TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 9

Subsection 33

Towards national unity and reconciliation: bringing the veterans together

119 At the special hearing on compulsory national service in Cape Town, Commissioner Mary Burton placed the following difficult challenge on the agenda:

We heard from people who were opposed to conscription from the beginning or who, through their experiences, were brought face to face with things that changed their minds. But there are many, many citizens of South Africa who did their military service and who still view themselves as having fought a good fight, as having upheld the safety of the State, as having opposed communism in a broad sense and who are still part of our country and who have to be taken into account as we move into a process of reconciliation and unity. Their views also need to be part of the whole stream of coming together. And when we talk about where we go forward we have to be knowledgeable of that view as well.

So perhaps part of the broad reconciliation challenge that lies ahead of this country over many, many years is the bringing together of all the veterans and that is a very big task, not one that this Commission can handle by itself, but one which has to be faced in building national unity.

120 A few weeks earlier, at the special hearing on children and youth in Johannesburg, on 12 June 1997, Mr Christo Uys made a similar statement:

Reconciliation is, according to our understanding, embedded in respect and therefore must we respect the struggle that was referred to in front of the [Commission] today in evidence, but we also ask that our role should be respected. We also have victims, people who died in the struggle and eventual reconciliation can only come about if these people are also honoured together with the comrades who were honoured by means of a play today.

Dealing with the legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge

121 Many testimonies serve as chilling reminders that the task of “transcending the divisions and strife of the past … which left a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge” (Preamble to the Act) is far from complete. For example, a facilitator at the special hearing on children and youth in Durban gave this feedback from children’s testimonies and drawings:

122 She quoted from the testimony of a thirteen-year-old girl about the killing of her father six years earlier on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal:

That night my younger brother, my mum and myself went into the forest looking for our father, and then what I saw that night I have been carrying around with me ever since. My father had bullet wounds and stab wounds all over his body, and ever since that day I vowed to revenge my father’s death.

123 She said:

Another picture which I have here from an eight-year-old girl. She drew her father as a small or young man, and the mother being short, and when I asked the child why she is drawing the father short she said the reason she drew her father short it’s because the father was helpless, and they surrounded her father and they poured petrol on him and burnt him. What is very sad about this is that these children, most of them they know the people who did this, and those people are still alive and they see them every day. And another child, who is eight years old said, “I am just waiting for my revenge”.