The South African Truth Commission
Lars Buur2001, Journal of Refugee Studies
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Abstract
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The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Desmond Tutu, sought to address the historical injustices of apartheid by examining the human costs and operational realities of an oppressive regime transitioning to democracy. The TRC's work involved significant challenges, including criticisms of its methodologies and findings, but it ultimately represents a crucial step in the process of reconciliation and political transition, offering insights applicable to other nations facing similar struggles.
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"Despite the length of time that has passed since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC) declared its duties done, it continues to have far-reaching consequences for the understanding and treatment of the issues of forgiveness, justice, memory, truth, and reconciliation within South Africa. This legacy, however, also extends beyond the South African context. Since other such Commissions have sprung up elsewhere in the world, it is imperative that the TRC, currently regarded as paradigmatic in the approach now taken for granted in dealing with post-conflict reconciliation, be thoroughly examined in order that its legacy may prove more positive and expansive. The three aims of my dissertation are: first, critically to examine the underlying assumptions of the TRC's employment and application of the concepts of truth and reconciliation. I assume no originality in engaging in such an examination, but where I do assume originality is in my employment of theorists from the early Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in dealing with both these concepts. Second, I consider the ways in which post-apartheid fictional literature has responded to the notions of truth and reconciliation, with particular focus on whether this response sanctions or challenges the TRC's assumptions. One of the observations I underscore is that there is a sense of challenge that arises out of the autonomy of literature as an artistic medium. Put in the form of a question: do the response of literature to the work of the Commission, and the Commission's engagement with the literary mode, help elucidate the concepts of truth and reconciliation both for the Commission itself and the larger South African community? Third, I examine how the narratives of truth and reconciliation as espoused by the Commission are driven primarily by a religious thrust; a thrust that the Commission uses to its advantage by pointing it back to the South African public as the public's own 'natural' discourse. Through the TRC, religion re-enters the public sphere as normative discourse, thus demanding serious engagement as it now forms part of the discursive narrative on the ethical and moral constitution of the nation."
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On 21 st March 2003, retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu officially ended the work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by handing over the body's final report to President Thabo Mbeki. This date, the anniversary of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, when South African police fired into a crowd of peaceful protesters, was a particularly resonant one for the TRC to conclude its seven-year-long investigation into human rights violations committed during the era of strict racial segregation known as apartheid. Established in a last-minute codicil to the interim constitution that was drafted as part of the multi-party negotiations preceding South Africa's first democratic election in 1994, the TRC heard the testimony of more than 21,000 victims of apartheid-era violence and their relatives in a series of emotionally charged public hearings. In addition to recording the harrowing words of these witnesses to atrocity, commissioners also examined amnesty applications from perpetrators of human rights violations, and sought, more broadly, to promote reconciliation between the races in the new, democratic South Africa. While other institutional innovations such as the final drafting of a new constitution may prove to have a more dramatic impact on South Africa's future, the TRC's hearings were among the most gripping public events of the post-apartheid era. 1 After decades in which a racist regime systematically silenced and brutalized them, victims of violence and their relatives appeared before the TRC in order to express their grief and rage. As a result of this process, the stories of ordinary people brutalized by apartheid were officially recognized and recorded by the new state. The TRC has, as a result, been widely perceived as drafting the first inclusive public history for a democratic South Africa. 2 Not surprisingly, the broad public dissemination of the TRC proceeding by television and film raise particularly thorny aesthetic and
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This article is dedicated to recounting the main initiative of Nelson Mandela's government to manage the social resentment inherited from the segregationist regime. I conducted interviews with South African intellectuals committed to the theme of transitional justice and with key personalities who played a critical role in this process. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is presented as the primary institutional mechanism envisioned for the delicate exercise of redefining social relations inherited from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Its founders declared grandiose political intentions to the detriment of localized more palpable objectives. Thus, there was a marked disparity between the ambitious mandate and the political discourse about the commission, and its actual achievements.
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South Africa: Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
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