{TRC was devised to steer South Africa from chaos and civil war and has been replicated elsewhere.}
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was meant to be the healing balm for a nation traumatised by the horrors of apartheid.
But 20 years later, hundreds of political crimes including murder, kidnapping and torture remain unpunished — and many blame post-apartheid governments for the delay.
The commission’s first public hearing on April 15, 1996 — two years after the end of white minority rule — was a solemn affair, met with hope and apprehension.
In a packed town hall in the coastal city of East London, TRC Chairman and Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu lit a candle, and the shocking testimony of atrocities began.
Police hit-squads targeting government opponents, torture, gruesome executions, a student thrown from an aircraft: by the second day Archbishop Tutu wept.
In exchange for full disclosure before the commission, police officers, soldiers and ministers could be granted amnesty for their crimes.
It was a revolutionary concept, devised to steer a country on the brink of chaos away from civil war, and it has since been replicated in several other nations.
Of the 7,000 amnesty applications received from 1996 to 1998, the TRC granted about 1,000.
More than 300 cases were recommended for prosecution. But two decades later, many of those remain untouched.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
“Less than a handful of these cases have been pursued,” said Tutu later, decrying the commission’s unfinished business.
“The fact that parents go to the grave without finding out what happened to their loved ones is unforgivable,” Howard Varney, a lawyer, told AFP.
“The fact that a government that represented the force for liberation and democracy has turned its back on its people is equally unforgivable.”
Thembi Nkadimeng, whose sister Nokuthula Simelane was abducted and tortured in 1983, calls it betrayal by the government.
Simelane’s body has never been found.
When family members embarked on a mission to find out the truth behind her death, they hit dead-ends — including the disappearance of the case file.
The prosecuting authority said it was investigating why these cases were taking long to conclude, adding that they were “very complicated” as many had to start from scratch.
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