S.Africa should try apartheid era torturers-UN body

[struggle4progress]

Fri 24 Nov 2006 1:20 PM ET
GENEVA, Nov 24 (Reuters) - South Africa should put on trial those suspected of torturing prisoners under apartheid and pay compensation to victims, a United Nations human rights body said on Friday.

While welcoming the work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which probed apartheid era crimes, the U.N. Committee against Torture said "de facto impunity" persisted for those responsible for acts of torture.

"(South Africa) should consider bringing to justice persons responsible for the institutionalisation of torture as an instrument of oppression to perpetuate apartheid," the committee said in its first report on South Africa.

Its conclusions were issued at the end of a three-week meeting at which its 10 independent experts examined the records of seven signatory countries to the 1984 anti-torture treaty -- Burundi, Guyana, Hungary, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Tajikistan ...

http://today.reuters.com/News/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=L24623259

[sweetheart]

1. a good precedent for going after the drugs nazis

After the drugs war is overturned, the worst violators, torturers and police state abusers
who've imprisoned millions, those persons should face prosecution for crimes against humanity,
and happily, south africa's precedent will help bring more justice.

[krispos42]

2. Oh, they're going to put them on trial

For a horrible second I though the South Africans were going to 'try out' the old torturers again. Taking a page from BushCo...

[cap]

3. well, there goes a contingent of Blackwater mercenaries..

a bunch of them came from South Africa

[gratuitous]

4. Torturers were given a chance to face their victims

In his book "No Future Without Forgiveness," Desmond Tutu detailed the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, which were instituted after the apartheid regime was dismantled. Torturers were given the chance to confess their crimes, face their surviving victims, and express their regret, publicly and to the people they had wronged. There were some other conditions, but basically the idea was to find out as much as possible about the excesses of the apartheid regime, and bring some kind of reconciliation between brutalizers and their victims. Torturers who did not appear before the Commission were not supposed to be granted amnesty.

It's not clear from the story, but it's strongly implied that the UN is trying to get South Africa to follow through on the Commission work and hold responsible those who did not appear. I hope that happens.

[FarrenH]

5. Spot on

There are a whole lot of people who have amnesty despite their horrible crimes. To jail them now would make a mockery of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was all about and discourage other countries emerging from misrule from doing the same thing.

The TRC gave us the opportunity to hear the worst crimes of our past from the mouths of the people that committed them. Apart from the reconciliation and whatever healing the victims may have gotten out of it, it played another role going forward. It gave us an honest account of history that later generations seeking to diminish the horror of Apartheid could not dispute. On South African web forums today you can already find disgruntled racist former South Africans (who've mostly gone to live in other countries) already trying to rewrite history in the same way holocaust deniers do, speaking in glowing terms of how well Blacks were treated under Apartheid and how they were better off than they are now. The work of the Truth Commission ensured that when white supremacists try to deceive future generations, there will be incontrovertible evidence of Apartheid's crimes, from the mouths of the criminals.

In return, they were given guaranteed amnesty. It was a trade off between immediate and long-term justice being served.

Many, however, were unrepentant after Apartheid collapsed and to this day still see the democratic election of the ANC as a triumph of Black "Communism"* over Western Civilization. Many refused to recognize the legitimacy of the TRC and considered answering for their crimes, even if it meant only telling the truth before their victims, as unacceptable capitulation. Those people have no protection against prosecution.

*While the ANC to this day maintains a political alliance with the tiny South African Communist Party, the ANC has implemented mostly neo-liberal economic policies. Many white conservatives in SA suffer from the same mental deficiency that many conservatives in the states appear to suffer from: an inability to distinguish liberals, greens or socialists from communists.

[struggle4progress]

6. The Afrikaaner nationalists were always a nasty lot, from the days

when they flew their triskelion based on the Nazi swastika, to the days when they copied the Nazi plan for Africa into their own country, through the days of the forced relocations of whole communities by thugs armed with machine-guns in the 60s and 70s ...

I expect the ANC maintains relations with the South African Communist Party in part because the communists had an ideological hostility towards racism and opposed apartheid consistently, and in a practical way, from the beginning. Communists went jail for opposing the system, just as Mandela did. The Marxist left in South Africa also played a critical role in demystifying the economic underpinnings of ideological racism and in documenting the full scale removals (as in the famous Surplus People's Project).