Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

UNKNOWN: Thank you, Chair.  Chair, members of the panel, after having listened to some of the evidence during this session of your Commission, I realised that with your permission, Chair, I need to clarify and qualify certain aspects.	Firstly, I have to state that I appear today at this session of the TRC out of my own free will.  This was a very conscious decision that I have taken. I have earlier made a written submission to the TRC, which I believe you have a copy, and I was invited to attend today at this hearing, to make a verbal submission.	Secondly, Chair, the printed agenda for today might give the impression that I will be speaking on behalf of the Afrikaans mainstream Press. This is not the case.  I appear in my personal capacity as a former full-time and part-time journalist in the Afrikaans Press and as a university media lecturer and media researcher.	My submission relates to the Afrikaans media from the 1960's to round about the 1980's. This is reflected in my submission to your Commission of the full original text of an article published earlier this year, in a shortened version in Beeld, as well as a longer version in Die Volksblad. My submission, should, therefore, be seen as pertaining to the time-frame mentioned above.		However, the present media situation, like other societal systems in the post-apartheid democratic South Africa of the 1990's, pose a number of issues, which necessitate serious and critical analysis and discourse.	This can be gleaned from research papers and publications on the South African media in the 1990's, that I and other research colleagues have made public over the last few years, and which I hope to continue with. But, as I have stated, Chair, today's submission deals with apartheid and the Afrikaans media, as I have mentioned. I will make my basic statement in Afrikaans, whereafter I will highlight some issues from the article submitted to you and mentioned above.	With your permission, Chair, I will be using Afrikaans, mainly for two reasons.  As Breyten Breytenbach eloquently stated "Afrikaans is the term of my soul; Afrikaans is die tong van my siel".	Secondly, Afrikaans has been derided as a language of the oppressor and the oppression.  However, I believe Afrikaans is also the language of freedom and reconciliation.  I will now follow with the Afrikaans section.	As this concerns my work as a student lecturer and media research person, and it also relates to my experience and personal view of the Christian faith and South African reality.  This submission must be seen against the background which the role of Afrikaans-medium media, teaching and media research had played in respect to the policy advancement and application or not of apartheid.  	As a point of departure I would like to state the following.  Few things have had such a radical effect in my life and my awareness, as the revelations before your Commission of the atrocities of Vlakplaas.  As the sickening story developed on TV, it increasingly disgusted me.  This and the other disconcerting and upsetting information which came to the fore in the last years of apartheid, increasingly made me aware of the certainty that I myself and fellow Christians and Christian Afrikaners, particularly, had failed miserably in giving effect to the most basic principle of Christianity, namely to love our neighbours as we love ourselves.	It is my firm conviction that I myself and millions of other fellow Afrikaner Christians, could not be held directly and primarily and personally responsible for complicity in the gross violations of human rights as committed by Vlakplaas murderers.	However, I am equally aware and convinced that I and my fellow Afrikaners, are individually and collectively responsible for that which was committed under the ideological cover of apartheid against our neighbours in the Christian sense.	There are many pseudo-legalistic and particularly sarcastically spiteful arguments in the Afrikaans media and elsewhere, why people or institutions should not appear before the TRC.  These are almost as cynically brutal as the friendly open faces of the people who testified in the Vlakplaas and Hani cases as the perpetrators of these deeds, where they chose their words with great circumspection to condone the deeds before the TV and the public.	I have many perceptual problems myself regarding the nature and functioning of the TRC. It was again emphasised in a main article of the Star, but one fact cannot be denied, and that is that the TRC despite possible, shortcomings, is a very important national forum in a decisive phase in the history of our country, for individuals and institutions such as the Afrikaans language Press, to come and defend themselves regarding apartheid and their actions, and their consciences, in particular. This applies to all the people operating in the media.	Against this background I wish to address a request to the TRC and to everybody who might be interested, to state the following in the greatest humility.  That I unconditionally accept that apartheid is a sin against God and humanity. That particularly in my media work as well as in my media lecturing and research, but also in other circles of life, under certain circumstances, had effectively kept quiet about apartheid when I should have protested more volubly.  That through my inaction in my media work and media lecturing and research, as well as through some of my actions in other circumstances,  I wittingly but also unwittingly was co-responsible for and allowed the shadow of apartheid to be cast over the country and its people.	For the above I accept unconditional responsibility, admit to my guilt and request in all humility the understanding and forgiveness of my fellow countrymen. It is also in this spirit that I stated similar points of view during the first meeting of the 1993/1996 SABC Council and upon the occasion of the founding meeting of the SA National Editors Forum. This is also the intent of the proposal which I submitted to the Senate of my colleagues, with my colleagues, at the Senate of the Potch University and which I also expressed within the context of the Reformed Church of which I was a member.  That is then the official portion of my submission.	I again thank you for the opportunity to be present here today and to express these thoughts.	Now I would like to refer in brief, with your permission, and add a few things to the article which appeared in Beeld and Volksblad and which I had submitted as part of my submission to you.	Many Afrikaans media people had a material question, including researchers and lecturers, whether people should or should not appear before this Commission. The one point of view which is maintained in the Afrikaans Press, is that everything that could be said about this matter had already been said in the Afrikaans language Press, and that adequate writing had taken place on this matter.  