TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 6

Subsection 11

■ WITNESS PROTECTION

58 Persons who were offered protection by the Commission’s witness protection programme provided a certain amount of information to the Commission. This information was generally recorded either by the witness protector or an investigator and forwarded to the Investigation Unit.

■ OVERVIEW OF THE COMMISSION’S WORK

59 The evolution of the Commission’s work through three broad phases had a direct bearing on its methodology. Although the phases overlapped to a large extent, it is nevertheless useful to characterise them as distinct phases for the purpose of understanding the various ways in which the Commission’s work changed during its term of operation. The phases can be defined as the hearings phase, the statements phase and the amnesty phase.

The hearings phase

60 The first hearing held by the Commission attracted both national and international attention. It created a tremendous demand from communities throughout the country to hold hearings in their areas. As a result, each of the Commission’s regional offices developed a fairly extensive hearings schedule, aimed at ensuring that as many communities as possible were accessed and provided with an opportunity to testify. On numerous occasions, two and sometimes three regional offices held hearings on the same day in different parts of the country. This illustrates the extent to which the work of the Commission was driven by public hearings.

61 The prioritisation of hearings meant that a large proportion of the time, energy and resources of the Commission was devoted to this activity. Commissioners and committee members spent a significant percentage of their time preparing for hearings and presiding over them. Regional office staff provided the necessary logistic and administrative support for hearings. Researchers provided background briefs on the communities in which hearings were held, and the Investigation Unit allocated a large number of investigators to the task of locating victims and transporting them to and from hearings.

62 The holding of hearings throughout the country, and the public attention they attracted, resulted in a dramatic increase in awareness about the Commission and its work. This, in turn, resulted in a significant increase in the number of victims wishing to provide statements to the Commission. At the same time, the Commission initiated the designated statement taker programme (see above), which also resulted in a large increase in the numbers of statements made. This large influx of statements put considerable pressure on the staff and infrastructure of the Commission, which had, up until then, been oriented towards the holding of hearings and not the processing of large numbers of statements. It quickly became clear that staff and resources should be allocated towards the Commission’s information management system and that functions associated with the holding of hearings should be scaled down.

The statements phase

63 As soon as it became evident that the information management system would not be able to cope with the large influx of statements, the Commission decided to reduce the number of hearings and to increase the Commission’s capacity to take and process statements. This involved increasing the number of staff members involved in the capture, processing and corroboration of statements and placing greater emphasis on the efficient and professional processing of statements. This shift in priorities required that the Commission devote greater attention to the legal and administrative dimensions of its work (the processing of statements and the making of findings) and less attention to the public and symbolic aspects of its activities (the holding of hearings). It also resulted in an inevitable reduction in emphasis on the therapeutic and restorative dimensions of statement taking and an increased bias towards the information-gathering and fact-finding nature of the exercise. Such institutional reorientation is not easily achieved and, although the Commission recognised the necessity for change, there was also considerable concern that it would become driven by technical rather than moral considerations. In developing priorities on how best to achieve its objectives, the Commission constantly grappled with the tension between attempting to acknowledge in a meaningful manner the suffering of each person who made a statement to the Commission and attempting to process and corroborate tens of thousands of statements.

64 In the final weeks before the 14 December 1997 cut-off date for submission of statements to the Commission, the Durban regional office received approximately 5 000 statements. This meant that over 40 per cent of all statements received in Durban were submitted in the last two weeks before the cut-off date. The Commission took a decision to enlarge the data processing and corroborative capacity of the Durban office to enable it to cope with this massive influx of statements.

The amnesty phase

65 The initial cut-off date for amnesty applications was 14 December 1996. This was, however, extended to 10 May 1997 in order to allow persons who had previously not been entitled to apply for amnesty to submit their applications⁴. By early 1997, it was already apparent that the Commission would receive thousands more amnesty applications than had been anticipated. It was also clear that each individual amnesty application would take far longer to settle than initially envisaged. Reasons for this included: the public nature of the proceedings; the right of victims and their legal representatives to be present, adduce evidence and ask questions, and the complex and contested nature of many of the applications. The Commission’s projections indicated that, if amnesty hearings were to continue at the same pace, it would take many years to hear the cases of the thousands of people who had applied for amnesty. It was on this basis that the Commission approached Parliament with a request that it be allowed to enlarge substantially the capacity of the Amnesty Committee and that funds be made available to allow for the simultaneous holding of up to six hearings. This was agreed, and the Amnesty Committee appointed additional committee members, leaders of evidence, logistics officers, secretaries and investigators.

66 By 1998, the Commission devoted virtually all of its resources to ensuring that statements were properly processed and corroborated so that findings could be made, and that amnesty applications were dealt with as expeditiously as possible. By the end of its term of operation, the Commission had succeeded in making findings in respect of all statements submitted to it, but had been unable to hear and decide upon all amnesty applications.

67 Once the Amnesty Committee has completed its work, the Commission will file a codicil based on the amnesty hearings.