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Meeting the Man who Organised a Bomb in my Car

INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR ETHNIC STUDIES CONFERENCE | FROM VIOLENT CONFLICT TO PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE | COLOMBO, SRI LANKA | 27 FEBRUARY 2014

It was about fifteen years ago; I’m sitting at the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg in my chambers. The phone rings, and a voice says, ‘It’s reception here, there’s a man called Henri who says he has an appointment to meet you’. I say, ‘Send him through’. And as I walk down the corridor to the security gate, my heart’s going boom, boom, boom. Henri had telephoned me a week before to say that he was the security officer who organised the placing of the bomb in my car, which blew up when I was in exile in Mozambique, and cost me my right arm and the sight of an eye.

He was now going to the Truth Commission; was I willing to speak to him before he went there? And I said ‘Yes’. I open the door, and I see this man; he’s tall and thin like myself. A bit younger. He’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him. And I see in his eyes, ‘so this is the man I tried to kill’, and he sees in my eyes, ‘so this is the man who tried to kill me’. We’d never met, we’d never fought, we’d never argued over love, money, power, passion … But he was on that side, and I was on this side. And he’d tried to kill me, and now he was going to the Truth Commission. As we walk to my chambers, he is striding like a soldier, and I do my best to use my judge’s ambulation to slow him down. We come to my office, and we talk, we talk, we talk, we talk, we talk, and eventually I say, ‘Henri, I have to get on with my work’. I stand up, and I say, ‘Normally, when I say goodbye to somebody, I shake that person’s hand. I can’t shake your hand. But, go to the Truth Commission. Tell them what you know, and maybe, maybe, maybe, we will meet again one day’. And when we walked back to the security gate, I noticed he was shuffling along, without that firm stride he’d had when he’d come in. He went out. Bye-bye Henri.

Now what was this Truth Commission to which he was going to go? The story goes back to six months before the first democratic elections, which I’m sure many of you would have seen on television in the programmes marking the death of Nelson Mandela. It was the first time black and white were voting together as equals in South Africa. About six months before that, the National Executive Committee of the ANC, of which I was a member, had a meeting near Johannesburg – about eighty of us at a very, very, very, impassioned meeting.

The issue was what to do about a report that had been transmitted to the National Executive prepared by what we called the Motsuenyane Commission. We had set it up to examine claims that the ANC had used torture during the liberation struggle; that we had held captured enemy agents in camps in Angola where the ANC guerrillas were, and that the captives had been subjected to very, very rough, abusive physical treatment. And the report said that prima facie evidence established that indeed this had happened. And it recommended in no uncertain terms that the ANC follow up against those responsible. The events would have happened in 1981–83. We are now speaking about it in 1993, discussing the recommendation that we must take steps to deal with the use of torture by the ANC in exile ten years before.

The ANC’s position was to condemn torture unconditionally. We were freedom fighters fighting for life – how could we be against life? But what to do now, ten years later when we had got back home? Some of us stood up and we asked for the Motsuenyane report to be implemented. ‘They’ve reported, we must follow through’. And others said, ‘No, you’ve got to understand the circumstances. Our guards were young, they were untrained. They’d given up their studies to go and fight for freedom. They did what they thought they had to do in the situation, because that’s what happened to them when they were captured by the South African Police. And it would be unfair to take action against them now’.

And I remember Pallo Jordan, one of the leading intellectuals in the movement, standing up and saying: ‘Comrades, I’ve learned something very interesting today, there’s a thing called “regime torture”, and that’s bad, and there’s “ANC torture”, and that’s okay. Thank you for enlightening me!’ And then somebody rose and said: ‘What would my mother say?’ Now ‘my mother’ was a figure we often used in our discourse in the ANC. ‘My mother’ would be an African woman with maybe four years schooling, not much knowledge about the world, but with a very strong sense of right and wrong. ‘What would my mother say?’ And he answered: ‘My mother would say there’s something very strange about this organisation. It’s quite correctly examining its own failures, but what about what racist governments have been doing to us for decades, for centuries? Where is the balance, where is the fairness in simply picking on our people who misbehaved and not on the others?’

