TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Part minority_position

Subsection 5

■ AMNESTY

35 The provisions for amnesty in the interim Constitution came at the very end of the negotiations. They followed in the wake of provisions for first temporary and later permanent indemnity, sealing the negotiated settlement. They moved us away from strife and towards understanding, towards forgiveness (by the state) and away from vengeance. They endorsed our reconciliation and national unity after decades, centuries of strife. So we are faced with a paradox: The disclosure of sometimes horrendous deeds, crimes, gross violations of human rights, committed with political motive under an old order, to be followed by a joyous reintegration into society within a new order of the perpetrator of those self-same deeds. This is seeing both the deed and the doer and severing them from each other. This is part of restorative justice. This is part of the spirit of ubuntu. It is part of the restoration of the organism that is our nation South Africa.

Victims

36 There is a second leg to restorative justice as intended by the Act. This involves the state acknowledging violations committed against victims. The restoration of their dignity is to an extent an unhappy choice of words. It is a legal concept. Victims carried themselves with dignity, even when they broke down. In its deepest sense, human dignity cannot be bestowed on someone. The ‘reforming’ old order failed to understand that human dignity always exists. It cannot be bequeathed. It can only be acknowledged.

37 The process allowed victims to be reintegrated into society. In hearings, victims often approached the Commission almost in a foetal position as they came to take their seats and relate their stories. They told their stories as they saw them, as they experienced them, as they perceived what had happened to them. And as they left their seats, the image was wholly different. They walked tall. They were reintegrated into their community. They could re-assume their roles in society; they could manage themselves and the world around them again. They were healthy cells of the national organism. This too is restorative justice. This too is the spirit of ubuntu.

38 The challenge to our society is to receive the successful amnesty applicants joyously as an integral and healthy part of our society. It is also to acknowledge the (former) victims as healthy individuals with their own roles and the capacity to manage themselves.

39 Our natural responses are to maintain respectively aversion and pity – equally damaging to the individuals and to our nation.