Human Rights Violation Hearings — Middelburg — 1997-06-04

CHAIRPERSON: Mrs Liberty, thank you very much.  I, in reading through the documents, also read through the funeral programme, the obituary.
 Were the pain that people appearing before us experienced - sometimes I get the impression that people are able to accept and live with it.  Other times it's clearly impossible to work through it.  
 Not having experienced similar pain, I don't know how I will handle it.  And I think one never knows, until it happens.  But again, referring to the obituary and the funeral programme, to the extend that, as a believer of one's beliefs in immortality, or to the extend that one may not believe in immortality, the memory of an individual is at least some resemblance of immortality.
 And I think that is saying it to you, in terms of his activities through his lifetime.  And I think to all of us.  He will certainly be remembered and to that extend always be present.
 Thank you for having come to us.  Thank you for having shared with us.  We'll see to what extend we can follow up.  You will appreciate that as difficult as it was for you, it will be almost as difficult for us.
 But whatever we can do, we will try to do and we will in due course report to you.  Thanks again for having come to us.
Ladies and gentlemen, just before I ask Mrs Sooka to extend a few thanks to various people here, may I just explain a little? 
 I think it's important that when we receive the statements, we select some of them for public hearing on the basis of their being representative.  We try to do preliminary investigative work to see what more information we can gather.  
 We take all the information from the statement, we analyze it, we process it and we put it in electronic medium onto computers where we can take it off from again.  All our statements we've treated in exactly the same way.
 We, in the end, through a long process where we also corroborate the information, because we don't simply accept anything that comes before us.  We establish the voracity, at least on the balance of probabilities and then we make our decisions in the Human Rights Violations Committee as to whether a Human Rights Violation did take place or not.
 If such a violation did take place, then clearly we also take it further to establish which persons, individuals, would have been victims, in our opinion, of the violation.
 Those names then are sent forward to the Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee for them to deal with.  But before we take it there and before we get to any final decision;   wherever any perpetrator was implicated in the statement that we received, we send a notice to those perpetrators, if a finding could reflect negatively on them, so that they also have an opportunity to add to our information base, to disclaim or to put us their side of the story to the extend if they are implicated.
 But our focus remains on the victims.  And the whole process, also of the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee, is a process that focuses on victims.  We do not administer any reparation.  We only peruse all the information.
 That's really the Committee of which Prof Meiring is also a member, representing them here at this hearing today.  And they look at each individual case.  Then they establish a policy and criteria which the whole Commission has to adopt and we are presently working on this.  We've already done an enormous lot of work on this.  
 Eventually our recommendations go to the State President through Parliament, through Select Committee processes and whatever our recommendations and criteria are, they need to accept or reject, or amend.
 Eventually Government and Parliament accepts the responsibility and they deal with the programme of Reparations.
 The other side of the activity comes through the process of ... (end of tape)
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