Mbeki embarks on perilous course
By using his presidential prerogative
to pardon 33 prisoners convicted of serious crimes, including multiple
murder, Thabo Mbeki has rekindled the controversy over who should - and
who should not - be exonerated for politically motivated offences
committed during the apartheid era. The Ministry of Justice has sought
to downplay the significance of the release. It has stressed that Mbeki
exercised powers conferred on him by the Constitution and freed the men
on the recommendation of Justice Minister Penuell Maduna. It has
emphasised, too, that each petition for pardon was assessed on its
merits. But for cogent reasons it has failed to either forestall or
defuse the controversy.
The surreptitious release of the prisoners without an explanatory
statement, still less debate in Parliament, is one reason for the
widespread dismay and anxiety that greeted news of the pardons. Another
is the apparent political favouritism shown by Mbeki. Judging by the
names of the prisoners, they are all members of the majority black
community. White right-wingers are conspicuously absent. Beyond that,
however, those with known political identities are all members of
either the African National Congress or the Pan Africanist Congress.
Narrowing the apparent selective favouritism further is another factor:
most of the freed men appear to have hailed from the Eastern Cape, a
traditional stronghold of the ANC. But, worse still, the 33 include men
who were refused amnesty by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission
(TRC) for common law murders which they sought unsuccessfully to
present as politically-motivated killings.
Mbeki and Maduna find themselves buffeted by criticism from people
occupying widely different positions on the ideological continuum. The
most prominent of these critics is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who, as
chairman of the TRC, handed over the TRC's five volume report to former
President Nelson Mandela in October 1998. Tutu speaks forthrightly of
the pardons making "a mockery of the TRC". There is no evidence that
Mbeki seeks that result. But there are suspicions that he may be
striving to rectify what he sees as the fundamental error of the TRC
findings. His quarrel is the TRC conclusion that the ANC, while
fighting a "just war", did not always pursue its laudable aims through
"just means". In the TRC's judgment, the ANC's moral transgressions
include: its targeting of civilians; its assassination of suspected
"collaborators"; its torture and execution of prisoners in detention
camps. It should be noted en passant that the term "collaborator" was
used loosely and often hung around the necks of conservative black
politicians who opposed the ANC's "people's war" and its advocacy of
economic sanctions.
The bitter exchanges between Mbeki and Tutu still ring in the ears.
Mbeki's declamation that "no member of my organisation, the ANC, can
ever concur with the scurrilous attempts to criminalise the liberation
struggle" jostles for attention with Tutu's rejoinder, "We can't assume
that yesterday's oppressed will not become tomorrow's oppressors". But
the TRC, for all the moral authority of its chairman, has not produced
a sacred text that cannot be changed one iota. Mbeki, in assessing the
situation nearly four years on, is entitled to reflect on whether
further steps should be taken to advance reconciliation.
If, however, Mbeki has embarked on an undeclared exercise to correct a
perceived imbalance in the TRC findings, and, more to the point, in the
work of its Amnesty Committee, by using his presidential prerogative
partially, he is almost certain to annoy more people than he appeases.
When he pardons prisoners he does so in the name of all South Africans,
not only those who support the ANC and the PAC (which, incidentally,
detects an ANC bias in the release of the 33). If, in contrast, the
releases are merely the first tranche in a politically balanced and
finely calibrated extension of the amnesty process started by the TRC,
some good may result. But a difficult and potentially perilous process
lies ahead.
The journey is made even more hazardous by another consideration. The
need to address the TRC's recommendation that reparations, in the form
of financial assistance, should be made to properly identified victims
of human rights abuse. So far the ANC-led government has done little or
nothing beyond making an urgent interim payment of between R2000 and
R5000 to selected victims. The TRC proposal that recognised victims
should be paid between R17 000 and R22 000 a year for six years has
been studiously ignored. Concern for the fate of prisoners should not
blind the Mbeki administration to the rights of the victims of past
brutality.