SOUTH AFRICA'S former president, Mr F.W. de Klerk, yesterday accepted blame for apartheid crimes under minority rule and one of his generals acknowledged there had been "gross violation of human rights".
Gen Constand Viljoen, former chief of the apartheid defence force and now leader of the right wing Freedom Front party, told Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission: "We certainly made a grave mistake when we allowed our political leaders to ignore the need for a timely settlement. So we take collective responsibility for the situation that developed."
Gen Viljoen, saying he represented "ethnic Afrikaners" pressing for self determination within South Africa, said the refusal of the then ruling National Party to address the demands of blacks "invited" the African National Congress to take up arms and forge an alliance with Communists.
"I will not attempt to rationalise what is generally called gross violation of human rights. They were wrong," he said.
Gen Viljoen's presentation to the commission was the first of a series due to be made this week by political parties seeking to explain their actions during the apartheid years.
Mr De Klerk, current leader of the National Party and the country's last white president, said yesterday in a television interview: "I'm looking forward to the opportunity to make a submission, to put what happened from our vantage point in the proper context. Part of that will also be to accept overall responsibility for many things which went wrong.
Written submissions have already been made by the ANC and the National Party. The submissions will only be made public when party leaders give oral testimony later in the week.
Testifying yesterday, Gen Viljoen reaffirmed the Freedom Front's request for the cut off date for amnesty to be extended beyond December 6th, 1993. Under the present arrangement the perpetrators of political violence after that date, including bombs attacks by Afrikaner nationalists on the eve of the 1994 election, do not qualify for amnesty or indemnity.
The Freedom Front, which offered Afrikaner nationalists a nonviolent means of striving for a separate Afrikaner state, was only formed after the December 1993 cut off date, Gen Viljoen said.
He noted that Afrikaner nationalists had already been prosecuted and jailed for their roles in political violence, while people who had committed worse deeds had been granted amnesty.
Gen Viljoen told the commission that he would have liked to encourage his followers to testify but could not do so "without the sure knowledge that they will not incriminate themselves."
Stressing that an accord between the Freedom Front and the ANC, signed shortly before the 1994 election, had agreed that the question of indemnity should be reconsidered, Gen Viljoen said he would have to reconsider his position as a leader committed to "reconciliatory politics' if the cut off date was not reappraised.