SOUTH AFRICA's official effort to come to terms with its bitter recent past begins today, when Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his Truth and Reconciliation Commission hold their first public hearings in the town of East London.
For four days, the commission's committee on human rights violations is to hear testimony on cases of torture murder and "disappearance" dating from the 34 year violent struggle for and against apartheid. At some future date the commission's amnesty committee could be called upon to pardon the perpetrators, if they can be persuaded to admit to their offences. What will happen in the meantime is anybody's guess.
Somewhere between a trial and an inquiry, the truth commission is an ungainly beast with unproven teeth - its exact powers and working methods will have to be determined as it goes along. About the only clear thing at present is that the commission will have three committees: one to grant amnesty to those who confess; one to hear testimony; and a third to decide on reparation, commemoration and rehabilitation.
Each committee will have regional offices and its members will tour the country's nine provinces, possibly several times. The Eastern Cape office alone has taken 250 statements to date, only 28 of which will be heard this week.
Nationally it is impossible to quantify the number of human rights abuses committed in the apartheid years. The ANC has accused former government forces of killing 73 political prisoners and about 220 anti apartheid activists. It in turn has been blamed for several civilian bombings and the deaths of hundreds of blacks accused of dissent or collaboration, as well as several dozen of its own fighters who died in detention camps in exile.
Thousands more people died as a direct of indirect result of the struggle, and lesser human rights abuses were commonplace. The commission has so far received some 2,000 applications for amnesty, most of them it seems from servants of the apartheid state. Many more are believed to be lying low, waiting to see what happens to those who have already applied.
Equipped with the confessions of amnesty applicants, the testimony of victims and the findings of its own team of investigators, the commission's ultimate task is to prepare a report setting out - as far as can be established - who did what to whom.
At the same time it is itself under heavy fire. Today's much hyped launch was overshadowed last week by a legal challenge from the relatives of several prominent victims of apartheid's security police, including the murdered black consciousness leader, Steve Biko.
They argued that South Africa's constitutional court should halt the proceedings because the commission's power to grant amnesty contravened the victims' right to seek justice and compensation. While the court refused to block the commission's launch, the case will still be heard at some later date and it is unlikely to be the only legal challenge the commission will face. With only two years to investigate thousands of political crimes, it is facing an uphill and possibly thankless task.
Part of the hard won 1993 agreement which led to the demise of white rule, the commission has been dogged by controversy ever since it was first mooted as a mechanism to heal the wounds of apartheid. The country's former rulers of the National Party reluctantly agreed to the commission as a means of obtaining an amnesty for apartheid's torturers and killers. The ANC, whose supporters bore the brunt of the white state's repression, agreed because it did not feel strong enough to impose Nuremberg style trials on South Africa's white led police and army.
Now, with the hearings about to begin, there are many on both sides of the argument who would be happy to see the commission fail. Many whites, eager to forget the past, now prefer to see the commission as an ANC witchhunt they could do without. Many on the "liberation" side are angry that the commission can - indeed must - grant amnesty to any and all political offenders who come forward and confess their crime. They do not accept that apartheid's murderers are entitled to the same amnesty as those who killed in the name of liberation. They would rather see their former tormentors in a criminal court.
Among these is Mr Marius Schoon, an Afrikaans ANC activist who spent several years exiled in Ireland after his wife and child were killed by a parcel bomb. Although he remains a member off ANC, Mr Schoon is publicly opposing the commission and attempting to sue the security policy spy, Mr Craig Williamson, who has publicly admitted that he sent the parcel. Mr Schoon makes it clear that he does not want to be reconciled with the murderer of his family.
The commission is even being questioned now by academics and "liberals" who might have been expected to support its worthy aims. Lawyers worry that the commission might not have the time or resources to properly test evidence. Last week Prof Hermann Giliomee, a historian from the University of Cape Town, said he was worried that the "quality of truth" produced might prove poor.
"Will one be forced to make negative comparisons between the commission's truth and judicial truth or historical truth?" he wondered.
The depth of criticism levelled at his commission appears to have stung Archbishop Tutu who said last week that he believed the majority of ordinary South Africans supported it and its goal of peaceful reconciliation. Having agreed to forego a comfortable retreat in the United States so that he could chair the commission, the Nobel prize winning clergyman has invested much of his formidable reputation in the commission's success. Last week he remarked: "I would rather have been in Atlanta, enjoying my retirement."
At the same time, however, the commission began to release statements that emphasised, by accident or design, the few teeth that it does possess. The commission's vice chairman, Dr Alex Boraine, said that the names of human rights violators would probably be made public in this week's hearings, which were primarily intended simply to put complaints on the record.
The commission's representative in the Eastern Cape, Rev Bongani Finca, said that several of the people identified by victims in the cases before the human rights committee this week were "household names". On Wednesday last the commission let it be known that that it was already informing those concerned that they were facing public denunciation. Unable to jail or even censure offenders, the commission can only discomfit them by airing their crimes in public. That process could begin sooner than anybody thought.