PRETORIA, South Africa -- After two years of national heart-searching, soul-baring and conscience-clearing, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission yesterday delivered a 3,500-page indictment of the apartheid era, blaming both whites and blacks for gross human rights violations.
"All of South Africa -- rural, urban, black, white, men, women and children -- had been caught up in oppression and resistance that left no one with clean hands," said the TRC's report.
The racist National Party government of the period was identified as the "primary perpetrator" of atrocities, but President Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, which now heads the country's first black majority government, also was charged with killings, torture and assaults during its anti-apartheid struggle.
A last-minute attempt by the ANC to block release of the report, which it viewed as "criminalizing" the liberation struggle, was thrown out of court. The ANC complained it was not given a chance to respond to the charges leveled against it.
Mandela, the former ANC leader, distanced himself from the party's court challenge, telling a nationwide television audience: accept this report as it is, with all its imperfections."
Accepting the five-volume report from TRC chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu in front of political leaders, diplomats and 40 representative victims of human rights abuses here, he said: "We are extricating ourselves from a system that insulted our common humanity by dividing us from one another on the basis of race, and setting us against each other."
Tutu, who was sometimes reduced to tears while listening to individual experiences at hearings across what he called this "traumatized and wounded nation," said: "Accept this report as a way, an indispensable way, of healing.
"Let the waters of healing flow from Pretoria today to cleanse our land, to cleanse its people and to bring unity and reconciliation."
Created to lay the nation's bloody and shameful past to rest through a mixture of honesty, confession and forgiveness, the TRC ended its investigation yesterday surrounded by as much controversy as when it held its first hearings in April 1996.
Marthinus van Schalkwyk, the current leader of the National Party -- which brought apartheid to bear and implemented it with a brutal hand -- boycotted presentation of the report, saying the TRC was dominated by ANC supporters.
So loud was the clamor of court challenges and complaints of the findings, that TRC commissioners were able to assert that they must have been doing something right to elicit such broad-based objections.
In one finding likely to arouse new passions, the TRC accused leaders of the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party of collaborating with the apartheid government to protect their own power-base in KwaZulu Natal and undermine the ANC-led liberation struggle.
"The South African government not only welcomed but also actively promoted this covert alliance with Inkatha, as it fell squarely into its response to what it saw as the total revolutionary onslaught against it," said the report.
The new evidence of collusion -- hardly a secret before -- can only render fledgling efforts by the ANC to unify with the IFP more difficult.
The commission was directed to investigate gross human rights violations dating to 1960, offer amnesty to perpetrators in return for full confessions and provide reparation for victims.
In its findings, it endorsed the position in international law that apartheid was "a crime against humanity."
It said that in applying the policies of apartheid, the state was trying to protect the power and privilege of minority whites, adding: "Racism, therefore, constituted the motivating core of the South African political order."
The report said former President P. W. Botha, who was convicted of contempt for refusing to testify to the commission, was accountable for unlawful killings, torture, abductions and other crimes carried out by security forces while he was prime minister and president from 1978 to 1989. Botha has denied involvement in atrocities.
The TRC also planned to link F. W. de Klerk, Botha's successor and the country's last white president, to two major bombing attacks.
He threatened to seek a court interdiction on publication of the charges, which he said were false. Rather than risk delaying publication of its entire report, the TRC ordered the printer to black out the section on de Klerk, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in dismantling apartheid by releasing Mandela from prison, legalizing the ANC and heading the country to its first all-race elections in 1994.
If across-the-board complaints are any measure of evenhandedness, the commission can claim impressive neutrality for its report.
What it cannot claim is to have uncovered the whole truth or to have achieved national reconciliation, the twin mandates in its title.
Earlier opinion polls found the TRC was widely held to have worsened race relations, with its perceived focus on white rather than black perpetrators, leaving Afrikaners, the descendants of the original Dutch settlers who dominated the apartheid government, feeling particularly victimized.
Whether its report and the ANC's hostility toward it will amend this view remains to be seen.
It was able to produce an appalling enough picture of the sheer inhumanity and bloody brutality that too often accompanied both the imposition of and resistance to the system of legalized racial discrimination.
But its hearings were frequently marred by evasion, half-truths and outright lies.
One "reluctant" witness was Mandela's former wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who, according to the report, approached the hearings into the activities of her notorious vigilante group, the Mandela United Football Club, as "a personal vendetta against her."
The commission found she was "politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the MUFC." These included assassinations, abductions, torture, beatings and arson.
The commission also accused the ANC and the Mass Democratic Movement, an anti-apartheid alliance -- '* Madikizela-Mandela was a member of both -- of failing to "bring her into the fold or disciplining her when things were beginning to go wrong.
"What is tragic is that so heroic a figure as Ms. Madikizela-Mandela, with her own rich history of contribution to the struggle, became embroiled in a controversy that caused immeasurable damage to her reputation."
The commission has left to the discretion of the attorneys general possible prosecution of alleged perpetrators of human rights violations who did not seek, or were denied, amnesty. Botha, de Klerk and Madikizela-Mandela have not asked for amnesty.
It said a time limit should be placed on prosecutions, but opposed a general amnesty which could create "a culture of impunity."
It called for government campaigns against racism, serious crime and corruption to foster "a human rights culture."
In its conclusions, the commission noted: "Reconciliation involves a form of restorative justice which does not seek revenge, nor does it seek impunity.
"In restoring the perpetrator to society, a milieu needs to emerge within which he or she may contribute to the building of democracy, a culture of human rights and political stability.
"Reconciliation does not necessarily involve forgiveness. It does involve a minimum willingness to co-exist and work for the peaceful handling of continuing differences.
"Reconciliation requires a commitment, especially by those who have benefited and continue to benefit from past discrimination, to the transformation of unjust inequalities and dehumanizing poverty."
Commission report findings Excerpts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final report on human rights abuses during the apartheid era:
Report's "primary finding": The predominant portion of gross violations of human rights was committed by the former state through its security and law enforcement agencies. Moreover the South African state from the late 1970s to early 1990s became involved in activities of a criminal nature when it knowingly planned, undertook, condoned and covered up the commission of unlawful acts, including the extra-judicial killing of political opponents inside and outside South Africa."
On former President P.W. Botha: "Mr. Botha was responsible for ordering former Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok and former police Commissioner Johan van der Merwe unlawfully to destroy Khotso House [which housed anti-apartheid groups]."
On the African National Congress: It "perpetrated gross violations of human rights in that the distinction between civilian and military targets was blurred resulting in civilian injury and loss of life."
On abuse of women: "Women were abused by the security forces in ways which specifically exploited their vulnerabilities as women, for example rape or threats of rape and other forms of sexual abuse." On the ANC treatment of women in its military camps: "Women in exile, particularly those in camps, were subjected to various forms of sexual abuse and harassment, including rape."
Pub Date: 10/30/98