TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Part minority_position

Subsection 2

■ NATIONAL UNITY AND RECONCILIATION

14 National unity and reconciliation is to be understood as a single concept. Like the concept of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it is a single idea. To think or to argue that there is no national unity without reconciliation and no reconciliation without truth would be to imply that the Commission has to achieve or pursue its mandate in stages. This is not the structure of the Act. It is not in keeping with the spirit of the postamble to the interim Constitution. The postamble posits the Constitution as the foundation for transcending division and strife. The postamble is in a sense eschatological in its essence. It posits the unity which is to be achieved, nurtured and promoted amidst all the different views and understandings.

15 It is against this background that I make a few observations on the mandate, concepts and principles as discussed in the report.

■ THE ROLE OF RELIGION

16 The danger of applying religious frames to phenomena in general should not be underestimated. I may as well comment briefly here on the use (or abuse) of religion in justifying apartheid thinking. The writings of DrAP Treurnicht (then a man of the cloth) on the moral justification of apartheid, basing his whole argument on an exegesis of scriptures, are but an example. I learnt my politics in church, and much more of my religion in politics. And without going into any detail, I take a dim view of some clergy who, in their submissions on behalf of their institutions, confess their mistake of having trusted their political leaders too much or too unconditionally. It may well be said by some politicians, and with more credibility, that they uncritically accepted their religious leaders’ (political) teachings of God’s will.

17 Religions, by their nature, are most often essentially dogmatic and absolutist. The juxtaposition of forces of light and forces of darkness, good and evil is inherent to religious thought. Who will not recognise this in the rhetoric of the conflicts of the past? The imposition of this framework on the political scene was probably the single greatest contributor to the escalation of the conflict through the Commission’s mandate period. The Bible was used not as canon but as cannon. Most gross violations were committed, as has often been testified, because of a belief in the justness of one cause and the evil of another.

18 Problems will never be solved at the level at which they are created. This is my main reservation about the structure of the report. The Act is far more advanced in terms of conflict resolution than is the frame of the report. The Act has as its focus gross human rights violations. The Act does not put apartheid on trial. It accepts that apartheid has been convicted by the negotiations at Kempton Park and executed by the adoption of our new Constitution. The Act charges the Commission to deal with gross human rights violations, with crimes both under apartheid law and present law. The Act does not ask us to deal with or expound on morality or ethics.

19 The Commission chose to take a moral-ethical approach, more by default than by design, and more so in its ongoing public statements than through its report. Publication of untested allegations rendered them public facts. It is widely believed, for instance, that the National Party government approved of a program to cause infertility to all black women by chemical means although, to the best of my knowledge, no corroborative evidence could be found and certainly no such finding has been made.

20 Apartheid had again to be found a crime against humanity. The judgement of a just struggle against an evil system had to be restated. There is no argument with this perspective from within the specific moral ethical frame. But the rhetoric does not take us beyond an endorsement of this one perspective on the conflicts of the past. It does not allow us to move beyond the level of dogma, of the absolute, to a level of politics, of the acceptance of politics with its different views and perspectives operating in civil society under and with acceptance of the processes set down by the Constitution.

21 There is no real historical evaluation of roles played by various actors. This is precluded by the moral-ethical approach. Whatever reservations people like FW de Klerk, Leon Wessels, Roelf Meyer and Pik Botha might have had, whatever

the moral imperative might have expected of them, one can but imagine what might have happened had they for moral reasons chosen a different political course of action during the reign of PW Botha. It is debatable whether we would have had our democracy by now, and one can only speculate about potential further escalation of the conflict.

22 It would serve us well to reframe and shift from good versus evil to good versus bad, where clearly even good has different meanings. This would allow us to get away from the absolutist to a frame of evaluation of policy, away from right versus wrong, from black versus white, to shades of grey.