TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 30

■ THE WAY FORWARD

109 During the life of the Commission, other issues relating to national unity and reconciliation were highlighted. Important aspects of reconciliation at a community level as well as the need for a deep, practical commitment by ordinary citizens to the reconciliation process were also emphasised.

Towards national unity and reconciliation: building a culture of democracy and respect for human life

110 A statement by Archbishop Tutu at the opening of the ‘Bisho massacre’ hearings in Bisho on 9 September 1996 serves as a reminder that the Commission’s attempts to help restore human dignity had a dual purpose: to restore the dignity of victims of past violations and to prevent future violations of human dignity.

111 One of the things the Commission was mandated to do was to make recommendations on ways to ensure that things of this kind never again happen in South Africa.

We will be looking to see how we might be able to inculcate, instil in all of us in this land, a deep reverence for human life against the prevalent cheapness that we see, for instance, in the high level of criminal violence that is happening at the present time in our country. We hope that as we listen to those who are not statistics but human beings of flesh and blood, that you and I will be filled with a new commitment, a new resolve that our country will be a country where violations of this kind will not happen, that the context will be inhospitable for those who seek to treat others as if they were nothing.

112 Addressing an angry audience at the same hearing, Archbishop Tutu made it clear that national unity and reconciliation are based on a difficult commitment to democratic values:

Chairperson: Colonel Peter, please have the podium. I am going to give you [the audience] a warning… I don't know what you have come for – but we came here because we have been given a job to do which is to hear every point of view. Whether we like that point of view or not, that is not the point. We have to hear everything so that we are able to describe as fully as we can what it was that happened… If your strong feelings affect how we listen here, we are then going to ask you to take your feelings and leave with them…

It is a democracy that we are trying to build up and many of us are believers, and believers say that it is possible for all kinds of people, all of us, to change and be different. That is why we are talking about reconciliation. You don’t get reconciled with someone you agree [with]. You get reconciled with someone with whom you disagree; otherwise there would be no point in having reconciliation. You do not reconcile with someone whom you have no discordance with. We would not have a Commission if there were reconciliation already.

This Commission exists because all kinds of painful things have happened on all sides, and we are being asked to do a small job in a process [indistinct]. It is all of us who have to accept the pain of what happened in the past, to try to move into the future. I will then ask you – please I beg you – will you give everybody a fair chance and don’t let anybody feel under pressure.

113 These sentiments were echoed by Mr Joseph Seremane, chairperson of the Land Claims Commission, at the special hearing on prisons in Johannesburg on 22 July 1997.

There is one thing that is messing up our country; it is the lack of sincerity in our country. It is the lack of recognising other people’s contribution if they don’t belong to your camp, if they don’t belong to your tribe, if they don’t belong to your race. We are still victims of fragmentation. We have achieved very little until we have changed…

We have been tested; we can forgive, we can reconcile; yet we are also capable of forming third forces to hit back. But that is not what we want. We are looking forward to a better South Africa – a South Africa that will respect the integrity of everybody, irrespective of their colour, creed, tribe, too, and social standing for that matter. And worse still, we must get out of this ideological straightjacket that we can only think of people, only as they belong to your straightjacket; outside your straightjacket, they are expendable commodities that you can wipe off as you please. Commissioner Wynand Malan emphasised the importance of seeing national unity and reconciliation as the embodiment of both a human rights culture and a democratic culture… A shared understanding of the past may well go a long way towards reconciliation, yet an understanding of the other person’s perspectives and motives will immensely increase the capacity to live with and manage the other and oneself, even with different understandings of the past persisting… A true human rights culture is a democratic culture. At the heart of a democratic culture is tolerance of divergent views and understandings of the past, present and future… National unity and reconciliation is a society with its members relaxed, a nation democratically at peace with itself.