TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 6

Part Appendix2

Subsection 1

■ APPENDIX 2: WHO CAME TO THE COMMISSION?

Introduction

1 In order to establish as complete a picture as possible of the conflicts of the past, the Human Rights Violations Committee focused the bulk of its energy and resources on gathering and processing statements from deponents²¹. The corroborated allegations of gross violations of human rights contained in these 21 000 statements form the basis for the Human Rights Violations Committee’s conclusions about the nature of the conflict.

2 The purpose in describing who came to the Commission and what they talked about is to allay fears that these conclusions are flawed because, for example, the constituency that approached the Commission was in some way partisan, or because the Commission itself did not reach out to a sufficiently broad cross-section of people.

3 The methodology of the statement-taking process was such that deponents came to the Commission of their own volition. The Commission did not carry out a survey of human rights violations in the sense of a conventional ‘market research’ approach using a stratified random sample, nor did it carry out a census of violations. The information gathered came from those who wished to tell the Commission about the gross violations of human rights they had experienced. In other words, the sample was self-selecting²² .

4 This section of the report looks at the cross-section of people who came to the Commission, in terms of their broad demographics and what they spoke about, in order to build up a picture of this constituency.

Geographical coverage

5 The Commission’s four regional offices gathered statements in all nine provinces²³ . The table below shows the number of statements taken in each of the provinces, starting with the provinces that took the largest number. For purposes of comparison, it also shows the total population of each province and the average number of statements taken per 1 000 people in the province.