TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Part minority_position

Subsection 3

■ TRUTH

23 Exaggeration is a natural consequence of human suffering. Often deponents were not present at the actual violations to which they testified and their stories were accounts of what they were told. They reflect oral history. They also reflect perspectives. Often deponents gave evidence in terms of their own understanding of what happened. Evidence was not tested. It was not intended to be tested. Except for a few statements, they were not even attested to under oath. Most deponents giving oral evidence, when taking the oath, made it clear that they would speak the truth “as they see it”.

24 This resulted in yet another debate in public across value systems. Those with strong minds raised their voices and criticised the Commission for accepting statements as fact without due testing.

25 The same problem arose with respect to information obtained through amnesty applications. Applicants generally downplayed their own roles in abuses. Because of the wording of the Act, applicants structured evidence to construct an order. While every application had to be dealt with on its own merit, all too often deceased individuals were implicated. The Amnesty Committee is not obliged to make a finding on implicated persons and seldom does. Implication may be blatantly false. It may also be an honest perspective, especially where there is reliance on implied rather than an explicit order from a superior authority. The same circumspection must be applied.

26 The interposition of extracts of such testimonies in the body of the report – where it deals with what actually happened and not with perspectives and understandings – poses a problem. We may have contributed to intensifying the debate by making

such interpositions. Awareness of this can ameliorate an otherwise useless and polarising debate on the work of the Commission and on our nation’s past.

27 Even though the report offers a good exposition of different concepts of truth, especially of factual truth and narrative truth and then of social or interactive truth, the distinction is not sustained. In arriving at findings, all is accepted as evidence, an ingredient of the factual truth. If we ignore the frame of our various dispositions through which evidence reaches us, we lose the context of the multiplicity of truth, both in dimension and in perspective. Truth, reconciliation and national unity can only be understood within the concept of multiple truths. Our perspectives decide our realities. Different elevations of an object give different pictures. It is only by sharing perspectives, by accepting them as real, that we can develop some form of understanding. To pour history into a mould is to recreate the potential for conflict which our Constitution and politics since 1990 have largely removed. A shared understanding of our history requires an understanding of different perspectives, not the building of a new national myth. Presenting ‘the truth’ as a one-dimensional finding is a continuation of the old frame. Nothing changes, sometimes not even content.

28 There is no denying the role of racism in the conflict, but to acknowledge the perspective of a cold war, of the threat of international communism, of nationalism, and then to find that the motivating force was racism, is a negation of all the former, a contradiction in terms, an arrival at a single truth again, not in the least conducive to reconciliation and national unity.