The truth commission

South Africa confronts its past

One of history's sadder chapters closed last week. The South African Commission on Truth and Reconciliation released its report, an unsparing examination of the political violence that enforced racial segregation in that country. It is a 3500-plus-page compendium of stomach-churning human-rights abuses.

Yet the report, compiled under the leadership of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Bishop Desmond Tutu, is also inspiring. We have entered a time when nations -- Germany, Japan, Russia, Chile, Argentina, and others -- are beginning to confront their roles in the totalitarian century. Repression, as Czech dissident-turned-playwright Václav Havel has written, cannot exist without lies. The South African report, produced by a nation that is still deeply divided, is a celebration of the power of truth.

It is hard to imagine a nation's producing an official report that is so damning, in so comprehensive a way, of its own recent past. For two decades, the South African state conducted a war on its people. It assassinated opponents, bombed buildings, and condemned dissidents to years of sadistic, dehumanizing torture. It even took its war beyond its borders when that suited its political ends. The report recounts in gory detail how far those in power were willing to go to maintain apartheid.

The commission also confronted the evil done by apartheid's enemies. Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, once the opposition party and now in power, is blamed for assassinations, torture, and the death of innocent bystanders. Winnie Mandela, the president's former wife, is singled out for her infamous "Mandela United Football Club," a gang that enforced her will through violence and even murder. And the Inkatha Freedom Party of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi (who received an honorary doctorate from Boston University in 1986) is implicated in abuses that include cooperating with the state security forces to assassinate common enemies.

All of the country's major political parties have distanced themselves from the report. But this report was not written for them. It was written for the victims, for the men and women who died in prison or who didn't even make it that far. It was written for the families who might otherwise never have known what happened to the ones they loved. It is the triumph of ideas over brute force, physical or political.

In this divisive political season, it's worth reflecting on how fortunate this country is. America has certainly not been spared the horrors of history -- slavery, the Civil War, Vietnam. But we have a political system that has managed to avoid most of this century's worst excesses. And that is because we have a people who, for the most part, are willing to confront the past, accept responsibility, and learn.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com.