TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 10

Subsection 3

■ THE DEFINITION OF GROSS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

15 The Commission went some way towards meeting the criticisms of gender bias. Nonetheless, there were those who argued that it did not go far enough. Activist lawyer Ms Ilse Olckers, describing discussions between two commissioners and women working on gender issues, said it was as if they “were asking them to convince the other members of the Commission to see the earth as round. We added a third dimension to a task already wearisome. A task which they felt they could hardly cope with in its current two dimensional state”.2

16 The inclusion of a separate chapter on gender will be understood by some readers as sidelining, rather than mainstreaming, the issue. Women will again be seen as having been portrayed as a ‘special interest group’, rather than as ‘normal’ members of the society.

17 To integrate gender fully, however, would have required the Commission to amend its understanding of its mandate and how it defined gross human rights violations. The Act states that ‘gross violation of human rights’ means the violation of human rights through – (a) the killing, abduction, torture or severe ill treatment of any person; or (b) any attempt, conspiracy, incitement, instigation, command or procurement to commit an act referred to in paragraph (a).

18 The CALS submission argued that the definition of ‘severe ill treatment’ should be interpreted to include apartheid abuses such as forced removals, pass law arrests, alienation of land and breaking up of families. This approach finds support in the declaration to the Commission by five top judges at the legal systems hearing that apartheid was in and of itself a gross violation of human rights.³

19 The Commission’s relative neglect of the effects of the ‘ordinary’ workings of apartheid has a gender bias, as well as a racial one. A large number of statistics can be produced to substantiate the fact that women were subject to more restrictions and suffered more in economic terms than did men during the apartheid years. The most direct measure of disadvantage is poverty, and there is a clear link between the distribution of poverty and apartheid policies. Black women, in particular, are disadvantaged, and black women living in former homeland areas remain the most disadvantaged of all. It is also true that this type of abuse affected a far larger number of people, and usually with much longer-term consequences, than the types of violations on which the Commission was mandated to focus its attention.

20 The suffering caused by influx control and related laws was not only physical, but attacked the very selfhood of many women and men. In this respect, Goldblatt and Meintjes quote from an interview with Ms Lydia Kompe, formerly a trade unionist and organiser of rural women, and now a parliamentarian. Ms Kompe was forced to use a different name so as to be able to pass for ‘coloured’ and remain in an urban area:

I had to do away with my own African culture, with my own self and call myself a different thing so that I could come and work, because I was not allowed to work in the so-called proclaimed areas of Johannesburg.⁴