Part of Tutu’s legacy at stake if TRC prosecutions don’t commence

As the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent more than two years listening to victims and perpetrators recount the horrors exacted in the name of apartheid.

The toll it took on him was clear. On the second day, he broke down in tears while listening to by then wheelchair-bound Snqokwana Ernest Malgas describe his torture at the hands of the notorious Security Branch. In an interview years later, he was asked how he had managed to get through the hearings. He said prayer had sustained him – but described them as “terrible”.

In 1998, the TRC handed its final report to then-president Nelson Mandela, recommending prosecuting authorities take criminal action against more than 300 individuals. But more than two decades later, none of them have been convicted.

In ruling on an application brought by former Security Branch officer Joao Rodrigues, who was in 2018 charged with activist Ahmed Timol’s death but died before going on trial, the High Court in Pretoria in 2019 found the delays in these prosecutions were attributable to political interference.

It recommended National Director of Public Prosecutions Shamila Batohi conduct an investigation. And the Supreme Court of Appeal upheld that ruling.

Finally, the wheels of justice seem to be moving. Earlier this year, Justice Minister Ronald Lamola told parliament a judge would be appointed to chair a probe in line with the courts’ rulings. Batohi announced a special division headed by Deputy National Director Advocate Rodney de Kock had been established to handle TRC cases. But time is running out for the victims and their loved ones – if it hasn’t already. The Archbishop was vocal in his calls for these cases to be pursued and urgently.

In 2014, he penned a piece titled Tutu: ‘Unfinished business’ of the TRC’s healing in the Mail & Guardian. In it, he was scathing of the inaction that followed the TRC’s report.

“I do not believe that Mandela would have left the commission’s business so scandalously unfinished, as his successors have,” he said, adding that “by ‘unfinished business’ I refer to the fact that the level of reparation recommended by the commission was not enacted; the proposal on a once-off wealth tax as a mechanism to effect the transfer of resources was ignored, and those who were declined amnesty were not prosecuted”.

“I believe truth is central to any healing process because in order to forgive, one needs to know whom one is forgiving, and why. But healing is a process. How we deal with the truth after its telling defines the success of the process. And this is where we have fallen tragically short.

“By choosing not to follow through on the commission’s recommendations, government not only compromised the commission’s contribution to the process, but the process itself.”

In a 2018 statement issued by the Legal Resources Centre on behalf of the team behind the re-opening of the Timol inquest, Tutu was quoted as saying: “The families of the victims have waited far too long for justice.”

Indeed they have, indeed the whole country has. And to make them wait any longer would be a disservice to their loved ones’ legacies and to the legacy of the Archbishop.

READ NEXT: Cradock Four families ask court to compel state to reveal records