The New York Times

Sunday, December 14, 1997

Anger and Amnesty In South Africa

By Mark Mathabane

KERNERSVILLE, N.C. Is it humanly possible to forgive someone who attaches a power generator to the chained hands and feet of other human beings, calmly turns on the switch and then watches them writhe and foam blood at the mouth and ears as bursts of electricity fry every part of their bodies?

Earlier this year, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its investigation of human rights abuses during the apartheid era in South Africa, I was among those who believed it was the ideal way to heal my homeland's deep racial wounds.

But in the past few months that belief has been severely tested. I've been shocked, sickened and enraged by what has surfaced during the testimony. Once again, I've felt hatred, an emotion I fought hard to purge from my heart because it corrodes the soul and ossifies empathy.

I've wept without restraint at finally learning the fate suffered by friends, classmates, teachers, neighbors and comrades with whom I came of age after the Soweto Student Rebellion of June 16, 1976. That was the day when black South Africans finally threw down the gauntlet and dared the apartheid regime to do its worst, because we could no longer be denied freedom in our own country.

I've grappled with guilt. Guilt at recalling that two of my brothers-in-law were gunned down shortly after I published "Kaffir Boy" and began speaking out in the United States against apartheid.

Sometimes the guilt I feel is more generalized. Why did I survive when so many township youths, armed only with bricks, gasoline bombs and shields made from the dented lids of trash cans, died fighting the mightiest army in Africa? How did I escape when so many guerrilla fighters, who infiltrated the countryside, were betrayed by Askaris - former guerrillas turned informers - and then tortured and brutally murdered?

My generation was not afraid to die. That's what makes the stories revealed in testimony to the Truth Commission so wrenching.

Take -the example of Harold Sefola, a member of Umkonto We Sizwe, the military wing of the African National Congress. After Sefola was betrayed by informers, the notorious Vlakplaas police unit took him to an open veld, where two of his comrades were already bound, awaiting their fate. An interrogator shoved a knife into his nose, and Sefola admitted to masterminding several bomb explosions and planting mines.

Sefola then pleaded for his life. When his pleas were ignored, he asked his interrogators if he could say something. He was permitted last rites. They untied him, and he stood up and began singing "Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika," the A.N.C. anthem. He then told his torturers that they could go ahead and kill him, but prophetically predicted that someday the A.N.C. would rule South Africa.

He resumed singing the anthem as he watched his two comrades being electrocuted. When his turn came to die, he thrust his clenched fist defiantly into the air and saluted his dead comrades in the name of the struggle. He met his fate like a true African warrior.

The three torturers who are now asking for amnesty didn't even have the decency to bury Sefola and his comrades. Instead they loaded the stiff bodies into a minibus, took them to a remote dirt road in the homeland of Bophuthatswana, placed them on a landmine and then detonated it to make it appear as if they had ineptly blown themselves up.

After listening to accounts of such atrocities, I found myself asking, Is it right to hijack justice for the sake of holding to a dubious truism about the past? What about the victims? What about the mothers who have lost their sons and daughters and husbands? What about the orphaned children I recently saw wandering the streets of my hometown of Alexandra, dressed. in rags, sleeping in shacks without heat, scavenging for food in garbage heaps?

What about Given and Angie, my niece and nephew, who lost their fathers to an assassin's bullets? What about the youths scarred for life by torture ? How can they be 'expected to accept that torturers and murderers are being set free, and that many sometimes return to their old jobs as policemen and receive pensions for their "honorable service to the country"?

The commission promised to grant amnesty to security force members who can prove that in torturing and murdering they were following orders.

But in much of the testimony I've heard - even from those whose motives for confessing have more to do with the cowardly urge to escape justice than to save their souls - few have proved that they were following specific orders.

Murderers and torturers should not be allowed to blame apartheid as their only excuse for criminal behavior. The commission should grant amnesty only to those who name exactly who gave them orders. So far, most have refused to do so. We must break their code of silence by refusing them amnesty.

Granting it to people who haven t fingered their superiors, as the commission has done many times so far, protects these suspects from being tried in criminal court or being sued by survivors or families of victims. Many of these survivors and

families feel that justice has not been served. They aren't saints; they can forgive only where it is humanly possible to forgive - and where forgiveness is truly deserved.

Someone must be held responsible for these crimes. If a person proves that superiors gave him specific orders, then the superiors would be responsible and can be tried.

Therefore, the Mandela Government should prosecute to the fullest extent of the law those who are clearly guilty and unrepentant. This may prove difficult. I know that the A.N.C., which I support, tortured people in its camps. And I was outraged and sickened by the testimony in the case against Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. No one's hands are clean. Eighteen years of living under apartheid taught me that there are no easy answers.

But the commission can set an example for South Africans and the world if, in the final report it plans to release next year, it strikes a balance between the search for the truth and the need for personal justice. Survivors and families of victims should have the prerogative to decide whether to forgive, which , remarkably, many of them choose to do.

There was a woman who spent years searching for those who had tortured and murdered her son. When the perpetrators were finally found, brought to trial and found guilty, the woman was asked by the judge what kind of punishment she

wanted them to suffer.

"Punishment?" the woman asked, perplexed.

"Yes, punishment," the judge said. "We now have the power to punish such people."

"Oh, no," she said. "I was searching for these men for a different reason, your honor."

"What reason?"

"I wanted to know whom to forgive," the woman said.

Finding the truth helped her forgive her son's murderers and uphold her integrity as a human being, rather than seek revenge and contaminate her soul.

Reconciliation is possible, provided the families of victims do not believe that in the pursuit of truth, they are being denied justice, South Africans have shown a willingness to take the path toward national healing. Let's hope the Truth Commission is brave enough to do so as well.