It was shortly after that that Professor Kader Asmal stood up and said: ‘Comrades, what we need is a truth commission’. Now this was one of those issues – how to deal with torture – that you can’t resolve by a show of hands. This was a deep moral issue, requiring an understanding of the context and what it means for the organisation and who you are and how you stand on matters of principle. Kader said: ‘There’s got to be a truth commission in South Africa, when we have democracy, after we’ve voted, that examines not only what our people did to the relatively few captives in our hands, but also the experiences of thousands and thousands of people who were tortured, victimised, assassinated by the regime’. And suddenly we knew that was the answer. It wasn’t a problem just for our organisation, it was a problem for the nation, the whole nation, across the board.

So paradoxically, ironically, the Truth Commission was set up not by an ANC government wanting to expose the crimes of the previous regime. It was set up by freedom fighters anticipating that they would sooner or later be in the government, wanting to help the ANC usher in our new democracy with clean hands; with no secrets; with nothing to hide.

We wished to find a way of dealing with the atrocities of the past, whoever had committed them, as a nation. That was element number one.

Element number two of the process also emerged in a surprising and paradoxical way. We have signed the interim constitution and are heading for elections. And I’m invited by a body in London called the Catholic Institute of International Relations, who’d given us a lot of support, to report to them on the new Constitution. I say, ‘Fine’, and fly to London. They put me up at a little hotel; a spartan little hotel in Kings Cross. And its quality is relevant to the story. I’m amused because as the constitutional negotiations advanced, our accommodation improved. For the last eleven days we had been in a Holiday Inn Garden Court Hotel. But now in London I’m back to my grassroots lodgings. I’m tired, I’m about to go to sleep, and there’s a knock on the door. ‘Terribly sorry to disturb you, Professor Sachs, but a fax has arrived from South Africa; it’s very urgent, can you look at it?’ And the fax said that there was a crisis that could jeopardise the elections. The generals and the leaders of the security forces in South Africa had said that President de Klerk had offered them an amnesty if we got democracy in South Africa. Then they read the text of the Constitution and saw nothing in it about amnesty. And they stated that they had protected the constitution-making process (and we knew that they had) and added that they knew of plans by extreme right-wing groups to bomb the elections to smithereens; many of their members were risking their lives to get information that would help protect the elections. But to ask them to protect the elections and then go to jail afterwards, that was too much. They weren’t threatening a coup, they weren’t saying they would take over the country, they weren’t holding a gun to anybody’s head. They simply said: ‘We will resign our commissions, we’ll go abroad, that’s the only realistic alternative we have’. And the ANC head office fax, maybe even coming from Mandela, indicated a certain measure of sympathy implying that President de Klerk hadn’t come clean in his dealings with his security people. I remember after reading the document – because this little hotel didn’t have a fax machine; it didn’t even have paper – I turned the paper over and wrote on the back: ‘We can’t give a general amnesty, a blanket amnesty. But could we not link amnesty to the Truth Commission? So that if people come forward one by one and tell their stories truthfully, then they can get amnesty on an individual basis’.

The fact is that we didn’t set up a Truth Commission in some abstract way to deal with the problems of the past. It arose out of three very specific needs. 1. The ANC needed to come clean about its own failures. 2. Some mechanism had to be found to enable the security people to carry on protecting our process. 3. At a purely practical level, we needed to avoid having endless trials clogging up the justice system; where would you find the evidence, and who would you charge – the one who pulled the trigger, the one who switched on the electric machine, the one who ordered it, the one who made it, the politician in charge, the president of the country? The complicity was so wide that whole sections of the country would be engaged in endless prosecutions. So we had very strong practical motives for producing a process with a defined date of closure.

