<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Another loss for democracy in South Africa.
Review: The aim of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission (TRC) was supposedly to reveal the atrocities committed by the apartheid government in the period 1948-1994. However according to a South African advocate, dr. Anthea Jeffreys, 99% of all the hearings did not comply to the necessary criteria to qualify as legally valid. No oaths were taken, cross examinations were highly superficial, evidence was seldom produced, and as much as 16 500 of the hearings were based on heresay and not on personally experienced human rights violations.
This is probably the reason why the crimes of apartheid were not heard inside a bona fide courtroom, for the likely chance that a court might find no support to declare apartheid as a crime against humanity, which obviously did not serve the interests of the ANC government at that time. Official government statistics during apartheid places a question mark on the extreme atrocities apparently committed by this regime. To top it off, the TRC had a survey done and discovered to their chagrin that 40% of all South Africans (black to white ratio is 8 to 1) claimed apartheid was "basically a good idea". Mr. Villa-Vicencio's findings are ultimately no more than anti-Afrikaner rantings which have become fashionable ever since Communism started ailing in the early eighties, leaving many left wingers without an ideology, which made them take to heavy anti-apartheid demonstrations to distract the attention from the problems in Eastern Europe and to find a new moral ground to justify themselves. Moreover, hardly any atrocities from British colonials were brought to trail, whilst Afrikaner atrocities were highly exaggerated in the abovementioned heresay.This book was a disapointing read, with little relevance to the actual situation experienced by millions of South Africans of all colour.
<< 1 >>
| 
