Archbishop Tutu chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
South Africa should have prosecuted the perpetrators of apartheid-era atrocities who did not seek amnesty, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said.
The archbishop was interviewed on South African radio to mark the 10th anniversary of the foundation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The TRC, chaired by Archbishop Tutu, was set up to probe human rights violations under apartheid.
Perpetrators had the opportunity to ask for amnesty in return for confessing.
"We have probably not done as well in regard to... those who thumbed their noses at the truth commission," the archibishop said.
"We probably should have done what the legislation requires and really prosecuted people," he told SABC radio.
Out of 7,112 perpetrators who applied, 849 were granted amnesty.
Compensation
He also said victims did not receive adequate compensation, particularly since those who testified before the TRC surrendered their right to seek damages in court.
"I think that we as a nation have been less than generous in the money reparations that we have offered to the victims," Archbishop Tutu said.
The government did not begin paying compensation to victims until December 2003, more than five years after the TRC had presented its findings.
A fund of 660m rand ($100m) was set aside to make one-off payments of 30,000 rand to 22,000 victims - considerably less than the 3bn rand fund recommended by the TRC.
Bishop Tutu’s position was repudiated by Patrick Lawrence, quoting John Daniel, in the Johannesburg Star for Tuesday January 3rd.
Patrick Lawrence, the editor of Focus, the journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation, quotes John Daniel, of the Human Science Research Council, and a former TRC research official, as saying that it is now too late to pursued this plan. Two reasons are given:
- The evidence and witnesses required for a successful prosecution are probably no longer available.
- The political costs of disrupting the de facto amnesty since the TRC’s 1998 would be too high.
On the other hand, it is possible to make a strong moral case for prosecuting known offenders who did not seek amnesty from the TRC on the grounds that forgiveness (at least as Christians understand it), always requires a clear recognition of guilt and a purpose of amendment as well as repentance in a more general sense.
Certainly the moral tone of South Africa today would have been much strengthened by the conviction of ‘unrepentant’ offenders against human rights from all parties, ANC as well as former Nationalists, members of the IFP etc. Only in this way would it have been possible to ensure that the new beginning and the move to a ‘rainbow nation’ were not sullied by the presence of a large body of people ‘in denial’ about what had actually been happening.
What do you think?
For a fuller discussion of the Christian understanding of repentance, see www.theologon.org.uk, ‘a God of new beginnings’.
