brings you to do what normally you would not wish to do. ... you know how it feels? Can you imagine how it feels to bury the brain tissue of your own son of eight years old? Can you imagine what it does to a human being? How does one become human again after such an experience? Three days after the explosion my wife died. Jaco did not get better. He died ... ... we have seen that this is a traumatic experience for victims and a very uncomfortable one for those who were responsible for or associated with the human rights abuses. We saw that again the last two weeks. Last week we had the secret graves of security police victims uncovered and this week the ... The Truth Commission can, according to the Act of Parliament that governs them, investigate the gross human rights violations perpetrated by Vlakplaas, but there are other apartheid practices that did even more damage to generations of our people that cannot be narrowly defined as individual human ... If prisoners kill each other, stab each other, they’re always on my neck. They’re always fighting and saying we don’t respect the human rights of prisoners. And when we start to restrain and start to develop prisoners so they should stop aggressive behaviour then we don’t respect the human ... ... down on paper, on record, on tape as factual evidence. When in fact it is not factual evidence as such. It is one person’s side of the story. And human people can err, and human people are not all very honest. And I will be … I don’t think I’m wrong if I say, all the stories that are told ... |
