Special Hearings — Political Party Hearings — 1996-08-19

MAPULE RAMASHALA: Thank you Chairperson.  I refer you to page 1 and page 7 of your document where you talk about restitution, the granting of reparations to victims and measures aimed at rehabilitating and restoring dignity to victims, and where you ask the question, does the exposure of the truth in itself have the power to heal.  And on page 7 where you list ideas in terms of addressing the suffering of those who experienced gross human rights violations and you list examples from 1 to I believe 4. I'd like to add a question to your list of questions on page 1 to see if you can address this following your logic in the submission.  And the question is, does the granting of amnesty, the call for repentance and forgiveness and response on the part of the victim for forgiveness change the quality of life of the victim and/or survivor?

MR MESHOE: I would say to an extent it does, many times people who are victims of these atrocities have been dehumanised. They are looking at themselves.  So once those people are given the necessary counselling to ensure, or to assure them that regardless of what has happened you are still a special person. That helps to restore the dignity.

MAPULE RAMASHALA: A follow-up question.  In Port Elizabeth a mother whose husband was killed and was left with five children has raised the children by herself is in a state of utter poverty, says to a question about forgiveness or counselling or rehabilitation, I'd like the quality of my life to change, my financial status of my children to change, to improve my ability to educate my children and you are asking me to look at rehabilitation first and that's unquote.  How do we deal with that?

MR POTGIETER: Our response would be our understanding of forgiveness goes hand in hand with restitution and throughout the Bible you would find that if someone has taken from someone else and he repents and he goes to the person and tells them that I done harm and injustice and unrighteousness then that person would go out of his way to restore the victim to its former position as far as that is possible.  Now as far as a murder is concerned it is not possible to restore to the family a caring husband and a breadwinner by just asking forgiveness. There could be a process of forgiveness, there could be the mother forgiving but there are still the reality of having to survive.  I come personally out of a situation where I was raised by a mother and my father died at the age of 29 and that was by means of an accident which he had. But had my father died as a result of civil unrest or whatever, or as the result of human rights violation, the results would have still been exactly the same, the suffering of the family and so on.
 So I would think that it would be very important for the state and unfortunately the perpetrators are not called to do restitution and to that extent I feel that the families are paying twice.  They are paying because they have lost the father, there is no justice involved, and they are paying again because the government or the state by means of taxes will now have to sustain the family, will have to sustain the mother and the perpetrator actually is the person who walks free.
 Now unfortunately or because of the past this kind of compromise had to be made because of what Dr Boraine said earlier.  It was necessary in terms to avert even possible worse suffering, a civil war, had this compromise not been made.  But we are sitting with the realities of the mothers without the fathers and we're sitting with the realities of those children who will need education and health care.  And so I think that as far as the Truth is concerned and reparation is concerned, that those are the cases where special attention must be given and the family must be restored as least financially as far as possible in the position which they had had the father not died as a result of the human rights violation.

CHAIRPERSON: Dumisa Ntsebeza.

MR NTSEBEZA: Thank you Chair.   I just want to clarify in my own mind whether I do understand the position of the ACDP with regard to the notion of justice.  It's a very illusive concept but do I understand the Party's position to be that for them justice for the victim survivor of human rights violations would be in the form of retribution and retribution only in the wider sense of the perpetrators having to be punished in one way or the other.  That's the first question but related to that, has the Party given consideration to the price that perpetrators would be paying if through this process they would be compelled to come publicly and reveal the gross violations of human rights in which they were involved in circumstances where maybe for the first time their families would be knowing for the first time that their father or brother or husband were murderers, torturers but wider than the immediate families the whole country would now know what they had been involved in.  In a sense, the persons private knowledge of what they had done would now be revealed for the first time and the whole world in a matter of saying would now know that so and so, some of whom are respectable persons in high offices, would through that process now be shown to be what they are.  Is that not what in fact the price of getting amnesty is all about?  Where therefore the public revelation of the truth, the vindication of the good name of the victims and the provision of reparations would be as that quotation which you have in your book on page 4 indicates, that that would be some form of justice as well?

MR MESHOE: Thank you Mr Ntsebeza, I want to concentrate on the second part to your question and my colleague will do the first part on justice.
 My approach would maybe be slightly different from your approach when it comes to a person that has committed a crime coming into the open.  My approach and recommendation would be if a person knows exactly who the victims of the crimes are and that person does not want the whole world to know, I do not see the reason why that person can not go to the victim directly and confess and if necessary ask for a mediator.  But I think it would be important to respect the wish of the person who knows the specific victims to go to those victims and make right with them.
 Going back to the submission we made, there is a paragraph there that says, "When a crime is committed there, at least from the personal perspective three offended parties, God the State and the victim". Now when a person has made right with the victim, and with God it is not necessary for those people who have nothing to do with that case to be involved in the case.  So my proposal is people who do not want to appear on camera, but who want to make right and confess and ask for forgiveness should be accommodated by attending to their requests in the absence of cameras.