Human Rights Violation Hearings — Welkom — 1996-10-10

WITNESS:   I am asking to make the suggestion that my elder brother, after he died, after five weeks of his death we were able to bury him in Senegal.  What we are asking is that - we are asking that the Commission should make investigations about Enoch(?), even if it was difficult, that the standard, the money, the budget for his funeral was R25 000,00, and because all the relatives contributed we were able to pay that R25 000,00.  We had to make even loans from the bank.  We were able to bury him like a soldier at Senegal.

PROF MAGWAZA: Thank you very much.  We appreciate that.  Thank you.

PROF MAGWAZA: /COMMISSIONER

COMMISSIONER: Fellow citizens, we have come to the end of the hearings which took place during these three days, and we have seen that in these hearings mothers and their children, especially the sons, were very much involved.  This story reminds me of the story which happened almost 2 000 years ago, the story of a man of Nazareth whose name was called Jesus.  The people during that time found themselves in a very similar situation, when some of the people from the community had colluded with the oppressors of the time and were killing their own people.  As a result one of the victims was this man Jesus himself.  I am reminded of his words, that when the women were crying for him as a young man, thirty three years old - they were crying for him.  They were seeing this young man, as these young men we have heard about here, they cried for him because he was the hope of his parents and the hope of the nation.  And this man Jesus said that, "Women of Jerusalem, don't cry for me, but cry for your children."  So I am not surprised when I see the mothers crying for their children who have died, nipped from the bud when they are young.  Their blood has become the seed of our liberation.  Maybe this must be saying something to our Government, because the youth died for this liberation, and it is very depressing when you see young people all over in the townships without any jobs, and some of them are saying that, "What did we fight for?  We fought so hard.  Some of us died, and we have no jobs."  I would hope that in future certain opportunities will be opened to facilitate the young people with expertise so that they can enjoy the liberation they fought for.  We want to thank them for the sacrifice they made.  We want to thank their parents for having given birth to these great soldiers, who were very courageous to stand firm and die for their liberation.
Now, having said so, I need now to thank all the people who have participated in these hearings in different ways.  We had some of the Government officials who came here, though they were very busy.  We had some of the non-Governmental organisations, NGOs, who came here and supported these hearings.  The churches and other faith groups who have been here.  The media, that is to say TV and the press.  I always calls those are the missionaries who spread the good news, so that what the President wants to achieve, maybe achieve.  The media is a strong agent for this, so that even those people who cannot afford to be here, when they read the papers, they see the TV, they can become involved in these hearings.  We thank them very much for this.  We want to thank the police for the security.  Our police, these are our police, because they are the police of a new Government.  We want to thank them for all what they have done here to help us in whatever we wanted to do - security, etcetera.
We want to thank the witnesses who have become bold, and were courageous to come forward, supported by their families and their relatives, and the support from the communities who came here to be with them.  We want to register our thanks to those people.  We want to thank the translators, who have used their skills of knowing even those languages some of us don't know, that they could translate for us, so that if they speak Sotho we can understand, if they speak English we can understand, if they speak Afrikaans we can understand.  We want to thank  you good people there.  I know that you have been suffocated there, because it is so hot where you are, but you could stand for it for three days.  
We want to thank the caterers who have been providing us with the eats, and they have been very good indeed, and they have been very friendly. There is nothing good when you see a person giving you food with a smiling face.  We want to register our thanks to them indeed.  
We want to thank the support groups, the psychologists who have been here, and social workers and other counsellors, who have been helping our people after they have given their testimony.  We thank them very much.
And finally we want to thank the TRC staff in their different categories, who have made it possible - starting from those in this region, preparing for these hearings, and those who joined them later to see that these hearings were a success.  We want to thank you very much.
And we hope that when you leave again you will leave those things, because they will mean nothing for you even if you take them, but we need them because we are still going to have many hearings.  I hope you are going to encourage the people where you come from to please come forward, those who were tortured and had relatives killed, to come forward and tell their stories.  We will still come back to the Free State.  The TRC finishes at the end of next year.  We are encouraging people to come forward and tell their stories.
In closing this I think it will be very relevant for us to sing that great prayer, the prayer of our fathers and our grandfathers and our forebears, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, and then after that we shall disperse in peace.   
/TRANSCRIBER'S