just want to quote to you to refresh your memory. What this ruling says is that, “judicial justice and
the TRC need one another”.
What is the implication for Zimbabwe?
You know for us coming from South Africa our legal system was totally compromised. We had the
rule of law but it was the wrong law. And judges slavishly followed the law and executed
hundreds of activists through the death penalty. So the rule of law can be very violent and if you
come out of a system where the rule of law has been compromised, how do you restore its
credibility? Judge Mohammed says, “Most of what transpired in South Africa’s shameful history is
shrouded in secrecy. Secrecy and authoritarianism have concealed the truth in little crevices of
obscurity in our history. Records are not easily accessible, witnesses are often unknown, dead,
unavailable, or unwilling. All that effectively remains is the truth of wounded memories of loved
ones sharing instinctive suspicions.”
The TRC addresses this problem by encouraging these survivors and the dependents of the
tortured and wounded, the maimed and the dead to unburden their grief publicly, to receive
collective recognition of a new nation that they were wronged, and crucially, to help them
discover, what did in truth happen to their loved ones. That truth which the victims of repression
seek and are desperate to know is in the circumstances much more likely to be forthcoming if
those responsible for such monstrous deeds are encouraged to disclose the whole truth with the
incentive that they will not receive punishment, which they undoubtedly deserve if they did do
these things. With that incentive, what might unfold are objectives fundamental to the ethos of a
new constitutional order. Both victims and the culprits who walk on the historic bridge described
in the epilogue of the interim constitution will hobble more than walk to the future with heavy
and dragged steps delaying and impeding a rapid and enthusiastic transition, which is the vision
of the epilogue.
So restorative justice was seen as creating the condition for the restoration of the credibility of the
rule of law, which is being discredited by revealing the truth, coming clean and starting with a
new dispensation. And if that process is seen as a cover up like the Marikana Commission now,
then you are not taking the nation forward to the future. It is vital that a new beginning is made in
such a commission. So, ‘the day after, the morning after’ all this happened: Government
understood the monumental clash between the project of Thabo Mbeki to rewrite South African
Truth Commissions: the Best Practices
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