During the second day of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings to investigate crimes committed during apartheid in 1996, Desmond Tutu put his head in his hands and began to cry.
In front of him was Singqokwana Ernest Malgas, in a wheelchair, a former political prisoner of the famous Robben Island prison.
Before the commission presided over by Archbishop Tutu, he reported the torture he suffered at the hands of the police: he was hanged by his feet, with his head in a bag, with his body suspended.
For the first and only time in his long public career, Tutu collapsed in front of the cameras.
“It wasn’t fair,” he said later. “The media focused on me rather than the legitimate issues.”
Between 1996 and 1998, the commission’s sessions shook the entire country.
Every Sunday, South Africans watched weekly highlights on television, which were sometimes hard to bear. Many viewers discovered the horror and brutality of the white racist regime, which ended Nelson Mandela’s presidential election in 1994.
For two years, black militants, regime security officials, torturers, victims and relatives of disappeared spoke to the Commission.
– “Healing balm” –
“President” Tutu later wrote in his voluminous seven-volume report that he wanted to make the Commission a “space where victims could share the story of their trauma with the country.”
The idea of the TRC itself was revolutionary. Executioners and leaders who so wished could confess their crimes in exchange for an amnesty. But with one condition: Tutu insisted that reconciliation and forgiveness would only be given when there was full disclosure of the facts.
Unlike the Nazi regime’s trials, the apartheid ones were not intended “to judge the morality of the acts committed, but to be like an incubation chamber for national healing, reconciliation and forgiveness,” explained Desmond Tutu.
It was a bitter medicine for many bystanders and victims. But Tutu rejected that justice was “by nature revenge and punishment”. He defended “a justice that is not so concerned with punishing, but with correcting imbalances and restoring broken relationships.”
“Whatever the painful experience, the wounds of the past must not become infected,” he insisted. “They must be open. Clean. You have to give them balm to heal.”
However, his vision was not shared by everyone. “Some thought the amnesty was cheap,” said one of the TRC commissioners, Dumisa Ntsebeza, who is close to Tutu. “Why cheap? Just because no one was going to prison,” this lawyer explained to AFP in 2015.
– “Tragic failure” –
But his view that the country would do better with the Commission’s collective psychoanalysis sessions had its limits. After Tutu published his report, the government barely followed through on his recommendations.
Officers or officers who did not participate in the Commission were not brought to justice.
The authorities never pressed for a proposal for a tax on the rich, a way to reduce the abysmal inequalities created by apartheid that 30 years later continue to undermine South African society.
Desmond Tutu was not lacking in disapproval. “How we manage the truth, once told, defines the success of the process. There we had a tragic failure”, he confessed sadly in 2014. However, his collaborators are less strict with the work of the Commission.
“It’s unfinished,” acknowledged Dumisa Ntsebeza. “But I wonder if we could imagine South Africa without him,” he concluded.
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