South Africa: part of the truth is out there, but where is the justice?

Andy George, writing from Cape Town, calls for not just words, but action, after some of crimes of apartheid are exposed.

The final report of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission runs to more than half a million words. As a record of the banal horrors and high crimes of apartheid, it will probably never be supplanted. With lengthy extracts appearing in the South African and international press, the brutality, depravity and inhumanity of the white regime, its functionaries, its collaborators and, on occasions, its opponents, have become a matter of historical record.

Yet that historical record remains tantalisingly incomplete. The report tells us little about the so-called "third force" killings that left thousands dead in the early 1990s. The role of the military and the intelligence services remains shrouded in mystery, and what of the slow-burning civil war in KwaZulu-Natal that smoulders to this day?

Nor, critically, does the commission's report point a clear way forward. Having documented the horrors of the past, the commission is distinctly equivocal about how South Africa should go about coming to terms with that past and dealing with the perpetrators of the crimes it records. In the fifth volume of its report the commission recommends that: "Where amnesty has not been sought or has been denied, prosecution should be considered where evidence exists that an individual has committed a gross human rights violation."

Several opposition parties representing those most deeply implicated in human rights violations have already called for a general amnesty to be declared - in the interests of national reconciliation, of course. Former President F W de Klerk's successful attempt to have a passage in the report declaring him to be "an accessory to gross human rights violations" removed was not intended to preserve his reputation as a Nobel Peace Prize winner - this is an indictment in itself with Kissinger, Begin and now Trimble for company. Instead, it was to protect himself against the possibility of legal action either in South Africa or abroad.

The ANC's response to the report will be critical. Early indications are not good. Apart from being startlingly inept, the ANC leadership's eleventh-hour decision to take legal action to prevent publication of the report forced it off the moral high ground thrown up by de Klerk's resort to the courts. It also casts serious doubt over how the government intends to deal with individuals who did not apply to the commission for an amnesty or have been found culpable in its report.

This is a painful dilemma for the ANC government. For among those criticised by the commission are Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) leader and Minister of Home Affairs Mangosuthu Buthelezi and the former head of the National Intelligence Service, Niel Barnard, who now directs the provincial government service in the Western Cape. On the list too are President of the ANC Women's League, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and the former commandant of the ANC's Quatro camp in Angola, Gabriel Mthembu.

The temptation to grant some kind of amnesty to forestall a series of high profile and potentially damaging prosecutions is going to prove hard to resist. The government is hard at work wooing Buthelezi as a strategic ally with a bright future back inside the ANC. It is also fearful of the havoc that the IFP might wreak if its leaders were ever brought to book. In these circumstances, there are already calls for a line to be drawn under the long drawn out conflict between the ANC and the IFP in KwaZulu-Natal.

Less appetising still must be the prospect of the ANC's internal disciplinary system coming under close scrutiny. The party has already made something of a fool of itself by accusing the commission of equating the liberation struggle with the crime against humanity that apartheid represented. What the ANC and its allies in the South African Communist Party seem unwilling to face up to is their own neo-Stalinist (or simply Stalinist) past. It seems as if political dissent - not to mention bad driving, if some reports are to be believed - was treated as tantamount to mutiny. Such a movement has little to gain from seeing its many Stasi-trained enforcers hauled before the courts of a state that it now controls.

There is, of course, no moral equivalence between the apartheid state and those who fought against it. But this is not to say that any act committed in the prosecution of a just war can be justified. Nor can the configuration of contemporary South African politics stand in the way of justice for the thousands of people murdered by the IFP. Neither can the generals and politicians of the regime continue to pretend that they didn't know what was going on. They cannot suggest that they didn't know that when they talked of "eliminating" their political opponents that someone was going to die.

Four and a half years after the country's first democratic elections, it is almost impossible to find a South African who supported apartheid. Yet, the majority of white people did - and voted for it at successive elections for over 40 years. Neither the commission, nor the government, can force those people to face that reality. Until it is faced, or the generations that lived through it are long gone, reconciliation will be elusive. What the government can do is to uphold the integrity of the process embodied in the commission. They can do this by demonstrating to those too arrogant, too complacent or too convinced of the overwhelming correctness of their demand to seek amnesty, that some day soon they will be called to account for their actions.

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