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Date: 15/04/2003
Source: Department of Education
Title: Asmal: Debate during tabling of TRC Report


ADDRESS BY THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, PROFESSOR KADER ASMAL, MP, IN THE DEBATE ON THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION REPORT, National Assembly, Cape Town, 15 April 2003

The Speaker, Mr President and
Honourable members of our National Parliament

We have arrived at a truly historic moment, long delayed, some might say, but certainly a moment worthy of celebration. The importance of this moment is that it constitutes the end of the beginning of a process that Parliament initiated seven years ago. It signifies the end of a particularly intense, searching and sometimes painful process in our country's history. But as much as it is the end of a process it also points to the dawning of a new chapter for our democracy and the national development and reconstruction needed to fully achieve the ideals we set for ourselves.

In pursuit of our goals, it is important to recall that the TRC was intended to be one initiative among many designed to bring healing to our nation in the wake of the evil years of apartheid. As we today face the closing phases of the work of the TRC, we need to recall the overall mandate that governed its work. It is to reconcile. It is to heal. It is to repair. The time has come to build a national consensus on how to do so.

Given its importance, we in this Parliament, need to treat this moment with the dignity it deserves. Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic, speaks of the need for what he calls 'non-political politics' in dealing with matters of national interest - this involves every member of the community seeking to complement one another in pursuit of a goal that is greater than anyone of us.

Therefore, we need to rise above our political differences in pursuit of national inclusivity, redress and restoration that will finally take us across the historic bridge between an unjust and violent past and a future founded on the recognition of human rights and peace and enables us to take forward the challenge of building a united and thriving nation.

We have made significant progress since setting out on our march. However at the same time we still have some distance to travel before we reach our destination of a better life for all.

We have often said that South Africa can be proud of the way in which it has negotiated its transition from a past of oppression and racial injustice to a present of democratic freedoms and the hope of development and progress for all of its citizens.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has played an important role in realising the moral significance of democracy in South Africa. In doing so, it engaged in the work of memory, dedicated to the struggle, in Milan Kundera's familiar phrase, of 'memory against forgetting'. This work of memory was important. Although we should be critical of attempts to turn memory into myth making, especially if such myths are only ways of avoiding historical accountability, the TRC was responsible for important memory work. To create a future, we must therefore remember the past.

In doing so it recognised that a wishful and forgetful approach would simply serve to entrench past inequities, as they would not simply disappear on their own accord. They must actively be dismantled. In doing so it acknowledged that to avert our eyes from the past is to tolerate it as a continuing phantom chauffer in a seemingly new journey. The TRC enabled us to come to a reckoning of our past, which is crucial in ensuring that the corrective action processes, which flow from its work, do not lose their historical moorings and condemn us to moral and political drift.

Indeed, the TRC recognised that for genuine and meaningful reconciliation to take place, we must ensure moral and political restitution in the sense of wiedergutmachung, which means to 'make good again'. We cannot really enter upon the process of making good the history of South Africa unless we acknowledge precisely what bad there is to undo. We cannot enter upon the rich and nuanced process of reconciliation armed only with mumbled banalities about the past being an 'innocent mistake'.

But what kind of memory of the past do we need to build a new South Africa? We need a memory based not on the bitter resentment of the past but on the possibilities of reconciliation for the future. In doing so we have followed the advice of the Chilean commissioner Jose Zalaquett, who insisted that a "society cannot reconcile itself on the grounds of a divided memory. Since memory is identity, this would result in a divided identity."

But memory needs a place, a habitation, and a name. While it is a truism that those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it, the reverse comfort does not necessarily hold. A society may remember its past and nevertheless repeat it; or even surpass it in cruelty. Afrikaner suffering at the hands of British imperialism early this century actually fuelled the racial oppression of apartheid, rather than serving as an admonition against it.

Part of the healing process is to identify the common bonds that hold us together as a nation. The Constitution provides us with the basis for developing a South African identity.

Since the devil can quote history to his or her own purpose, a simple factual record of the apartheid past, devoid of an ethical basis, would be of little value. What matters is not merely the fact that we remember history but the way in which we remember it. In this context, one where we take full measure of the past, our country can become a safer place for idealism, the sort of place that Seamus Heaney had in mind when he wrote of those rare times and places 'when hope and history rhyme'.

And it is in between our divided past and our hopes for the future that we can only build such bridges in the present.

As we receive the Final Report of the TRC, we find another occasion to recommit ourselves to its central injunction, never again. However we also need to acknowledge the ongoing efforts of bridge building that will provide the moral and material basis for ensuring that such a past is never again repeated.

In doing so, we should however focus on 'building' and not 'restoration', of imagining afresh, of starting anew. We are not restoring what was lost, as if we are returning to some golden age prior to apartheid of tolerance, understanding and multiculturalism.

As Antjie Krog has noted, is reconciliation or restoration the right word in a country where there is nothing to go back to, no previous state or relationships one would wish to restore? Or is it, as she intimates, about the recovery of a lost humanity squandered in the violent pursuit of racial purity and ethnic self-interest.

As the TRC process revealed, we have been a wounded, divided, and deeply scarred society. It would therefore be extremely foolish to remain complacent about the deep suspicions that continue to exist in the country. It would be foolish to expect that the severe corrosion of our human dignity would heal quickly and without purposeful effort, active reconciliation and focused attention to developing the values necessary to support our democracy.

