Special Hearings — Trojan Horse Hearings — 1997-05-20

CHAIRPERSON: We have come to the end of our first day of hearings and we just wish to thank everyone who had been here, but in particular I wish to thank the families of victims and some of the victims who were shot in the process of the Trojan Horse killing and the St Athens Mosque killing.
 You know we often say when we make our comments to witnesses who come appear, we often thank them for their
bravery and for being strong and for having stuck up, you know, their bravery and yet when you come to talk about your stories, there is no evidence of bravery.  The truth is you were afraid, you were struck by fear, you were suffering, you were in pain, but this is the way that people perceive you.
 People who are using their own language to understand how you went through it.  In a way, it is a way in which we also avoid confronting the pain that you went through.  We say you were brave and thank you, you know, but the reality is that it had nothing much to do with bravery, it had a lot to do with fear and many of you do relive that fear when you come up on stage here.
 I think that any trauma, trauma in general is very difficult to talk about trauma and there are two possible ways of dealing with trauma.  The one way is to remove it totally from consciousness and the other way is to express trauma.
 When we remove it from consciousness we deny it, we deny that it is there and when we talk about it, we want to talk about it because we want to relieve ourselves of the tension that it arises within ourselves.
 I think that is all the kinds of stories that we have heard today and in other hearings of the Truth Commission, including those of the amnesty hearings.  It is very difficult to imagine they have the most gruesome stories, they are very hard to talk about and this is what is meant by the term unspeakable, they are just purely unspeakable.
 But the ghost of atrocities cannot rest until they are resuscitated.  The telling of stories of atrocities is crucial if you want to heal individual wounds and if you
want to restore our society to some kind of normality.  Psychological trauma by definition carries with it that tension between a commitment to deny that atrocities did take place and a need to pronounce them.  Individual victims and survivors of atrocities may deny because they find it difficult to deal with the pain and the memory of it.
 Now certain sectors in society deny because acknowledging that these atrocities did take place, threatens their own humanity, so they deny and claim that remembering is opening wounds.  But whose wounds are they more worried about, wounding their sense of humanity or the wounds of victims after they suffered in silence all these years?
 At the heart of the Truth Commission hearings is our commitment to listen to testimonies of victims and confessions by perpetrators.  We will listen to victims because we want to allow them the opportunity to talk about their pain.  It is not for us or the public or the society to say that this is opening wounds if victims want to talk about their wounds.
 There is a stigma attached to it of course, victims attracts a certain stigma because people blame them or accuse them of crying at the Commission.  Or accuse them of not being consistent and all of that, now part of that is because anything told emotionally does present itself as being somewhat fragmented.  This is expected of anything that is remembered, any painful experience that is remembered. 
 Now, we opened this occasion to victims and survivors to break the silence and along with this breaking of silence comes a lot of pain and it is difficult for us, for every
one I think, almost impossible to be neutral about pain.  I think you could either be silent about pain, pretend that it is not there or you could have your own pain, memory of your own pain re-awakened.
 Now I think Toya Abrahams, it was Toya Abrahams that said that he used drugs to try and deny that this pain is there, to try and deal with the memory of this pain and thus to maintain the denial.
 And Chris Everson mentioned that after covering these stories, they would go to a restaurant to try and erase it from memory, but the Commission is not a place to anaesthetize the pain.  On the contrary it is the place where memories of pain meets.  Where the dialogue between memories should be encouraged.
 It is an important way of understanding what people had to go through.  Mr Williams expressed in this words:  Pain is like a bike without wheels.  There are silences around Mrs Friddy's house when questions about her husband are raised by her daughter.
 Now through this process in the Commission we hope that we can put the wheels back on the bike and we hope that we could also rupture the silence in Mrs Friddy's house.  And we do this by allowing families of victims to come to experience some form of justice. 
 The problem with the notion of justice is that it is also defined in court terms as criminal justice.  And yet we have seen many times in the Commission that people who come to the Commission feel a sense of validation, they feel a sense of affirmation.
 Many people say this is happening, they talk about their pain for the first time.  Some people today spoke
about how they felt isolated in their community.  On the one hand they had the police who were descending upon their children and on the other hand they had to deal with their individual pain in relation with what was going on with their children.
 And the helplessness that comes with it, so there was a sense of isolation but coming to a public hearing allows them a sense of validation, a sense of feeling validated and feeling affirmed.
 So the process in a way does provide a certain kind of justice for them, and that is important.  And I think that it is important to remember especially when people have gone through several inquest, several years of inquest, trying to find out what actually happened in the matters that took the lives of their loved ones.
 This is not the first time we are hearing the story about an unsuccessful enquiry.  In this case the inquest found that the police were negligent but when the families pursued the matter, the Attorney General declined to prosecute.  Now that is what happened in this country.  That is the sense of justice that went on in the courts in this country.
 Many victims have come to our hearings have gone to inquests and never even been represented, inquests would go on and the messenger of the court would come out and tell them that no one was found responsible.  When they didn't even participate in the processes of justice.  So it raises a big question about the history of that kind of justice.
 However, the Commission provides a different kind of justice.  Perhaps a reparative kind of justice.  It is a very difficult process and it is a very difficult idea to
understand for many people who lost families but it is a very different process from the one that pertained in the years of apartheid.  And I think we will remember for many years, I mean from the 1960's when President Mandela himself had requested a Magistrate to recuse himself because he suspected that the Magistrate was not being fair and the Magistrate told him well there is only one court and that is a White man's court, this is documented, it happened then and one wonders if in fact, perhaps there was a degree of empathy from the point of view of the Magistrate or the point of view of those people who held justice in their hands.
 If there was a degree of empathy if our history today would be different.  I don't think that there is a contradiction between empathy and judgement.  The challenge is to continuously dialogue the empathic understanding and the intellectual demands so I think ... (tape ends)