S. Africa arrests put emphasis on justice, then reconciliation

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 15, 1995 by Carole Collins

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa--South Africa, like many former dictatorships, faces the difficult question of how, in a newly free nation, to balance the need for reconciliation against victims' demands for punishments of crimes committed by old regimes.

But the Dec. 1 murder indictment of Gen. Magnus Malan, former South African defense minister, and other senior apartheid-era security bosses, placed this nation on a very different course from most others confronted with the dilemma.

The indictment charges that Malan and most of former President F.W. de Klerk's other top security men worked with Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi to create anti-ANC death squads in the late 1980s. The murder charges grow out of a 1987 massacre at a prayer meeting. The indictment gains added credibility from the fact that it was independently prepared by a provincial prosecutor who has had a frosty relationship with the African National Congress, a left-wing, anti-apartheid organization.

Until the security men were arrested in November, South Africa seemed destined to follow the Latin American model for "truth commissions": Apartheidera crimes would be investigated and exposed, but perpetrators would be immunized against prosecution.

Catholic leaders were among the most eloquent critics of this approach, arguing that total amnesty for apartheid-era killers and torturers sends the wrong moral message.

"What is the value in getting people to confess their sins, (if) they then pay--no punishment, no price?" asked Fr. Buti Thlogale, general secretary of the Southern African Catholic Bishops' Conference, during an August interview. Fr. Sean O'Leary, Justice and Peace chief for the conference, said that a commission that would provide amnesty to all who confess would "make it too easy for the perpetrators," potentially setting the stage for vigilante action by victims' survivors and supporters. The indictment, which coincided with the announcement that Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu will head South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, should relieve the concerns of those who felt their country was headed toward undeserved secular absolution for unrepentant architects of apartheid violence. But it raises new worries about the stability of the patchwork of compromises that helped soothe white fears about the transition to majority rule.

The centerpiece of that compromise was creation of a government of national unity including the two top opposition figures--de Klerk as a deputy president and Buthelezi as home affairs minister--and other leaders from their parties. Now, however, Security Minister Sydney Mufamadi says that government investigations of apartheid-era crimes will continue wherever they may lead, even if de Klerk, now a deputy president, must himself be charged.

Further worries have been raised by Malan's prediction--seen by many as a thinly veiled threat of violence from the still heavily armed, white far right--that the arrests of himself and the others would bring "democracy in South Africa to its darkest hour ever." Seen by many as the man who did more than anyone else in the 1980s to keep South Africa off the path to democracy, Malan proclaimed himself an innocent, moderate, Christian supporter of "family values" and said he won't go before the truth commission to seek indemnification because he has no crimes to confess.