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people's warExplanation No, I’m not sorry for what I did. Like I said in the past, I’m sorry for the people, for the waste of human life. Because say for instance we killed another 2000, there was no difference in the outcome of this whole political incident. Time for another portrait of the people behind the Truth Commission process. Truth Commissioner Denzil Potgieter recently joined the amnesty committee. Our cameras caught him at work in Port Elizabeth this week. And out of the blue one day in 1995 Barney Pityana phoned me and said Wendy can the Human Rights Commission nominate you for the TRC? And I said Barney I’d be honoured, but surely there are other people who are far more appropriate and suitable. And he said, no we think you should be on it so I ... It is impossible to suggest, as some have tried, that there is a collective culpability on the part of the business sector. // I believe that we have consistently shown that we did not support the system of apartheid. // Chairperson, the culture was that the organisation stood for change. I mention ... This episode focuses on the HRV Committee hearings held in Sebokeng and Helderberg during the first week of August. From Sebokeng we hear evidence of IFP and hit squad violence in the Vaal Triangle region during the era of negotiations, focusing on the 12 January 1991 Nangalembe night vigil ... Friday was a more joyful day for the Biko family. Thousands of people packed the streets of East London to remember the life of Steve Biko. President Nelson Mandela said he’d never met Biko but regarded him as one of the greatest sons of South Africa. Singer Peter Gabriel also paid tribute to one ... It’s unfortunate when you look into the attendance here, that the majority of the white people, and our brothers and sisters, are not here as South Africans. What would close the chapter of our own country, of our own past, and they are part of that history. // We are not out to blame and white ... Du Plessis is serving a twelve year prison sentence and Van Wyk life imprisonment. This week they appeared before the Amnesty Committee. Both men believe they have been rehabilitated. Du Plessis had converted to Christianity and started a regular church service in jail. // Not only the three people ... The National Party made its submission and the former state president made his submission. He said actions of an unlawful nature were never authorized, they were either bona fide misinterpretations of lawful instructions or they were bona fide actions as a result of people who were overzealous or ... The more and more he began to implement what happened, the more and more he became also a prisoner of a system which eventually destroyed not only the Afrikaner people but also destroyed the humanity of the lives of many such people. Throughout the 1980s most of the state’s aggression was unleashed on the black youth of the country. In 1986 26 000 people were detained, 40 percent of those were 18years old or younger. At least 1 198 people died in political violence in the same year, a third of whom died in the hands of ... Why did this happen? You raise it, you ask the question, you’re critical about yourself, you concede that what you did fell short of what you should have done in the circumstances. But why? // The overwhelming majority of attorneys in private practice were white males as you set it out in ... ... where are our loved ones? Where can we locate their remains? Therefore the sooner we know, and appeals will be made to people who know, come forward. Not just my family. I mean, we should talk about everybody in South Africa. Whoever knows where, what, how things happened, come forward. ... I realized that they were going to be killed at the scene of the crime when the people were singing these freedom songs. And you’d find that when you were stopping one side, something would happen on the other side and you couldn’t control the people and people were saying things like ‘our ... And this is exactly what many black people did. The passport out of the hardship of being black was trying to be coloured. Many took on a coloured identity or an Afrikaans sounding surname, usually both. // Yes, they called it turning your jacket inside out. You put the inside outside and the ... I believe a person who killed so cold-bloodedly, I believe something must be done about him because it’s innocent people, innocent people in the street. He didn’t care who they were. Commissioner Johan van der Merwe also told the Truth Commission that the 1988 order to bomb Khotso House in Johannesburg originated in the state president’s office. // In 1988 the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches in Johannesburg was bombed. 18 people were injured and the ... I think it was Cecil Msotho who I saw first and he described the tail end of the shootout in which opposite the dormitory we were in, under a gum tree, police had walked up to a guy, to one of the people they had shot, and had in fact fired a bullet into him while he was prostrate on the ground. ... leg and truth first as always. Are we really, have we really been getting to the truth in this process? // First of all congratulations on your award. We have certainly done that. We’ve heard the stories of victims and survivors. We were worried that we were not in fact getting the accounts ... ‘Good evening. A woman was killed in one of two bomb explosions on the East Rand today. She died in the Johannesburg Hospital a short while ago. At least 57 people were injured in the explosions believed to have been caused by limpet mines. One blast took place in a packed restaurant in the ... |