TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 6

Subsection 2

■ DECENTRALISATION

6 One of the first decisions the Commission was required to take was whether itshould operate from one central location or on a decentralised basis. Becauseof the sheer size of South Africa (1,2 million square kilometres) and the unevenand far-flung distribution of its population, the Commission decided to set up ahead office (in Cape Town), four regional offices (in Cape Town, Johannesburg,Durban and East London) and a subregional office (in Bloemfontein). Theseregional operations were designed to help reduce logistic difficulties associatedwith holding hearings, taking statements and conducting investigations over anextremely large area. They also allowed the Commission to respond moreeffectively to the significant differences and characteristics of various regions.It needs to be recognised, however, that the regional offices themselves hadjurisdiction over what were, in their own right, very large geographical areaswith significant intra-regional differences.

7 One of the major challenges, therefore, was to find ways to ensure that people everywhere could access the Commission with relative ease. Despite the fact that the Commission made a conscious effort to communicate and interact proactively with communities throughout South Africa, the sheer size of the country made this an extremely difficult endeavour.

■ COMMITTEE MEMBERS

8 The Act allowed for the appointment of additional committee members, other than commissioners, to serve on the Human Rights Violations and Reparation and Rehabilitation Committees. The Commission decided to appoint such members, not only to assist in discharging the functions and responsibilities of these committees, but also to ensure that their membership was representative in terms of race, gender and geographical origin. The Commission felt that it was important that the membership of the committees reflected the life experiences of all South Africans - black and white, men and women, urban and rural.

■ THE PROTOCOLS

9 At the outset, the Commission decided that the primary means by which it would establish the identity of victims was by inviting them to make statements. In order to ensure that as much relevant information as possible was gathered from these statements, a protocol was developed which attempted to structure and systematise the evidence given by each victim. The protocol was also designed to promote uniformity and consistency in the way statements were taken from victims. The Commission appointed specially trained statement takers to ensure that information provided by victims was captured as accurately as possible.

10 Every effort was made to ensure that statement takers could speak the major languages of the region in which they worked to allow victims to tell their stories in their mother tongues. Statement takers were also trained to identify signs of emotional distress presented by those from whom they took statements. This allowed them to offer preliminary assistance to victims who found the process of making statements difficult or traumatic, and to refer those in need of professional assistance to appropriate mental heath care facilities where these existed and were accessible.

11 As the early statements were received and analysed, it became clear that the initial protocol, developed before the Commission began its work, was inadequate. This may be attributed to two factors. First, the structuring of information gathered from long and complex narrative statements imposed some technical difficulties: narrative statements might contain information on gross violations of human rights which occurred on one or more occasions, at one or more places, to one or more victims and carried out by one or more perpetrators. As different kinds of evidence of varying degrees of detail and complexity were gathered, it became clear that there was a need to adjust and fine-tune the structure of the protocol in order to ensure that all necessary information was captured in a uniform manner.

12 Second, as the Human Rights Violations Committee and the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee confronted various policy issues, it became clear that new and additional information would be required. For example, the Human Rights Violations Committee’s policy on the corroboration of victim statements set out a range of ‘corroborative pointers’¹ designed to assist in the process of finding whether or not a deponent was, in fact, a victim of a gross violation of human rights. The first draft of the protocol was not structured in a way that prompted victims to provide as many as these pointers as possible. As these new requirements were identified, the protocol evolved, with the result that the final version of the protocol, on which the majority of victim statements were captured, was the fifth version.

13 This demonstrates the point made at the beginning of the chapter: it is difficult to embark on work and simultaneously develop systems to manage it. Yet, despite the number of different protocols used to take statements, and some slight variations in the kind of information captured, the Commission was satisfied that neither the overall integrity of the information gathered nor the quality of the findings was affected.

■ THE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

14 The Commission decided to establish an information management system to ensure that all information gathered from victims was captured, processed and corroborated according to a uniform methodology. This was viewed as essential in ensuring that the findings of the Human Rights Violations Committee were as rigorous and defensible as possible. The information management system prescribed that each statement received should be processed according to certain specified and consecutive steps resulting in what was described as the Commission’s ‘information flow’. Seven major steps were involved: statement taking, registration, data processing, data capture, corroboration, regional ‘pre-findings’ and national findings. Each is discussed in detail below.