My friend, Dullah Omar, one of the lawyers on the National Executive, was made the first minister of justice. He spent almost the whole of his first year just working on the Act dealing with the Truth Commission. It was adopted in terms of a clause placed towards the end of the Constitution, called an epilogue, which I preferred to call the post-amble. And the post-amble was poetic, it wasn’t in technical legal language. It spoke about acknowledging the untold injustices of the past, but responding to them not in a spirit of vengeance or retaliation, but in a spirit of ubuntu and reconciliation. Ubuntu is a word derived from African culture that that means ‘I’m a person because you’re a person’. My humanity is dependent on the recognition of your humanity. It implies that we don’t exist as isolated human beings; though each of us is an individual person, we live in a society with other human beings. So my acknowledgment of your humanity enriches my humanity and does not diminish it. The word ubuntu was used in the epilogue to the Constitution, which said that the new parliament would establish the processes for dealing in the spirit of ubuntu with the crimes of the past committed in the course of the political conflict.

The Truth Commission as it emerged, then, had both a constitutional and statutory foundation. In drafting the law, we drew very heavily on Chilean experience. José Zalaquett, a famous human rights lawyer from Chile, came to South Africa to share that country’s experiences with us. We learnt a lot from him about what they had done in his country, but we didn’t copy the Chilean model and then add a few South African ingredients. Instead, we created our own Truth Commission, building on their experience.

It was structured around three different bodies. It was important that they functioned separately. The first was the one that heard the testimonies of people who had suffered. They came from all sides. This structure travelled around the country, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It didn’t just sit in beautiful rooms, town halls. It went to little school rooms, church halls, into the communities. And it heard the stories of people who had suffered terrible trauma themselves, or who told of the loss of people close to them. It was so important for our country to listen to them. Ten thousand people testified, gave oral accounts. Another ten thousand sent in written testimonials. Overwhelmingly, they were people who had suffered at the hands of the apartheid regime. But it also included people who had suffered as a result of being placed in captivity by the ANC, or from injuries produced by bombs that the ANC had used. As Tutu said, ‘it enabled the little people to speak.’ This was for the people who had never been listened to. It’s so much part of human dignity to have your pain, your suffering, the things you have gone through, the trauma you felt you could never get beyond, acknowledged. And we had very, very, telling testimony. It is important to note that you weren’t relating your story to get damages, on the basis that the more you suffered the more you’d get. Nor were you telling your story to send someone to jail. You were telling your story just to tell your story. That was the one section of the Truth Commission.

The second section dealing with granting amnesty, was more formal. It had two judges and I think three lay people on it. The criteria for the granting of amnesty were laid down. Basically it dealt with conduct, usually secret, that had violated the law as it stood at the time. However bad apartheid law had been, it had never openly allowed the use of torture. It had never formally permitted assassination. In order to get an amnesty, you had to come forward and you had to reveal the truth of what you had done. And your actions had to have been related to the political conflict. Several thousand people applied. Most of them were in prison for things like robbing banks, who said, we were black people fighting the white racists, and we robbed the bank to help our people. They didn’t get amnesty; their conduct might have had a political background, but it wasn’t undertaken as part of the political conflict. The majority of the people who testified came from the security forces.

I still remember vividly Sergeant Benzien in Cape Town, my city, asking for amnesty.

This man had once had the power of life and death over his captives. Someone he had tortured said simply to him: ‘Sergeant Benzien, show us how you put a wet bag over our heads’. An orderly went on the ground, a bag, not a wet one, was put over his head, and the sergeant kneeled on his back.

Tony Yengeni, formerly an underground operative of the ANC, now a member of parliament, told the Truth Commission: ‘I thought I was suffocating, drowning’. And as Sergeant Benzien stood up, he started crying. We saw it on television, we saw his tears. This man who’d had power of life and death, was now crying. And he was crying because he’d been asked by Tony Yengeni, ‘How can one human being do this to another human being?’ Now the whole nation was asking this question, ‘How can one human being do this to another human being?’ The sergeant was crying because his whole world had collapsed. Before, he had got a medal, promotions. Now, he suddenly realised, ‘No, this was not the way, I was doing it in defence of apartheid, and the very people whom I was torturing, are now giving me an opportunity to carry on with my life through telling the truth. And I thought I was doing this to evil terrorists who had to be destroyed.’

