Читать книгу Dare We Hope? - Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela - Страница 12

ThisDay, 4 August 2004

When, in July 2004, Eugene de Kock, incarcerated former commander of the notorious apartheid-era police counter-insurgency unit stationed at Vlakplaas, testified at Gideon Nieuwoudt’s second amnesty hearing, he apologised for his own involvement in the Motherwell car bombing to the families of the four victims. By contrast, Nieuwoudt presented evidence that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which may have affected his previous evidence. It occurred to me that the difference between the two perpetrators’ responses to the past holds the key to our nation’s healing.5

EUGENE DE KOCK and Gideon Nieuwoudt, at once different and similar, have again entered the public discourse. These two crusaders for the apartheid state both snuffed out the lives of those who fought, in ways violent and non-violent, to bring us the democracy that we so proudly embrace today. But there is something that we miss in portraying these two men as ‘exceptional’, as ‘rogues’.

They, like many who kept the apartheid government in power, believed in the political order of the day. Moreover, De Kock and Nieuwoudt were characteristic of the majority of white voters during the apartheid years. They may individually represent the ruthlessness of that deadly era, when state enemies were ‘removed from society’, but many white families during the apartheid years collectively participated in the conscription of their sons into the army to fight openly in the black townships the war that De Kock and Nieuwoudt were fighting in the shadows.

The apartheid laws might have been conceived and debated in political and religious corridors of power, but their implementation was not hidden from view; black people were openly pushed away from any semblance of a shot at equal opportunity. White people, with a few exceptions, were happy to maintain the status quo and to continue enjoying the privileges that De Kock and Nieuwoudt fought to protect. I bring this up not to evoke white guilt, but to remind ourselves that in order for our reconciliation agenda to be effective, and to heal the wounds of the past, we must recognise our collective role in it. The success of an evil political system like apartheid, like Nazism, like the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, does not reside in one or two individuals.

The cry ‘Never, and never again’ will have meaningful significance only when we begin to realise that we would probably have been just like any ordinary South African who knowingly or inadvertently supported apartheid, a system that was declared a crime against humanity by the international community – as bystanders, beneficiaries, collaborators, or morally culpable in some other way.

Good and evil exist in all of us. Portraying De Kock and his ilk as the villains who should ‘hang’ for the sins of the past allows us to believe that we are morally superior. But, sadly, reality does not allow that kind of fantasy. Denouncing the evil of apartheid and identifying its villains in 2004 is easy. It is a far cry from taking a stand against it in 1984.

During last month’s public drama of Nieuwoudt’s amnesty hearing, we were reminded again of the choices that people can or cannot make when they are confronting their role in the evil of the past. De Kock seems to have crossed the threshold of guilt. He has done what most of his comrades have been unwilling or unable to do and admitted that apartheid’s war, what he fought all his life, was wrong and a waste. He expressed a public apology to the families of the victims of the crime that is the subject of Nieuwoudt’s amnesty hearing, and evoked a deeply moving emotional response. This may only be symbolic, but this is where hope begins. This is the kind of public dialogue we need to move our country forward onto the road of healing and reconciliation.

Nieuwoudt, in contrast, has become tangled in a web of memory loss. Not only that, he has experts claiming that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is as if he is saying, as the psychologically damaged victim of the past, that he cannot be expected to account for it. The diagnosis of PTSD in cases of perpetrators who came before the TRC has become something of a growth industry, and Nieuwoudt’s claims of PTSD send a wrong message. The essential feature of PTSD is a life-threatening experience, or one that threatens one’s physical integrity. The fundamental element of the experience is that it overwhelms the senses, and evokes a response with the following main components: intense fear, helplessness and horror. For PTSD to be diagnosed, there must be a clearly identifiable life-threatening experience, commensurate with the response of fear, powerlessness and helplessness. I have not seen Nieuwoudt’s psychiatrist’s report, but based on what I know about Nieuwoudt’s role in the security forces, being in full control and inflicting harm and risking little or no danger to himself, I doubt that he could claim that he endured these cardinal features of PTSD.

We have to ask: did Nieuwoudt suffer a life-threatening experience? Or is the truth too threatening to his Christian self, to his perception of himself as morally human? What the court may have to deal with in Nieuwoudt’s trial is a denial of memory rather than its loss. If he does show aberrant symptoms, the question has to be asked: are they symptoms of PTSD, or anxiety about the public shame and humiliation he has to endure? Are the truths he is forced to face about himself too threatening for him, so that he has to protect himself against internal rupture of his perception of himself as a moral human being, and undoing what he believed in for his entire life too frightening to confront?

The public behaviour of Nieuwoudt and De Kock represent two options in terms of how we may confront the past in our society. Let us make the choice that will uphold the vision of reconciliation and social change in our country.