South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission tended to gloss overANC violence in a way that was politically convenient. A similar commissionin Northern Ireland would run the risk of doing more damage than good,writes, Justin O'Brien
The sprawling township of Katlehong on the outskirts of Johannesburg still bears the scars of the past. The no man's land that separated the mainly African National Congress (ANC) residents from the hostels housing the migrant workers supporting the Inkatha Freedom Party has been filled with shacks.
But the bullet-riddled walls and burnt-out houses remain, testament to the violence that tore the East Rand apart in the final days of apartheid. In the final months before the first democratic election in 1994, more than 1,200 people died in this township alone.
"This was a killing field," says Robert McBride, a veteran of the township violence and now a senior official in South Africa's Department of Foreign Affairs. "The hostels were basically fortresses of apartheid's surrogate forces."
Although the ANC was officially on ceasefire and the National Party engaged in negotiations for a peaceful transition to democracy, in the townships a proxy war raged throughout the early 1990s, a war in which Robert McBride played a pivotal role.
He makes no apology for his past. Something of a hate figure for whites because of his involvement in the bombing of a bar in Durban in 1986, McBride was released from prison as part of the negotiations between the ANC and the National Party. He returned immediately to the maelstrom.
"I had just come out of Death Row - released from prison and from what was going on here I had to come back and defend the people. It was apartheid's last stand. Evidence has come out in the truth commission and in subsequent prosecutions that some of the notorious units of the state provided weapons to the hostels directly," he says.
The truth is at once more complex and more ambivalent. As the violence raged in the townships, the ANC used a variety of front organisations and alliances with groups not on ceasefire to create violent self-defence units (SDUs).
McBride received amnesty from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission for his role in directing violence in the townships. He rejects any suggestion that the ANC's own role in the violence engulfing the industrial heartlands needed to be investigated.
"The liberation movements co-operated in defence of the people," is the stock refrain to repeated questioning of ANC abuse.
The commission appeared to agree with this analysis. It accepted in its final report the ANC's argument that control was decentralised, thereby militating against leadership control and responsibility for directing reprisals.
The final report of the commission found that most gross human rights violations between 1960 and May 1994 had been committed by "the former state through its security and law enforcement agencies . . . and in collusion with certain other political groupings, most notably the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)."
In contrast to the vehement denunciation of the security forces and the Inkatha, the commission concluded: "The ANC leadership should have been aware of the consequences of training and arming members of SDUs in a volatile situation and in which they had little control over the actions of such members." A veil was thereby placed over what abuses were conducted by the ANC during the transition to democracy, a period in which more people died in black-on-black violence than any other kind in the 40 years of conflict covered by the commission.
South Africa may have required truth but it was a politically self-serving truth designed to smooth the transfer from one elite to another, placing the blame for communal violence on the past regime and minimising the scale of the abuse that undoubtedly occurred within the black community itself.
This failure has contributed significantly to criticism of the commission. Far from paving the way towards reconciliation, the commission stands accused of amounting to little more than a propaganda exercise that replaces one bogus version of history with another.
"The commission never got to the root of the cold blooded murder of about 400 Inkatha Freedom Party officials in the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal. They never got to the root of the so-called necklace murders, and thousands of people were threatened with this," argues the former president and Nobel laureate F.W. de Klerk.
IN ITS defence, what the former president omits to mention is that the ability of the commission to investigate the rationale behind the township violence was compromised by a cabinet decision in 1993 to shred masses of secret documents that could have helped to pinpoint political responsibility.
The non-co-operation of Inkatha, which advised its members not to testify or seek amnesty, was also debilitating, as was the failure of the ANC to persuade its activists to provide full disclosure to the commission. But Mr De Klerk maintains that the commission approached the conflict with an overtly political agenda to legitimise the violence of the ANC.
This allegation of bias finds expression in a tortuously written section on the abuses conducted by the liberation movement. It claims that although the ANC was fighting a "just war" against a system condemned internationally as a crime against humanity, it breached international humanitarian law and committed gross rights violations.
The commission acknowledged that "it was not the policy of the ANC to attack and kill political opponents", but "in the absence of adequate command structures and in the context of widespread state-sponsored or directed violence and a climate of political intolerance, SDU members often took the law into their own hands."
Responsibility for the violence in townships like Katlehong is reduced to a weak charge of collective moral and political responsibility. The primary blame is placed on an easier target: the South African police and the military personnel involved in specific incidents.
The focus on victims of state aggression may have had a cathartic effect but it also served to obscure the crucial issue of why the descent into violence occurred. And it is this wider issue of accountability that is at the heart of criticism of the entire commission process in which justice was traded for truth.
The commission generated an enormous archive that documents the worst excesses of the apartheid system on individuals. Its findings cannot be regarded as definitive, however, or immune to the political context in which it operated. Truth and justice are conditioned by political realities.
It is this failure that undermines the argument that a truth commission can provide an objective account of the nature of conflict. The danger for South Africa is that the vast archive, now stored in government archives in Pretoria, will generate a new orthodoxy that underplays the role of political actors in directing violence.
Victims were provided the possibility of confronting the perpetrators in order to establish culpability.The victims' decision to forgo any legal right to issue civil prosecution ensured that the individual act of forgiveness became part of the solution. The survivors underwrote the political compromise, giving politicians the space to manoeuvre.
That space simply does not exist in Northern Ireland, where there has been already been a steady erosion of popular support for the moral compromise at the heart of the agreement which sees those castigated as terrorists at the heart of government.
In the Northern Ireland conflict, where more than 50 per cent of the victims died at the hands of the republican movement and where the demands for inquiries have centred mainly on state violence, there is a danger that even a limited truth commission could degenerate into a fraudulent rewriting of history.
Unless the commission could compel attendance by the paramilitaries, a retrospective justificationfor violence would arise that distorts reality. Given the lack of a clear victor in Northern Ireland, any attempt to institute a similar process needs to take into consideration the failure as well as the success of the South African model.
Justin O'Brien is current affairs editor at UTV