The report is not final. Thousands of hearings are still to take place in which cops, army officers, soldiers, and others are applying for amnesty for acts they undertook during that period. Under the TRC's guidelines, people who fully disclose their acts can be granted amnesty from prosecution. Out of a total of 7,000 amnesty applications, about 150 amnesties have been granted to date. Two thousand cases have yet to be heard.
The TRC report describes apartheid -the system of racist segregation imposed by the rulers of this country into the 1990s - as a crime against humanity. It says "the state, in the form of the South African government, the civil service and its security forces, was, in the period 1960-94, the primary perpetrator of gross violations of human rights in South Africa and, from 1974, in southern Africa."
The commission, however, attempts to give its report the veneer of supra-class morality, equating the crimes of the apartheid state with acts carried out by those involved in the struggle to overthrow it. "The vast majority, if not all, of the gross violations of human rights that were perpetrated ... happened at the hands either of those who sought to defend the unjust apartheid and racist dispensation or those who sought to resist and ultimately overthrow that system," says commission chairperson Desmond Tutu, an Anglican archbishop.
This approach angers many working people who fought apartheid, including those whose friends and relatives died at the hands of the regime.
"Without that struggle, we wouldn't be where we are today. People lost their lives -it was a war. We struggled then and we still have to struggle," said Ellen Matlakala Morudu, whose son was active in the ANC's military underground in Mamelodi township. He was killed by the police in 1987 and his body dumped in an unknown location.
The report accused the ruling African National Congress, which led the democratic movement, of bombing civilian targets, a land mine campaign in the mid-1980s, the execution of mutineers in ANC military camps, and the killing of suspected collaborators in townships. The ANC made voluminous submissions to the commission accepting political responsibility for its conduct in the war against apartheid. It also undertook internal disciplinary hearings to deal with cases of torture in its camps in southern Africa. The TRC's findings "show an extraordinary refusal on the part of the commission to locate itself in the context of the ... struggle against apartheid, both within and outside the country," said an October 30 statement from the ANC. Unable to obtain a hearing to raise these concerns with the commission, it made an unsuccessful 11th hour court bid to block the report's release.
No apologies for revolutionary struggle
"The commission is now over and the ANC is still going to be
around to ensure that the glorious chapter of our struggle is
not depicted in such a way that future generations should be
ashamed of it," said ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe.
"Since its formation the ANC meticulously tried to avoid loss
of life, but we were a revolutionary organization and we are
not apologetic about that."
Former president F.W. de Klerk won a court ruling forcing the TRC to blank out a section in its report accusing him of human rights abuses, though he is implicated in other sections of the document. Among those named as responsible for human rights violations are former president P.W. Botha, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and former general Constand Viljoen.
An entire chapter is devoted to the conduct of ANC Women's League president Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and her Mandela United Football Club, which the TRC says functioned as a "private vigilante unit."
The report covers the military actions of the apartheid regime from 1960 to 1990, a period during which it sought to maintain racial domination over the whole of southern Africa in general and smash the ANC in particular.
By the 1980s, the report says, the South African Defense Force was involved in various levels of warfare including Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and organizing cross-border raids, hit squads, and coups in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and the Seychelles.
Untold numbers of people were killed in these actions - including 100,000 Angolans estimated to have starved to death as a result of war-bred famine. In the 1978 attack on Kassinga in Angola alone, South African troops slaughtered 624 people, most of them civilians.
Other report findings for the period 1960-1990 include:
More than 2,500 people were hanged to death by the state - 1,154 between 1976 and 1985. Some 95 percent of all people executed were African.
Approximately 80,000 people were jailed without trial.
Torture "was condoned by the South African government as official practice."
The regime initiated a chemical and biological warfare program in the 1980s and 1990s in which "cholera, botulism, anthrax, chemical poisoning, and the large-scale manufacture of drugs of abuse, allegedly for purposes of crowd control, were amongst the projects of the program.
Moreover, chemicals, poisons, and lethal micro-organisms were produced for use against individuals, and `applicators' (murder weapons) developed for their administration."
At the hearings on the chemical warfare program, Daan Goosen, who worked on the biological warfare program for the army, said that in 1983 the government began to search for a drug that would be effective against "pigmented people only."
"Where amnesty has not been sought or has been denied," the TRC says, "prosecution should be considered." The report has been forwarded to the Attorney General for action.