TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Volume FIVE Chapter NINE

Reconciliation

■ INTRODUCTION

1 The Commission sought to highlight the deep damage inflicted by past gross human rights violations on human relationships in South Africa. While the main conflict was between a state representing a white minority and an oppressed black population, the conflict found expression in various ways and involved different sections of the population, exploiting and creating divisions within and between communities. The young and the old, men and women, members of the same family or organisation, neighbours, different ethnic and racial groups often turned against each other. People were victimised in different ways and a range of gross human rights violations was committed. The result demands extensive healing and social and physical reconstruction at every level of society. Sometimes these different needs themselves compete with one another, leading to fresh conflicts. This makes reconciliation a complex, long-term process with many dimensions.

2 With its short lifespan and limited mandate and resources, it was obviously impossible for the Commission to reconcile the nation. The following selected moments from the life of the Commission do, however, express significant steps in the reconciliation process. Some are beacons of hope. Others warn of pitfalls. Together they constitute signposts on the long road towards making individual, communal and national reconciliation a living, lasting reality in South Africa.

3 Clearly, everyone who came before the Commission did not experience healing and reconciliation. However, extracts from testimonies before the Commission illustrate the varying ways and degrees in which people have been helped by the Commission to restore their human dignity and to make peace with their troubled past. They include cases where an astonishing willingness to forgive was displayed, where those responsible for violations apologised and committed themselves to a process of restitution, and where the building or rebuilding of relationships was initiated.

4 This chapter underlines the vital importance of the multi-layered healing of human relationships in post-apartheid South Africa: relationships of individuals with themselves; relationships between victims; relationships between survivors and perpetrators; relationships within families, between neighbours and within and between communities; relationships within different institutions, between different generations, between racial and ethnic groups, between workers and management and, above all, between the beneficiaries of apartheid and those who have been disadvantaged by it. After a visit to Rwanda, Archbishop Tutu said:

We must break the spiral of reprisal and counter-reprisal… I said to them in Kigali “unless you move beyond justice in the form of a tribunal, there is no hope for Rwanda”. Confession, forgiveness and reconciliation in the lives of nations are not just airy-fairy religious and spiritual things, nebulous and unrealistic. They are the stuff of practical politics.