Special Report Transcript Episode 42, Section 2, Time 06:59

Can I ask a quick question to Dr Fazel Randera. You’re working on the ground in Gauteng, so you should get the feeling from the people. There’s been a lot of criticism, especially from the National Party, that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is not contributing to reconciliation, it’s concentrating on one side and the reconciling is not happening. Is your experience that there is a measure of reconciliation coming through the last year of hearings? // Max, certainly as we go through the small towns and townships of the area that we’re covering, and recently we’ve also started targeting schools, the impression that I’m coming away with is that it’s a very mixed bag at the moment. There’s anger on the one side and one particularly feels that in the small towns, the small towns in the western Transvaal that we visited last year and also in this year. The Afrikaner community, one gets the impression, is feeling particularly targeted and it’s understandable. If you’re on television every day, if you’re in the newspapers every day, where members from your particular community seem to be the ones that are appearing for amnesty applications particularly, I’m not talking about the human rights violations side. We’ve tried, as much as we can, when we choose the cases for human rights violations hearings, to try and be as even handed as possible in the cases that we choose. But clearly, young people as well as adults, I want to give the example of I was in Klerksdorp over the weekend and my son was playing in a tennis tournament and one of the parents was from Ficksburg and he brought up this issue once again, to say. We are feeling that the Truth Commission is actually polarizing the situation rather than reconciling and I think that is a difficult one. But in some ways people are also saying that we didn’t know about what was happening. Yes, we may well have supported the government of the day but we clearly did not know the depths to which certain arms of government were committing human rights violations in this country. // There’s also a school of thought that says reconciliation lies in the fact that the victims can actually speak in front of the nation and reconcile themselves, it’s not entirely a white black thing, or a former government and victim thing. Reconciliation could mean victims get the truth out, speak in front of the nation and make peace with it. Is that your thinking also? // I agree with that, but what we’re finding from the victims’ side is that at the same time, whereas many people particularly the ones who come to the hearings and are able to speak about what happened to them, at every hearing - and I think this is one of the weaknesses of our process - you mentioned the process earlier on, that we’ve had 8 and a half thousand statements through the human rights violations statement gathering process and we hope to gather many more. But only one out of seven, one out of ten of those people are getting the opportunity of appearing and talking to the nation so to speak. The rest of them are speaking to statement takers and yes there is some catharsis taking place there but at the same time there’s always the question. Why are we not speaking to the nation as well? So there’s that disappointment on the part of the victim and of course people are, there is this balancing on the one side where perpetrators appear to be given amnesty and on the other side, nothing seems to be happening, with regard to reparation. // We’ll get to that… // And that of course is causing its own anger as well and it has an impact on reconciliation, we can’t deny that.

Notes: Max du Preez; Fazel Randera

References: there are no references for this transcript