The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa is an imaginative and valiant attempt to deal with the profoundly divisive and unjust inheritance of apartheid after the peaceful transition to democratic rule. Its comprehensive report has surprised the commission's critics by exercising its judgments on culpability for human rights abuses without fear or favour. In the long term those who yesterday rejected its findings may come to agree that this courageous approach to historical truth will indeed contribute to the objective of reconciliation intended by the post-apartheid government which set it up.
The report finds that apartheid was a crime against humanity and that the struggle against it was a just war. That is a central judgment, argued carefully and scrupulously from the evidence presented in some 21,000 reports of human rights abuses over the period 1960-94, rather than on the pervasive political rhetoric so characteristic of the anti-apartheid struggle. It finds that the primary perpetrators of these abuses were the apartheid state and the National Party which governed it. Although legal action by its former leader, Mr F. W. de Klerk, has led to deletions in the published text relating to him, there can be no doubt that the primary blame for what happened in those years lies with him and his colleagues.
The other major finding is that the liberation movements against apartheid were also responsible for human rights abuses, principally because they failed to employ just means in conducting their just war. It must be remembered that the African National Congress was a signatory to the Geneva Convention and to other international humanitarian instruments - an honourable attempt to conduct their struggle within relevant legal norms.
This distinction between ends and means is central to those norms; it is not excused or relaxed by arguments arising from the elementary justice of the struggle against an inhuman system - apartheid. If universal human rights discourse is to command credible support, it must be based on a systematic and coherent commitment to the ethical inseparability of ends and means. The commission's findings on the ANC's gross violations of prisoners' and dissidents' human rights, as well as those of innocent civilians during its guerilla war, are fully in line with that principle. This strengthens its report and lends it legal and political credibility.
This is no abstract philosophical document, however, but a detailed assessment of an inhuman system and the struggle to overthrow it. Millions of people were brutalised and their lives destroyed by apartheid. Its racism corrupted South African and world politics in ways that are still not properly understood or appreciated. Its inheritance of prejudice and inequality in South Africa will take generations to repair. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission faithfully expressed the spirit animating the ANC's struggle against apartheid and its commitment to transcend it by universalist, non-racial norms.