This is a question which everybody has to reply to for himself.	But I am not convinced that everything which the Afrikaner Press did during the apartheid years, collectively or individually, had been adequately answered.	However, it is a question which I understand is not an easy one to answer. One of the factors which cannot be replied to adequately, is the role of the Commission itself. It would be far-fetched in my opinion to regard responsible Afrikaans editors and journalists in the same vein as the Vlakplaas perpetrators, or to negate the role which the Afrikaans-language papers played in the political process of reform.  But should one keep mum about all of this, it would also twist around the facts of history, if, at this stage, we simply without any further incisive discussion, deny the role of the Afrikaans Press and particularly, during the early years of apartheid.	One cannot wipe clean the historical slate when papers in particular, during the Eighties and Nineties helped erase the vestiges of apartheid, and because from another context, a lot had been published and said about the Afrikaans Press.  Some Afrikaans Press circles have stated very clearly that there were no plots in the Afrikaans language Press to cover misdeeds which had been committed or violations which had been committed or to just hide these or cover them, but the point is that the whole of the Afrikaans Press played a very important role during 1948 to 1980, in implementing apartheid.	Then one doesn't even refer to the second decade in the Afrikaans Press support effort of segregation and the thoughts that were central to segregation.	Every right-thinking Afrikaans journalist or media student cannot mention the apartheid matters of the previous decades without going against the grain of truth and fairness, if one tries to justify all of this. However, the question which may be asked in this discussion today, is very pertinently, is whether the Afrikaans newspapers in the apartheid era, did give proper reporting on these wrongful deeds and fallacies of the past, or whether they had kept quiet too much.		So this rather concerns the matters of deeds of omission than deeds of commission. If this is the case that people had been keeping too quiet about this over the years, the question stemming from it, is whether to a greater or lesser extent, we have not misled the South African public and gave the progression of South African history a negative foundation.	To support this point of view I would like to refer very briefly to some examples, in the submission to you. If one looks at the collective issue; whether the Afrikaner Press collectively had been keeping mum for too long about that, it is a fact in the heyday of apartheid years, at least three Afrikaans papers existed which were official mouthpieces of the NP, that many people of the NP were involved in the Press groups in leading positions and exercised their effect very carefully, and they criticised many people for points of view which are now commonly accepted by the Afrikaans Press as facts of life.		One could also just ask the following types of question.  How openly timeously and enthusiastically did the Afrikaans Press comment on, for example, the accumulation of apartheid legislation such as the bizarre of refusing a Japanese jockey a visa or the purposeful implementation of the Group Areas Act. How effective was the Afrikaans Press in adding to facts which were uncovered, for example, by the Rand Daily Mail, in the prison scandal, the information scandal, the death of Steve Biko, et cetera.	Another question which could also be asked, is how a small alternative Afrikaans newspaper such as Vrye Weekblad, which was mocked and scorned by part of the establishment of Afrikaans Press, was able to report with limited resources, about the horrendous activities of Dirk Coetzee and Third Force activities in black townships, whereas in most of the Afrikaans Press, there was a deafening silence in this regard.	I have to finish off. It is not just broad collective media policy which is involved.  As in all other human dramas, such as Vietnam, Bosnia and Northern Ireland, et cetera, it is the individualised cases which more often is impressed more prominently on one's conscience and with which one is more prominently aware.  	A few examples.  As a young Afrikaans journalist I was responsible for covering a motorcar accident where a young black child had been knocked down by the car. I tried to have her admitted to the Ontdekkers Hospital, which is just down the road, but it was practically impossible because an ambulance from this hospital was not prepared to come out and we had to wait for an ambulance for blacks, from a black hospital, to come and take her to that hospital, whereas she was bleeding to death a 100 metres from the Ontdekkers Hospital.	In a similar manner in the old Western Transvaal, I saw how people were chucked onto lorries, after the houses had been flattened and their possessions had been taken away.  This was covered by the English Press, whereas the Afrikaans Press judged that it was not newsworthy.	In a similar way, many other people can testify and probably have clearer and more illustrative examples which appeared in the English Press and not in the Afrikaans Press during the heyday of the apartheid years.	But any Afrikaans Press person who worked or is still working in the Press, should at least - it is not important that everybody should come to the Commission and it is also  not necessary for everybody to deny what happened, but we cannot violate history by pretending Afrikaans newspapers or journalists were not some of the greatest supporters and champions of apartheid.  This is a given which can't be dismissed lightly.	In conclusion, no person in his or her right mind can deny the role of certain newspapers and journalists in the Afrikaans media in the process of reformation from the Seventies to the Nineties.  To mention but some examples, Schalk Pienaar's point of view regarding an inclusive nationalism or Tom Vosloo in the early Eighties, who already  stated to his readers that the time would come when the National Party Government, together with the ANC will have to go and sit around a negotiation table.	Similarly, it cannot be forgotten that - it cannot be stated that we have to comfortably forget about the Forties to the Sixties, in all convenience, because this was the period when the National Party established with the willing and enthusiastic support of a large section of the Afrikaans Press, the foundations of apartheid and expanded them.  Thank you.