Cape Town: Ten years after the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa is still trying to find the best way of healing the scars of apartheid.
At a conference yesterday to mark the anniversary, victims of human rights abuses demanded that the government take action to prosecute perpetrators. An aide to the last white president pleaded for reconciliation rather than prosecutions he said would only reopen old wounds.
Yasmin Sooka, a former commission member who now heads the Foundation for Human Rights, said countless South Africans remained hungry for justice. "For many victims' families in South Africa, they do not live in peace, they live in a twilight zone, never being allowed to forget their pain and not ... able to heal or put closure to their memories," said Sooka.
"It's so sad that 10 years later, we still don't have the sense of people taking responsibility for their actions during apartheid," she said.
More than 21,000 victims gave evidence to the commission, which met for the first time in April 1996 with former Archbishop Desmond Tutu at its head. During an emotional journey into the slayings and torture of the apartheid era, the commission granted amnesty to about 1,000 South Africans who confessed to their crimes and showed remorse.
It refused to pardon the worst offenders, such as Eugene de Kock, who headed a police unit notorious for torturing and assassinating anti-apartheid activists and who was nicknamed "prime evil". He was sentenced to multiple terms of life imprisonment.
The commission had no power to act against people who refused to confess their crimes, but instead passed on their names about 300 of them to the National Prosecuting Authority for further investigation. The government announced guidelines late last year to proceed with prosecutions of those who did not apply for an amnesty.
