Special Hearings — Armed Forces Hearings — 1997-10-07

CHAIRPERSON: Before you proceed, Comrade, I just want address myself to the remarks that have been made by Comrade Leklapa and I can only say what I stated earlier and I will do so very briefly this time.  I know of no person sitting on this panel who is utilising a process none of which is, all of which is not of anyone of us is making.  We found a process, we found an Act to which your political party contributed by being participant in Parliament in the discussion and making thereof.  We are the agents of bringing about the aims and the objectives of the Act.  We are not sitting in judgement and I want to emphasise that.  We are not trying you and I am not aware that there is an attempt to put on your defence in the sense of attributing crime to actions that were perpetrated in the course of struggle.
 You know, the TRC is a controversial place and institution and I cannot state it higher than that and I just want us, certainly in these proceedings, to be able to still go out of these proceedings and be able to say that session was tough, but it contributed to our understanding of the broader issues, which is why I take into account all the things that you have said about the TRC and about the cases that you are referring to and which is why, as Chairperson, I allowed you to go and discuss things which, possible, we will be able to discuss, in a better forum, much more fuller in the course of an amnesty application and I will hope that it will be possible for you to be able to, either in a supportive role or by yourself, to avail yourself for an amnesty hearing at which you will more specifically deal with the issues that I felt, in the interest of fairness and in the interest of enhancing our understanding of issues, you must be allowed to mention here, even though I felt this was neither the time nor the place, but I, again, need to emphasise that what I said earlier and that is we are not here sitting to deny or even to pass moral judgement or any judgement, for that matter, on the justness or otherwise of the war that was fought and we have heard other people, possibly, we will hear other people from the SADF who will just say the same thing as you are saying.  That they were justified in fighting what they considered to be terrorists and we will interrogate them.  You must be sure of that.
 We will be as tough and as penetrative in our questions to them as we are to you and on the question of whether or not we are putting on the same pedestal acts by a liberation movement like yourselves and acts by an apartheid security state apparatus, that is not that question that we are in this process, evaluating.  As I say, at the end of the day, we would all lose our credibility as Commissioners if we were ever to press you to take a position that says when you think it was so, your struggle was not just.  At the end of the day I think we all come with a knowledge of what the international community had said about apartheid being a crime against humanity.  I think that is common knowledge, but what we, as a Commission, have a task to evaluate is whether what I call a minimum threshold of moral accountability is able to be demonstrated, at the end of the day, by you and by anyone who comes before us.  
 At the end of day, I think it should be apparent, if it will be apparent, that you are able to say now, if you are able to, yes, there was a war, yes, it was unjust, yes, from our perspective, it was a just war, yes, people died, yes, people were killed and then, we fought a war in the best way we knew how, but now, through this process, I would hope you would be able to say so.  We are able to say, as a leadership we are accountable for each and every action that was taken by our operatives, we cannot apologise for that.  That much has come very clearly in the speech by Brigadier Mofokeng and, lastly, I would hope that we should not be uneasy in these proceedings by having to have these interludes.  
 There is no worst way of trying to explain yourself than if you are trying to defend your integrity.  I only hope you are able to accept that all of us here are men and women of integrity, as the minimum, and that the rest should be for prosperity to judge in as much as you are saying prosperity will judge the cause that the liberation struggle has waged by the PAC and Apla, will become apparent in the course of time.  So, I would hope that after you have said the things that you have said, we have now cleared the air for us to be able to carry on these proceedings without it being TRC versus Apla, PAC contest even if it is so in your own perceptions, that we are on a witch hunt.  The best we can do, sitting as we are here, is to say we are not.