The third structure of the Truth Commission was the section that dealt with reparations. My own view is that it was the least successful of all three. It focused too much on money, identifying who the ‘victims’ were, and indicating how much money should be paid. I’m sorry to say, I don’t think the South African government responded graciously and generously. The attitude was, ‘we all suffered under apartheid, millions and millions over the centuries. To give a huge hand-out just for this one group that had come forward, somehow, we don’t feel that’s appropriate’. I feel they underestimated the moral, symbolic significance of the special form of suffering,

… but the real problem wasn’t even about the money and the timing. The real problem was that reparations should have been in the form of actions that reached into the imagination, the soul, the spirit of human beings. There will never be enough money.

You can never pay it quickly enough, and the money is soon spent. But gardens of remembrance, and assistance for people who have been disabled because of what had happened to them, and stipends for their children to get schooling to make up for loss of breadwinners, and creative things like libraries, and a bridge – these things are memorable things. One beautiful example was a bridge used by workers to get over the railway lines, named after one young guy who’d fought to the death as part of the freedom struggle. In Chile, President [Patricio] Aylwin [1918–2016], who wasn’t even from Pinochet’s group, sent a personal letter signed by himself to everybody who’d suffered under General Pinochet’s military dictatorship, saying in the name of the new democratic Chilean government, ‘I express my emotional feeling for you who have suffered so much in the conflicts of the past’. That was imaginative. It might seem like just a little piece of paper, but it’s different from just money, just cash. I think we didn’t equal the Chileans in that particular regard.

The value of the Truth Commission is contested in South Africa. People on the more radical side say that we allowed criminals to walk free – how could we let that happen? Or they say, ‘You make the Truth Commission sound as if the only aspects of apartheid worth examining and exposing are the violations of rights by the security forces.’

But what about the system of apartheid itself that dislodged people from their land and their homes? And the deep systemic forms of economic exploitation? I think that’s a powerful consideration, but an unfair critique. It wasn’t the function of the Truth Commission to deal with the systemic violence and injustice of apartheid. The Truth Commission was there to deal precisely with atrocities. That was all.

If you can’t get these extreme sources of pain out of the way, there’s so much continuing rancour, so much pain, so much anger, so much emotion, that you can’t even reach a proper historical analysis of the structured and institutionalised injustices. As for the deeper, more enduring transformations required, that’s what the vote is designed to correct, and what parliament is for. It’s the function of parliament then, of the whole society and civil society organisations, to deal with systemic structured forms of domination. But the secret, hidden atrocities of the past, that was for the Truth Commission to expose and manage.

Then there were people from a more conservative side who had a different critique. Their principal contention was there hadn’t been due process of law in the Commission proceedings. Yet the strength of the narratives came precisely from their spontaneity. People could tell their stories without interruption. We did indeed introduce some due process elements. Thus, anybody mentioned negatively in a witness’s statement had the right to bring counsel to question the testimony. But overwhelmingly the power and the glory of the process came from the manner in which it permitted people to stand up and tell their stories in their own voices in their own way.

An incontestable contribution of the Truth Commission was its role in preventing denialism. One of the worst features about covert atrocities is that the people responsible, and often their children and grandchildren, deny that they happened at all. They continue the denial for generations, and this keeps alive the pain, which never goes away. The society remains psychically divided. There’s a kind of continuing insult and agony through the refusal to even acknowledge that these terrible things happened. Fortunately, no one in South Africa can now say that apartheid was simply a failed experiment. No one can deny its deep cruelty because we’ve heard about the evil things done in its enforcement from the mouths of the defenders of apartheid themselves. They testified in person, not because they were being tortured, not because they were being offered plum jobs, but simply because they wanted to come forward and tell the truth and get amnesty. It was vital to have at least the elements of a common understanding emerging about basic themes of our history. We couldn’t have had a nation in South Africa without that. If you have a black memory and white memory, the whites saying, ‘Well it wasn’t so bad. We had a few bad apples, the system was unfair. But now, that’s the past, let’s move on’. And black people remember that it was their fathers, and aunties, and mums, and so on, who suffered terrible pain that’s not even being acknowledged. It was a deeply cruel way in which human beings were treated by other human beings. If you don’t acknowledge that, it becomes hard for us to find the generosity we are longing to express. Part of the freedom we fought for was to have freedom from anger. It is not easy to move forward if the pain remains with us.

