The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's afrocentric justice

The preparation of the first general and non-racial elections did not happen without tension which also affected the black parties themselves, especially the relation between the ANC and the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party.

The TRC has dealt with those cases including the many violent acts committed particularly during that preparatory period, both by blacks and whites.

'General' Nico Prinsloo, member of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), testified, among others, to the violence aimed at enforcing the creation of a Volkstaat - an independent Afrikaans state. Twenty people were killed in a bomb attack and many others were injured. The TRC was particularly interested in who had ordered the attack and had directed it. Other Afrikaaner participants also testified to this terrorist act and they even gave the names of those responsible for it. The courts had already previously condemned several of the offenders guilty of this crime, the perpetrators and organisers of which were currently not being granted an amnesty by the Commission since it did not consider these testimonies to be complete and truthful. Therefore, the verdicts were not abolished (Amnesty Decisions: No. 1004/96).

However, the case of C.J.Lottering was of a differnt nature. This man had shot a black taxi driver only to prove that he was ready to fulfill every single order that he was called upon to fulfill by the leaders of the extremist Order of Death, a white organisation of which he was a member. Mr. Lottering was sentenced on charges of murder, theft and his subsequent escape from confinement. The TRC amnestied him only for his escape from prison. The corresponding number of years in detention was thus shortened respectively.

Until now, the ratio of the total number of amnestied persons has amounted to one white person versus three blacks.

In 1993, one must mention the amnesty of three black youngsters who had stoned to death the American scholarship student Amy Biehl in the black township of Gugulethu near Cape Town caused a great stir. Amy was on her way to the township by car at a time when various young people in a highly excited state were on their way home following a stormy meeting of the Pan-African Student Union whose participants were chanting what was a very popular slogan: 'One settler, one bullet'. Two out of four killers were university students. Everyone of them had been amnestied because in the Commission?s view their act had been perpetrated due the 'spirit of the times' and had therefore been 'under the direct influence of the corresponding agitation of their political organisation'. Consequently they were released from prison.

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