History For The Future

It is 20 years since the South African Truth and Reconciliation held its first hearing into the gross violation of human rights under apartheid. The TRC was brought into being by an Act of Parliament in 1995, and was an essential component in the transition to democracy. It positioned itself between two extremes: the prosecutorial path of retributive justice evidenced in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders on the one hand; and the blanket amnesties handed out in the wake of the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet on the other. There, victims of gross human rights violations testified in secret. In South Africa, on the other hand, all the hearings, both for victims of apartheid and of perpetrators, were in public. The names of victims of apartheid are recorded in one volume of the TRC report. It is a list that goes on for 50 pages in small print. More than 21,000 people gave statements to the TRC. Nearly 7,000 applied for amnesty but few met the strict conditions laid down by the law: full disclosure,