Truth and Reconciliation Commission

South African government commission established in August 1994 to investigate state-sanctioned murders and other human rights abuses under the former apartheid regime. Its chairman, since 1995, has been former Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The aims of the Commission, as its title suggests, are to discover the truth about what happened in the era of apartheid and, in so doing, to bring about a reconciliation between both sides of the divide.

The Commission was given the power to offer amnesties (pardons) for politically-motivated crimes committed before 5 December 1993, when the transitional, multiracial government effectively replaced the existing parliament. In setting it up, however, Justice Minister, Dullah Omar, said the Commission's investigations would include abuses committed by liberation groups, including the African National Congress (ANC), but it would ‘not equate those who fought in the struggle against apartheid with those who participated in all kinds of activities in order to keep apartheid in place’.

Following the virtual end of the apartheid system in South Africa and the election victory by the African National Congress (ANC) in May 1994, its president, Nelson Mandela, became the country's president. In his inauguration address to the nation he said he was humbled to lead the country ‘out of the valley of darkness’. The theme of his speech was national reconciliation and he committed himself to building a ‘rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world’.

After months of, sometimes heated, discussion about the Commission's composition, on 29 November 1995 Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace laureate and head of the Anglican Church in South Africa, was appointed chairman and on 22 November, after 18 months' labouring by both houses of parliament and its committees, a 63-page draft constitution was published. Archbishop Tutu announced his retirement in June 1996, but said he would continue to head the Commission.

As the Commission began to hear evidence there were calls from people who had been oppressed by the apartheid system to remove its powers to grant amnesties, but these calls were rejected by South Africa's Constitutional Court. In a dramatic statement to the Commission in October 1996, former members of the police maintained that former president P W Botha, and some of his ministers, had ordered state violence in the 1980s. Botha himself refused to appear before the Commission and, after a private meeting with Archbishop Tutu, issued a written statement in which he said he would never apologize for apartheid, and described the policies of the present government as a ‘fierce, unforgiving assault on the Afrikaner’. In January 1998 he was charged with contempt of the Commission and was forced to appear before a court.

The deadline for the receipt of applications for amnesty was fixed as 10 May 1997, but hundreds continued to pour in, and the drama before the Commission unfolded as the killers of Steve Biko and former apartheid ministers gave their testimonies. Winnie Mandela, former wife of President Mandela, was also required to defend accusations of killings allegedly instigated by her. Starting in October 1999, the Commission heard the testimony of Eugene de Kock, a former commander of the South African police force's counter insurgency unit, accused of human rights abuses during apartheid. In December 1999 he was refused amnesty and jailed for 262 years.