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De Klerk and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

© Jessica Powers

In the early 1990's, when South Africa faced the task of becoming a democratic nation that allowed all citizens -- black, white, and coloured -- to participate in the government, it had to find a way to heal the wounds caused by over forty years of apartheid (the system of rule that segregated Africans from whites and institutionalized racism). The method chosen was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a commission that listened to the victims tell the stories of oppression and abuse. Then it held hearings for individuals who had committed political crimes, holding out the possibility of amnesty for some of those individuals.

For those involved, the Truth and Reconciliation hearings became a time of both healing and ripping apart. Antjie Krog, one of the journalists who covered the hearings from the beginning to the end, described how journalists became a puddle, a mess, during the months that they heard the victims' stories: "And this is how we end up at the daily press conferences -- bewildered and close to tears at the feet of Archbishop [Desmond] Tutu [who directed the Commission]…." (Krog 45).

Journalists who flew in for a day or two were just as bewildered -- not because of the hearings but because, as one Belgian journalist stated, "'South African journalists keep on bursting into tears all around me in the hall'" (Krog 46). For these journalists, the hearings became a process of discovering each other's humanity, of accepting their own collective and individual guilt as Afrikaners, and of extending forgiveness and understanding.

But for F. W. de Klerk, the president who released Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and led the country while it made the transition to its first democratic election, the hearings did not seem to lead to reconciliation and forgiveness. In his autobiography, de Klerk describes the hearings as if they were a witch hunt and he expresses surprise and horror that colleagues have "confessed" to things that were not true.

To accusations that he was involved in or knew about secret police activities and the government supported war against the African National Congress, he claimed complete innocence. Indeed, he stated that such accusations are "irrational" (de Klerk 335).

He accused the Truth and Reconciliation of seeking out lies. The only way he could have satisfied the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he said, would have been to make a “false confession that I had been aware of – and thus condoned – the reprehensible actions of groups like the Civil Cooperation Bureau and the Vlakplaas Unit,” two groups formulated outside the normal jurisdiction of the security forces with special mandates to wage a secret war against ANC members (de Klerk 382).

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