Truth and Reconciliation Commission
After the enactment of the constitution focus turned to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1995 under the dictum of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to expose crimes committed during the apartheid era. The commission heard many stories of brutality and injustice from all sides and offered some catharsis to people and communities shattered by their past experiences. The Commission operated by allowing victims to tell their stories and by allowing perpetrators to confess their guilt; with amnesty on offer to those who made a full confession. Those who chose not to appear before the commission would face criminal prosecution if the authorities could prove their guilt. But while some soldiers, police, and ordinary citizens confessed their crimes, few of those who had given the orders or commanded the police presented themselves. State President P.W. Botha himself, notably, refused to appear before the Commission. It proved difficult to gather evidence against these alleged higher-level criminals.
Read more about this topic: History Of South Africa
Famous quotes containing the words truth and, truth and/or commission:
“Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols—it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source; for that reason one must often not do something to the detriment of error since one would do also something detrimental to truth.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don’t want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939)