Human Rights Violation Hearings — Ladybrand — 1997-06-26

CHAIRPERSON: We've come to the end of the public hearings in Ladybrand, and at the end of this hearing we have also come to the end of a very unique experiment in South Africa's history.  We've also reached a very significant point in the history of the Truth Commission.  This is the last hearing for victims that will ever be held in this country, and it brings to a close one of the most far-reaching steps that this new Government has ever taken to acknowledge the loss, the pain, the suffering of thousands of victims of this country's political past.   And that is the first and one of the most important jobs of this Commission, is to provide victims, like the ones we see here today - to provide them with a public forum at which they can tell their stories, and at which they can be publicly acknowledged in order to help them restore their civil and human dignity, to help them to come to accept the loss of their loved ones, and to help them to move on with their lives.
But there's also another very important purpose of hearings such as this one today, and that is to assist us, the Commission, with our very vital work, which is to establish as complete a picture as possible of the causes and the nature of the human rights violations, the gross human rights violations, which took place in this country over the last 34 years.  
But just for a minute let's forget what the purpose of the hearings have been and let's focus on the sort of testimony and evidence that we have heard over the last 14 or 15 months since we started holding hearings.  Over these past months we have been taken by victims like yourselves today - we have been taken into what I can only describe as the very heart of darkness, into the most cruel and lonely corners of the human temperament.  We remember the testimony of people like Port Shepstone in KwaZulu-Natal, a man who worked as a cook on a ship, who came back from many months out at sea, back on home leave, to find that his wife and two children had been murdered, had been hacked to death and their bodies had been thrown into a pit toilet.  We think of witnesses that we heard in Brandville in Mooi River, where three women from one family, a grandmother, a mother and a young child of six years old, were brutally stabbed to death by men with spears and bush knives.  
We have heard terrible stories of assault, abduction, torture and death from every corner of this country, but we've also heard stories about the strength and the triumph of the human spirit over adversity ... (inaudible - end of Side B, Tape 3, beginning of Side A, Tape 5) ... shocking experiences, and we've heard them stand up confidently and powerfully relate those stories of their past.  And we've heard these people ask the Commission not just to recognise them, and what happened to them, but also to recognise and to remember the thousands of other people who also suffered who have not been able to gain access to the Commission.  And we've seen people who have suffered these terrible violations of their rights, we have seen them caring and nurturing for other people and helping them to gain access to this Commission.  We have been very, very moved by the actions of people like that, and we want to acknowledge them and to say that without them this Commission could not have done its work properly. Now, the obvious thing about victims' hearings like this is that it tends to focus on the evidence of the individuals, it focuses on their pain, their loss, their suffering.  It focuses on the events of that particular day, but often it doesn't tell us much about the big picture, it doesn't give us an overall understanding of what happened in this town, in this country, in this province.  It doesn't tell us who gave the orders for that incident, who supplied the guns, who helped cover up the investigations, who secretly buried the bodies.  
And the Truth Commission has other means, other forums, for finding out that sort of evidence.  We have an investigation unit, we have private investigative inquiries, where we subpoena people and we cross-examine them and ask them questions about what they did, why they did it, on whose behalf they did it.  And we also have the dramatic - often dramatic evidence of the amnesty applicants themselves, perpetrators who come to this Commission and tell us what they did and why the did it, and on whose orders or instructions they were acting at the time.  We have been taken by perpetrators themselves, amnesty applicants such as Security Branch policemen - we've been taken by them to grave sites, and they have pointed out to us where they have shot and killed people and buried them.  And this sort of evidence is vitally important for the Commission, because it doesn't just tell us about the disappearing or the murder of one person, it tells us what the motives of the State were at the time, and why these things were done.  And this Commission is in possession of applications from amnesty from perpetrators which contain very far-reaching and even shocking details about this country's history, and those applications will be made public in due course.
So, in this way, with evidence like we've heard today, and at other victims' hearings, and evidence from amnesty applications, we are able to slowly piece together like a jigsaw puzzle the history of this country.
I am going to give my colleague, Mr Lax, an opportunity to make a few observations on the victims' hearing that we've both attended, and then I will make some concluding remarks about Ladybrand.