In South Africa we have never had even a pretence of a common history. Even our history books were different; the history books for white kids, the ones I had in my school, were quite different from the history books for black kids. How can you build a nation, have a common citizenship, if people’s memories are so totally divided, and there aren’t points of commonality in the way we understand our past? At least let there be the ingredients of a common narrative, common appreciation. Otherwise the imaginative separation continues apartheid in our minds forever. So that was one aspect of the Truth Commission that is of enormous significance for us.

Can we say the Truth Commission brought about reconciliation in South Africa? Yes and no. Yes, it removed a huge impediment and blockage. We’re beginning to live in the same country, to be on the same map. Getting the vote was a fantastic ingredient and symbol of common citizenship. But more was required. We needed to feel that the country belonged to all of us, and that we all belonged to the same country.

We’re beginning to inhabit that same land, where the pain of some is the pain of all, where injustice is injustice, racism is racism, and cruelty is cruelty. That has been important. Because if you’re living with suppressed rancour in your heart, you can’t start passing legislation based on inclusive and comprehensive transformation. Everything you do is going to be coloured by your anger.

Whichever side you’re on, you can’t be objective, you can’t have a nationwide vision. In that sense the Truth Commission process helped remove huge impediments to developing that nationwide vision. That sense of facing our history was extremely important and we had the courage and strength as a nation to do it. It’s not a sign of weakness to have a Truth Commission. It’s a sign of strength. A sign of great moral strength, that we have the capacity to examine, explore, come to terms with unacceptable things that we did, and to acknowledge what we, on all sides, had been responsible for, in varying degrees. So in that sense, it played a huge role in allowing processes of reconciliation to move forward.

And yet, and yet … At the end of the hearings, overwhelmingly the people who had suffered the most would have to walk back to their homes, often shacks. And the security officials who’d done most of the torture, even if it wasn’t easy for them to stand up and acknowledge on television what they’d done, would afterwards hop into their Toyotas and drive home. There’s still a massive sense of inequality in our country, directly associated with race, reflecting who was advantaged and who was disadvantaged in the past. Until we really overcome those inequities, we’ll never have full reconciliation.

Pride in our nation’s achievements came out very strongly at the time of Mandela’s death. But massive problems still remain. Many we inherited but others we have made worse ourselves, and we’ve got to take responsibility for that.

What would I say were the key elements of our Truth Commission experience that could be replicated elsewhere? The first potentially transportable element is that no participants in a situation of conflict should automatically be assumed to be wholly without fault. The process has to be across the board. I might mention that when, many years ago, a truth commission for the former Yugoslavia was being proposed by civil society organisations, I suggested that it would be hopeless to simply look into the crimes of the Serbs, or the Croats, or the Muslims. Rather, the truth-telling had to be across the board.

The second possible exportable aspect of the process related to the public nature of the Truth Commission’s proceedings. I tell the following story against myself. Following on the Chilean experience, I had argued that evidence should be given behind closed doors, otherwise you’d never get the truth, you’d never get the torturers and the killers and the assassins to come forward. However, civil society people like yourselves responded by saying: ‘We don’t like this Truth Commission thing, we want accountability; we want people to go to jail. But you seem to be insistent on having it, and if you’re going to have it, at least let it be in public.’ And fortunately, Albie Sachs was overruled, and fortunately, I repeat, the legislation provided for the proceedings to be held in public. That turned out to be absolutely vital. The report of the Truth Commission came out afterwards. It’s a beautiful report, well worth reading. It’s well written, it’s vivacious, and not just a dull technocratic report. But, nobody reads it. Everybody remembers Sergeant Benzien crying, and moments like that. It was our people expressing themselves in memorable and totally recognisable ways, that’s what we recall.

