This is the first time though that after telling it we feel as if a heavy load has been removed from our shoulders."
Thus the option of trials, which represented one extreme of the possible ways of dealing with our past, was rejected.
Then there were those others who opposed the trial option and suggested rather glibly that we let bygones be bygones. This was much sought after by the members of the previous government and those who had carried out their behest in their security forces. They clamored for a blanket or general amnesty as had happened in, for instance, Chile, where General Augusto Pinochet[227] and his cohorts gave themselves amnesty as a precondition to handing over from their military junta to a civilian government. Even though they agreed to the appointment of a Truth Commission, such a commission would deliberate only behind closed doors and the record of General Pinochet and his government and the security forces would not be scrutinized by the commission, certainly not for the purpose of apportioning blame. It has been important in the whole debate over impunity to point out that General Pinochet and his officers and government forgave themselves, they alone knew what precisely they had done; they were the accused, the prosecution, and the judges in their own case. In the absence of amnesty designed, as it was in South Africa, to establish accountability, I am a strong supporter of the recent extradition proceedings against General Pinochet. It would be quite intolerable that the perpetrator should decide not only whether he should get amnesty but that no one else should have the right to question the grounds on which he had so granted himself amnesty and for what offense.
In the South African case there was to be no general amnesty. This amnesty was not automatic and the applicant had to make an individual application, then appear before an independent panel which decided whether the applicant satisfied the stringent conditions for granting amnesty. So the other extreme, of blanket amnesty, was also rejected. Apart from the reasons given above, it was felt very strongly that general amnesty was really amnesia. It was pointed out that we none of us possess a kind of fiat by which we can say, "Let bygones be bygones" and, hey presto, they then become bygones. Our common experience in fact is the opposite—that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, has an embarrassing and persistent way of returning and haunting us unless it has in fact been dealt with adequately. Unless we look the beast in the eye we find it has an uncanny habit of returning to hold us hostage.
The English and Afrikaners in South Africa are a perfect case study in point. During the Anglo-Boer War[228] at the turn of the century, the British incarcerated more than 200,000 people, including Boer women and children and black workers
Chile rather than extraditing him to Spain to face trial for crimes against humanity. 6. Anglo-Boer War: one of two conflicts fought in the late nineteenth century between Great Britain and Dutch settlers, known as Boers, for control of South Africa.
on Boer farms, in what was a new British invention at the time—concentration camps, which were to gain, appropriately, a foul reputation as a special feature of the Jewish Holocaust in Hitler's mad obsession with Aryan purity. Nearly 50,000 of the inmates are estimated to have died in unacceptable conditions. At the end of the war neither side ever sat down with the other to talk about this aspect of their war. It seemed that in time the wounds inflicted then had healed and English and Afrikaner seemed to live happily together. Alas, however, the amicable relationship was only superficial and really quite unstable and uneasy. In 1998 I traveled by road from Zurich to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos. I was accompanied by a young Afrikaner who said he remembered so clearly his grandmother telling him of the awful things that had happened to his people in the concentration camps and he said with some feeling that he was ready to fight the Anglo-Boer War over again whenever he remembered his grandmother's stories.
At Dachau, the former concentration camp near Nuremberg, there is a museum 25 to commemorate what happened there—you can see the gas chambers and the ovens where the bodies of the Jews were incinerated. The gas chambers look so innocuous, like normal shower rooms, until you see the vents through which the lethal gas could be pumped into the chamber. In the museum are pictures of prisoners marching behind brass bands while they are carrying some inmate to his execution—macabre humor indeed. The Germans were so methodical and systematic. They recorded everything, including the experiments they carried out to see what depths and altitudes human beings could tolerate, and of course the guinea pigs were the subhuman, non-Aryan, Jewish inmates and it is all there to see in those photographs, showing faces grimacing like hideous gargoyles.
Over the entrance to this museum are philosopher George Santayana's[229] haunting words, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Those who were negotiating our future were aware that, unless the past was acknowledged and dealt with adequately, it could put paid to that future as a baneful blight on it.
To accept national amnesia would be bad for another telling reason. It would in effect be to victimize the victims of apartheid a second time around. We would have denied something that contributed to the identity of who they were. Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean playwright, wrote a play entitled Death and the Maiden. The maiden's husband has just been appointed to his country's Truth Commission. While she is busy in the kitchen someone whose car has broken down and who has been helped by her husband enters the house. The woman does not see him but hears him speak and she recognizes his voice as that of the man who tortured and raped her when she was in detention. She is then shown with the man completely at her mercy, tied up and helpless. She holds a gun to him and is ready to kill him because he denies strenuously that he could have done this and tries to produce an elaborate alibi. Much later, he eventually admits that he was the culprit and, very strangely, she lets him go. His denial hit at the core of her being, at her integrity, at her identity, and these were all tied up intimately with her experiences, with her memory. Denial subverted her personhood. She was in a real sense her memory, as someone who has Alzheimer's disease is no longer quite the same person we knew when she or he possessed all her or his faculties.
Our nation sought to rehabilitate and affirm the dignity and personhood of those who for so long had been silenced, had been turned into anonymous, marginalized ones. Now they would be able to tell their stories, they would remember, and in remembering would be acknowledged to be persons with an inalienable personhood.
Our country's negotiators rejected the two extremes and opted for a "third way," a compromise between the extreme of Nuremberg trials and blanket amnesty or national amnesia. And that third way was granting amnesty to individuals in exchange for a full disclosure relating to the crime for which amnesty was being sought. It was the carrot of possible freedom in exchange for truth and the stick was, for those already in jail, the prospect of lengthy prison sentences and, for those still free, the probability of arrest and prosecution and imprisonment. . . .
Let us conclude . . . by pointing out that ultimately this third way of amnesty was 30 consistent with a central feature of the African Weltanschauung[230]—what we know in our languages as ubuntu, in the Nguni group of languages, or botho, in the Sotho languages. What is it that constrained so many to choose to forgive rather than to demand retribution, to be so magnanimous and ready to forgive rather than wreak revenge?