Human Rights Violation Hearings — Pretoria — 1996-08-14

CHAIRPERSON: Mam, we want to direct our sympathies to you.  Do not think that even now whilst you are telling us about what happened, we have heard that you, when you look at his clothes you imagine people around at home and you imagine him to be in the home.  We can see that you are going through a difficult time.  People usually say that sometimes it is always easy for a person who is living nice to tell others about the difficult times they went through.  We sympathise with you even though we have not directly been touched or experienced what happened to you.  We also thank you for still being among those people who did these bad things to you especially because most of us come from families that had difficult times because of the pressure of the past regime.
 We would like you to please accept from us that we sympathise with you and we send our condolences to you.  We say unto you may the Almighty God please bless you and comfort you.  As a Commission we have been put here to investigate or to do everything in our means to trace the whereabouts of those who went missing.  We will try in whatever way we can to trace Matthews if at all he is still alive.  It is always bad even if he had died that you get informed of what happened to him because maybe your pain is being brought about by the fact that you do not know whether PRETORIA HEARING TRC/GAUTENG
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he is still alive or not.  We as a Commission, we are going to try to help you to trace Matthews or to establish whether he is still alive or not.  
 I think one of the things that this Commission is doing, as we listen to the harrowing stories that we have heard here, we hear in other places, is to remind us that we are not talking about statistics.  You know, sometimes when you read in a newspaper, you hear two children disappeared and maybe as a kind of defence mechanism, they are just numbers, but now and again when we come to hear testimony of this kind, we are reminded that we are talking about people of flesh and blood.  That they are not just numbers.  They are the son of, they are the daughter of, they are the mother of, they are the father of.  It is people of flesh and blood.  It is a Matthews who had a mother who loved him, who still washes his clothes and when she looks at clothes in a shop window that would have fitted her son, breaks down.  That is part of the hurt and the anguish, the pain of what has happened in this land and it is part of that pain that we are asked to assist in healing.  
 It also just keeps reminding us that young people in this land paid a very heavy price for the freedom that we are now enjoying and that it was so called "ordinary people".  There are no "ordinary people".  Everybody is a very special person, but we often speak of "ordinary people".  Often and often it was they who have had to bear the brunt of all of this awfulness and maybe we will all keep bearing in mind, we got this freedom and the price that was paid was a very high price and that, for goodness sake, we will not want to devalue it and we are asked to remember this past because we want to commit ourselves to saying that PRETORIA HEARING TRC/GAUTENG
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things of this kind never happen again in our land.  
 I think we should adjourn for lunch.  Will you please stand.  Please, yes, can you.  Order please.  Nobody should move around.  Thank you.  We will resume at two.  
PRETORIA HEARING TRC/GAUTENG