Even the security people giving evidence in their suits, with their little moustaches, intoning their words robot-like as if giving testimony in a court of law – I wished sometimes they’d been more relaxed, and more open, and more warm, and more human – even they were true to form as they delivered their statements in a stiff and formal way. It was important that they did bend the knee, and make some acknowledgement that they’d done awful things.

Participation in the Truth Commission processes was expressed in the body language of our people, we saw our nation there. It was like a huge drama unfolding in front of our eyes. I would say that’s the second crucial element.

A third essential element that could travel well was good leadership. It was important to have people of the calibre of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, supported by Alex Boraine, who had also been a minister of religion conducting the Truth Commission. Their team was broadly based. It excluded prominent political activists, but included persons from many faith communities as well as people who were not religious at all. Parliament chose very carefully.

As Tutu would say, the commissioners were not neutral – you can’t be neutral on torture, you hate it. But you’re impartial in the way you listen to everybody.

You don’t make up your mind about anybody in advance. The diversity and the balanced and wisely led nature of the Truth Commission was crucial to its success. The credibility of any truth commission will, accordingly, be dependent not only on the terms of its remit, but on the care with which its members are chosen, the integrity and wisdom of its public representatives, and the impartial manner in which it functions.

And the last and possibly the most important transferable feature of the Truth Commission was that it was not expected to carry the whole burden of our history and function in isolation from other processes of transformation in our country. If there hadn’t been political transformation in South Africa – universal suffrage, the reconstruction of our vision of parliament, a whole new constitutional order that completely reconceived and reimagined South Africa – the Truth Commission would have got almost nowhere. Overall, what gave it its very special meaning in South Africa was that it was part of a wider process of dealing with the root problems that had led to the conflict.

So it’s the end of the year, a hot day like today here in Colombo, and I’m tired. A friend of mine says we must go to a party organised by some film people, and I must relax. I go with her. The band is playing loudly. There’s a big crowd. And I hear a voice shouting: ‘Albie! Albie!’ Wow, it’s Henri [the security officer who organised the placing of the bomb in my car]! I haven’t seen him for almost a year. He’s beaming as he comes up to me, absolutely elated. And we get into a corner to be away from the music. Excitedly he tells me: ‘I went to the Truth Commission, and I spoke to Bobby (it was Bobby Singh), and Sue (Sue Rabkin), and Farouk (Farouk Mahomed) and I told them everything I knew. And that you said maybe, one day’. And I said, ‘Henri, I’ve only got your face to tell me that what you’re saying is the truth’. And I put out my hand, and I shook his hand. He went away absolutely beaming. And I almost fainted. And that should be the end of my story. But the truth doesn’t end at any particular point.

I heard afterwards that he had been invited to the party given by film people interviewing him as one of the few soldiers who had gone to the Truth Commission. He was enjoying himself enormously, I was told, when suddenly he left, went home and cried for two weeks. And that moved me.

Henri is not my friend. I won’t phone him up and say, let’s have a drink or go to a movie together. But if I’m sitting in a bus and Henri sits down next to me, I’ll say, ‘Oh Henri, how are you getting on?’ Somehow, this whole process enabled us to live together in the same country. We can acknowledge each other and feel some kind of connection. And to that extent I feel that the Truth Commission liberated me from the lurking mystery of that abstract thing, ‘the enemy’, that had tried to kill me. And now, it’s this guy, Henri, who’s struggling to get on with his life in the new South Africa. And somehow I feel just a little bit stronger in myself, thanks to the Truth Commission; just a little bit better and more human than I’d been before.