Special Hearings — Business Hearings — 1997-11-11

CHAIRPERSON: Let me try and be a little more cultured. Morning, Goeie More, Molueni, Dumela.  It does make me feel like we are in church because most of the congregation is sitting at the back.  Quite marvellous really, you don't actually think that you would like to move a little forward? Just in case that there might actually be more people coming it would actually be easier if we then filled.  I wish all my congregations behaved in like you, I mean
 Can we just observe a moments silence please.  
 Thank you for - I welcome you most warmly to this special hearing on the business sector.   
 I want to first of all to express appreciation to all of you who have sent in submissions and those who have accepted our invitation to make verbal presentation either in their own personal capacities or speaking on behalf of one or other of the various organisations that we have contacted or any of those who have contacted us.  I also want to say how deeply grateful I am for the hard work of Dr Fazel Randera who is on my left who has had special responsibility for organising this particular hearing and also to my other colleagues and the TRC staff.  We have received what we would consider an avalanche of submissions.  I think 55 in all of different qualities and size and we've had some also coming from overseas.  Certainly there are some glaring absences of those making submissions amongst organisations we have none representing white workers, none from the agricultural unions, and most glaring and blatant, the absence of any submissions from the oil industry, Shell, BP, Mobil, know that they were the targets of the Anti Apartheid Sanctions Movement and it is a huge gap in our deliberations and records to have nothing from that particular sector.  Many would say that they were the most obvious supports of the apartheid dispensation, willingly or unwillingly and it would have helped us considerably to get as complete a picture as possible of the period under review.  We have received a written submission from Armscor and I will refrain at the present time from the remarks that I have put down which were that if they do not come to make a verbal intervention we are not yet clear what is going to be taking place there.  It does seem as if they may in fact be coming, so my remarks in regard to them will pend until their position is clear.  The Carlton is an appropriate and hugely symbolic venue.  Governments know the critical importance of business for the success or failure of a nation in the implementation of their own particular policies and so it was not surprising that Mr P W Botha should have sought to woo business in 1981 and in 1990 the Consultative Business Movement organised the get together between business and the ANC.  So it is highly symbolic that we should be meeting here to consider the role of business in the whole matter of gross violations of human rights which the Commission is meant to be investigating.  How even if they did not specifically research violations they might have helped to create or to sustain a climate where such violations could happen or alternatively what it might have been that they did to make clear their position as being opposed to what the five judges who made a submission to us said supporting a system which they described as in and of itself a gross violation of human rights.  You will know that a few weeks ago the new Blue Train was inaugurated and one of the people on that train was saying that he said to his child, we are going on a very important train from Pretoria to Cape Town and the child piped up, is that the gravy train Dad?
 But it did have its advantages in that on that trip from Pretoria to Cape Town I was able to have chats with business moguls and in a non-threatening atmosphere and it was I think useful for those of us who were able to chat together to make clear to some extent what we were hoping we would achieve by the hearings that are taking place over these two-three days.  No one today admits to having supported apartheid.  What we know is that business operated in a milieu, not obviously of their creation where they gained profits as a result of government policies.  Cheap labour, the migratory labour system, the system of single sex hostels, the iniquitous pass laws and the severe influx measures that impacted negatively on black family life.  The operation of job reservation and the colour bar.  I know that some of those in the business sector tested against such unjust laws but many acqueiesd at best or positively co-operated.  
       Now we've come together, not in order to pillory anybody.  We have not come in order to ridicule anyone and in a sense we haven't even come to put in the dock.  We want to hear your story.  We are not so naive not to be aware that governments are powerful and often room to manoeuvre by business is restricted.  You know that wonderful story Jesus tells of the publican and the Pharisee.  The publican is vindicated, because all he says is I have sinned, I am a sinner. I acknowledge who I am rather than engaging in the self justification which the Pharisee indulged in.  The world would and we would, the country would welcome such critical self scrutiny and we give thanks for some of this in some of the submissions and one wants just to refer to that from the Handelsinstituut because you see when you ask to be forgiven within the Christian dispensation, then the other, the wronged is under obligation to forgive. And what is this business of forgiveness?  That is the acknowledgement that wrong was done and expression of contrition, sometimes they say remorse, the sorrow for the wrong done which triggers off the confession and then there is the forgiveness.  But the process is not complete because there is the matter of restitution, of seeking to repair the wrong that accrues from whatever was done for which the person is contrite, and I myself have suggested to some of the business leaders that there are things like seeking to engage in training of those who have for so long been excluded from the possibilities of acquiring skills to enable them to engage in the business of, the competitive business of participation and that there ought to be, one hopes, real participation from people who in the past were excluded from the decision-making processes in business and obviously one is not talking about a tokenism here.  And a genuine desire to advance people who have been held back, not because they didn't have gifts that would have enabled them if those gifts had been allowed to flourish and blossom to have those gifts develop and  become skilled people and one wants to be able to see the business sector being more representative of the demography of the land and that there is a crucial role that you can and I hope will want to play in the process of reconciliation and some of you know are already participating in that, assisting deprived communities in all sorts of ways, building clinics, schools and we value all of that as contributing to the healing of our land.  But I also am certain that we would have an incredible dramatic effect if in the course of these hearings representatives of the business giants were able to say we want to make substantial contributions to the President's Fund from which reparations, the recommendation of this Commission are going to be made who those whom the Commission designates victims, it will be wonderful to have someone here say we did this, we did that, we want to participate and we want to say here is something that will assist in pouring oil on wounds.  Here is 10 million for the President's Fund.  None of us could ever claim that money would ever be able to restore to people, loved ones but it will go a very very long way to saying that we have people who can afford it, say we want to be part of the feeling of this beautiful land whose future is clearly one that God wants to see being a scintillating one.