In this work of bridge building we affirm that reparations must take the form not only of monetary compensation but also of other forms of redress. We were all struck by how often victims told the TRC that they wanted their loved ones to be commemorated by a marker, a plaque, a memorial. The work of memorialisation, from shared monuments such as Freedom Park to individual grave markers, is a significant aspect of reparations. Issuing of death certificates, the expedition of reburials, and the facilitation of outstanding legal matters also responds to the needs of victims.

Financial reparation is a part of redress. Funds have been set aside for reparations and the President has referred to the Government's obligation under section 27(1) of the TRC Act. The TRC, however, mandated individual reparations for victims of 'gross' violations. But we must always remember that the real and offensive gross violations affected over 35 million people through the policy of apartheid. Their suffering must also be addressed. It would be extremely insensitive and absurd to suggest that the victims of apartheid can be limited to only about 22 000 people.

Therefore, the class action suits currently being considered in the United States against multinational corporations that did business with the apartheid government are completely inappropriate as the assumption continues to 'individualise' claims when the real crime against humanity was against an entire people. South Africa must settle this issue for themselves and does not need the help of ambulance chasers and contingency fee operators, whether in Switzerland, the Netherlands or the United States of America. As South Africans we have effectively dealt with our own historical challenges and we will continue to do so. It is part of our sovereign right.

In this spirit, Madam Speaker, Parliament was directed by the Interim Constitution, in terms of the TRC Act, to adopt a law providing for amnesty and which is introduced by the words 'in order to advance reconciliation and reconstruction'. This unique association between reconciliation, reconstruction, amnesty and reparation is a truly South African solution, which has drawn the praise of the rest of the world. Reconciliation is intrinsically linked to, and a part of, the reconstruction of all of our country. Otherwise, as we have been warned, there will never be peace in our country.

This is because we recognise that the criminal act of apartheid was in and of itself the most fundamental of violations of human rights, which permeated all levels and institutions within our divided society. We cannot therefore simply limit our response to that of individual reparations. Instead we would do better to continue on our path to achieve sustainable collective redress through socio-economic programmes that invest in people, eradicate poverty, create employment opportunities, and redress the legacy of exclusion. This is the task of reconciliation.

My point is a simple one: Individual healing ultimately requires a restored and healthy society within which the aggrieved person can, to the extent that it is possible, get on with his or her life. This requires the creation of a society within which victims and survivors of past atrocities have reason to hope. And beyond hope to expect to be able to find employment, to obtain adequate schooling for their children and have a decent roof under which family cohesion and respect can be generated. The creation of a balanced, stable and just society within which there are adequate social, educational and health services for all must surely be the moral foundation of any reparations policy.

To suggest that a monetary payment is all that a victim or survivor of a gross violation of human rights requires is insensitive. It smacks of ignorance and indifference. We must provide a policy that is more responsible and more sensitive to the needs of the people than that. It is a policy that involves the need to heal the often haunting memories of those that have suffered. It involves access to social and health services. It involves time and above all space within which to remember and pay respect to those who have fallen in pursuit of our democracy. It involves the public spaces where we, as a nation, can commit ourselves to remember as a basis for ensuring that the atrocities of the past do not reoccur in the future. It involves some form of recognition and acknowledgement of the suffering of fellow citizens. Suffice to say, we cannot merely make a monetary payment, feel that we have done our duty and then walk away from those in need. That is too easy.

In so doing, we remember the words of the former Deputy President of the Constitutional Court, the late Justice Ismail Mahomed, when in 1996, he stressed that; "The resources of the State have to be deployed imaginatively, wisely, efficiently and equitably, to facilitate the reconstruction process in a manner which best brings relief and hope to the widest sections of the community, developing for the benefit of the entire nation the latent human potential and resources of person who has directly or indirectly been burdened with the heritage of the shame and the pain of our racist past."

Briefly stated, reparations for individuals needs to be communally balanced against other state obligations for reconstruction.

Therefore for us true reconciliation needs to acknowledge the necessity for redress, best described in Afrikaans as regstellende aksie, which recognises the need for corrective action by the State and which is guaranteed by the Constitution. It is only through collective reparations that we can address the overall injustice of the apartheid system and the resulting imbalances in society.

And in just under ten years, we can report with pride that while we still have a long way to go, so much has already been achieved. In education, housing, land restitution, social development, health, in the transformation of the public service, in the renewal of higher education, we have targeted for a South African renewal in a manner without parallel elsewhere.

In brief, the ultimate goal of the TRC, reflecting our Constitutional imperative, was to create a society within which people (all people) experience human dignity, with the knowledge that the suffering of the past will not be repeated in the future. It is the task of a wider reparations policy to ensure and guarantee this. For it to happen, there is a need for a broad-based national consensus on how to do so. It is a consensus that must reach beyond the Government to business, trade unions, civil society, faith communities and private individuals. It constitutes a call for a new social contract.

Let us not forget, honourable members, that the path we chose in 1994, that of constitutional and peaceful regime change, achieved with little civil strife and disruption to family and community life, paved the way for reconciliation, without the compelling need to exact vengeance and retribution. This has placed a moral obligation on us to, in the words of the Constitution, 'to heal the divisions on the past and establish a society based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights'. This we can only achieve, if we continue to commit ourselves, what ever our differences, to the total reconstruction and national development of our country. In doing so let us heed the prophetic call of a great leader, Chief Albert Luthuli, who almost sixty years ago, expressed the hope that 'here in South Africa, with all our diversities of colour and race, we will show the world a new pattern for democracy and set a new example for the world'.

Enquiries: Molatwane Likhethe, Minister's Mdeia Liaison, Department of Education, 082 573 0397
Issued by the Department of Education, 15 April 2003

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