PRESENTATION ON SOUTH AFRICA Dr. Fanie du Toit: The Morning After: What Happens after the work of the Commission: Recommendations and Implications. I remember making a phone call to the office of the Truth Commission in South Africa just after the report had been sent to President Mandela in 1998. The phone just rang unanswered. Because at that point our commissioners Yasmin Suikah and others were all international figures touring the world. They were telling the story. And there was very little left back home both institutionally and in terms of personnel or staff to actually do anything because its recommendations had been handed over to the government and now, we all assumed there would be political will to implement these recommendations. Well, we were wrong. Fifteen years later the legacy of the Truth Commission in South Africa is under pressure because of the failure to systematically implement what were 45 pages of very carefully crafted recommendations. We failed to have a follow up mechanism that would be at least semiautonomous and that would keep the recommendations on the agenda of the government. This has not happened once since 2003 when the final two volumes of the report were finally handed over to President Mbeki and to parliament. The first five volumes were handed to President Mandela in 1998, then followed five years of on-going amnesty hearings, and started, but not finished, court cases. When all of that was finished, President Mbeki also received the report in 2003 and announced a package of measures and reparations that the state would pay. It was nothing like what the TRC had recommended. The TRC recommended something like the basic minimum wage over six years for the victims and the government decided to give a once Truth Commissions: the Best Practices 63