Mandela's tryst with truth


By Karamatullah Khan Ghori

THE Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa is a unique phenomenon - a novel idea in a nation which was earlier home to the loathsome system of apartheid.

South Africa does not cease to amaze the world. The first wonder of modern day wonders was the country's orderly and restrained transformation from apartheid - which was a demonic practice steeped in indignity and insult to mankind.

No doubt the blacks of South Africa paid a horrendous price in suffering, blood and sacrifice before they were able to see light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel. However, in the end it was the indomitable courage and unflagging determination of their leader Nelson Mandela that clinched the day for the black majority and forced the white supremacists to yield ground to them. Mandela won because of the strength of his conviction, and more than that because of the superiority of his moral crusade.

Now the same Nelson Mandela - who is undoubtedly a giant amongst men and globally venerated as a statesman in this day of pigmy and parochial leaders - has embarked on a totally maverick and unorthodox experiment to heal the festering wounds of his scarred nation.

He has chosen to apply on these wounds the balm of truth and reconciliation, shunning the tried and tested, but vacuous, path of settling scores for his own and his people's insults and injuries through special trial courts or tribunals. He could have very easily done that and few would have dared to differ with him. After all, he has an unprecedented popular mandate (doesn't that sound sweet as a lullaby to our national ears?) from his people and is a popularly elected head of state.

And he would not have had the need to dig deep into history to find any number of parallels for trials of vendetta and purpose- oriented tribunals organized by the victors to humiliate and disgrace the vanquished. The Nuremburg and Tokyo trials at the end of World War II come readily to mind.

The world, by and large, would have had no reason to feel uneasy or squeamish about the trials of those who were guilty of having crafted the abominable system of apartheid which was an insult to the collective conscience of mankind. Those who perpetrated on so many for so long a crass, inhumane and terribly exploitative abuse like apartheid would have had hardly any voice spoken in their behalf anywhere in the world.

But what Mandela is doing is truly amazing. His truth and reconciliation experiment is the very antithesis of apartheid which was invented by an insecure people who did not have the moral grain to face and accept God's word that all men are born equal, irrespective of the colour of their skin, and that the dignity of every individual is inviolate and sacred.

The fundamental premise of the truth and reconciliation commission is simple and logical. Punishment of a guilty person cannot only be administered by throwing him or her in prison or, in extreme, being hauled up the gallows. A greater punishment can still be inflicted by shaming a guilty person publicly - in the presence of his or her accusers as well as peers - and forcing the guilty to confess to his or her guilt unconditionally and apologize for it without reserve.

There is no distinction between high or low, or privileged or underprivileged, in this nationwide exercise in search of truth; discrimination of any kind is no longer in vogue in this new multiracial South Africa. Winnie Mandela has been exposed to it and P.W.Botha, a former President of apartheid South Africa, has also been summoned. South Africa seems to have done away with the VIP culture for good, not just in name.

However, punishment by public humiliation and shame by exposure is not an end itself; it isn't the name of the game or the whole game. Punishment is supposed to be just the means to find the truth, nothing but the whole truth. Curiously, in a departure from known canons of justice, physical or corporal punishment may never be meted out to most of the accused found guilty of abusing their privileged or not so privileged positions during the apartheid era, if they were only to make a clean breast of their gory past.

A full confession and public apology may be the only punishment for most of those who, through their villainy, had singed a broad spectrum of South Africa's majority population. The silent black majority will not exact any other retribution for what undoubtedly were crimes against humanity.

Therein lies the grand motif of the whole exercise: truth must be found and responsibility for guilt assigned. But that done, the healing of all the scars - those inflicted by the oppressors on the victims in the past, and those stamped on the culpable oppressors by public exposures now - should begin immediately. Reconciliation is effective and possible only when there is no feeling of victory or defeat, gain or loss, on either side of the former divide. That alone can guarantee the emergence of a multiracial and united South Africa.

No doubt, it may still take a long time for all wounds to mend. In all realism and fairness, it will be a slow, very slow, healing process. But there is no denying that the approach is right, the prescription is well suited to the diagnosis of the nation's malady and those dispensing it are well motivated. There is a Nobel Laureate like Bishop Desmond Tutu presiding over the commission whose credentials as a man of grace and peace are impeccable, indeed.

But in the ultimate analysis, it is the messianic touch of that great and noble, doughty fighter Nelson Mandela which can ensure that South Africa's flirtation with an untested panacea will not prove skewed, after all, but may well turn out to be just what it is intended - a panacea for his nation's ills.

There is a lot that Pakistan can learn from the South African example. In 50 years of our national life, we have yet to make a serious attempt to unravel the truth. On the contrary, we have made every effort - consciously and unconsciously - to hide and cover up the truth even in the face of most crying justification and need to be candid and forthcoming.

Isn't it amazing that not a word of official inquiry and investigation into the murder of Quaid-i-Millat Liaqat Ali Khan, 46 years ago, has ever been made public? Is it not a wonder of wonders that the famous Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report into the debacle of East Pakistan, 26 years ago, has yet to see the light of day? I would be pleasantly surprised if the actual report still survives and is available in the archives of Pakistan. Could there be a more colossal national tragedy than the dismemberment of Pakistan? But an even greater tragedy and irony is that the whole nation has been administered a collective amnesia about

that epic calamity and the younger generation doesn't even remember the date of the fall of Dhaka!

The logic operating with successive governments probably has been that people's memory is short, and their preoccupation with the taxing chores and drudgeries of daily life - nothing short of survival of the crustiest - facilitates amnesia. But that is convoluted logic. People's memory is not, after all, so short and they are not blind to reality.

It is in fact a gross insult to the intelligence of the Pakistani people for anybody to expect that they would forget the calamity of East Pakistan, or not remain curious about the characters and actors who had hatched the brazen plot to eliminate the first Prime Minister of Pakistan. For that matter, would anybody in their right mind expect the people of Pakistan to blot out of their memory all those Karakoram-high promises made to them about 'Ehtesab' and the rooting out of corruption?

The problem is not with the people of Pakistan and their intelligence or memory. It is with the ruling elite which invariably overestimates its facility of guile and intrigue and believes, self-servingly, that it can go on meandering and finessing its way around the alleged short memory span of the people. They seem never to have read or heard Santayana's sterling verdict on the intelligence of such wizards: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

Not that we have not had opportunities to come clean and open up the burgeoning cupboards of our nation for the people of Pakistan to view all those skeletons of the past, exorcise the demons surrounding them and bury them for good, in order to make sure that they wouldn't resurrect themselves.

There was a wonderful opportunity for doing just that after the cataclysm of 1971 and again in 1986 after we had banished the ghost of martial law. Alas, the governments of the day were more interested in keeping the lid ever more tightly on what they feared were Pandora's boxes. They were afraid that they would not be able to control the forces released from those boxes. Hence the coverups have continued to multiply; each incoming government has added to the skeletons in our national chests. Fudging has been honed to perfection in Pakistan.

Our people and leaders may not realize how important it is for a nation - any nation - to unburden itself of any guilt, or vestiges of it. Richard Nixon and most other characters who were involved in the macabre drama of Watergate are dead or have long faded out from the scene but the search is still on in the US to unearth and make public the last scraps or shreds of evidence surrounding the cloak-and-dagger episode which has become a legend in US history.

John Kennedy, the Camelot of American politics, has been dead for 34 years and enshrined in the American pantheon on the pedestal of a national icon. But that notwithstanding, journalists and biographers are still laboriously engaged in digging up evidence that reveals several dark patches about the life and morality of this modern day Camelot.

And it is not by any stretch of imagination in pursuit of a witch-hunt - as that rabid high priest of apartheid, the former South African President P.W. Botha has described the Truth and

Reconciliation Commission - that Mandela is determined to unveil the truth. Nor is it merely the sweet smell of millions of dollars of royalties that might fall into the lap of Seymour Hersh - the great investigative Pulitzer Prize winner American journalist - that eggs him on to set the record straight on John Kennedy. No, the primary and ultimate motivation is to seek the truth about a nation's, or a hero's, murky past in order to be true to history and posterity.

Nelson Mandela knows that a nation's catharsis cannot start unless the messed up slate of its past is first wiped clean; reconciliation and reintegration would follow suit once the disease has been properly and fully diagnosed. The prize he is after is not to settle scores with his former tormentors and oppressors of black South Africans. No, that would be the myopia of a petty politician. Mandela - the visionary nation-builder - knows that he owes it to South Africa's succeeding generations to leave them in no doubt about their nation's past.

That is the point that we, and others saddled with skeletons in our cupboards, ought to appreciate and understand. A nation's moral foundations would always remain shaky and infirm if it is not prepared to clear its conscience. And conscience can never be cleared unless a people are prepared to empty whatever they may be carrying and hiding in their bosoms.

If the past has demons lurking in murky corridors then those demons must be looked straight in the eye, confronted and exorcised. Or else, they will continue to haunt not only the present generation but the future generations, too. We owe it to our children, and their children, not to bequeath them a chamber of horrors as our legacy; a posterity thus reared will always be stunted in its growth.

Those in charge of our nation's destiny somehow still believe that the best remedy for all our problems is to sweep all the debris and detritus of the past - and the present as well - under the rug. Their belief is that full-throated slogans and promises are the best anodyne to treat the nation's cancer; they are applying Band-Aid on festering wounds to staunch bleeding. They seem believers of the gospel that sleeping dogs must not be disturbed lest they took out their wrath on you. But then we are not so lucky as the South Africans. We do not have a Nelson Mandela to lead us to redemption and national salvation.