South Africans: The TRC: Truth betrayed?

To my horror I saw this program on what I believe to be two innocent men, tortured into confession by the old regime, and kept in prison for 17 years by the new.
witsjusticeproject.wordpress.com...

Clip here: beta.mnet.co.za...

How many more are there?
They told the truth that they were innocent before Tutu's TRC, and yet they went back to prison.
It was expected that they "confess".
Truth was never the point, or so it seems now.

Foot-soldiers and patsies were jailed; the political bosses went free with golden handshakes.
Even the ANC got collective leadership amnesty.
Were we conned?

Will Mr Desmond Tutu fall to his knees and cry, and beg these men for forgiveness?
I won't hold my breath, but maybe it wasn't all just a sick joke after all.
Just maybe...

The overriding conspiracy about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that it was cosmetic and expensive, and achieved very little.

What is known is that the old regime met the ANC several times in the 1980's, even while young whites were brainwashed to fight a disputable war, and some did unmentionable things on the command of their leaders.
I think the ANC made a legal deal with apartheid, that all the ministers and leaders would not be prosecuted.
Those leaders knew this before the TRC, which is why they treated it as a public relations exercise (De Klerk), or like PW Botha, with absolute dismissive scorn.

It was often called the "lieg and bieg Komissie" in Afrikaans - the "lie and confess" commission.
I cannot believe this farce is actually exported to other countries and trumpeted as a success.

Dr Wouter Basson is often seen as the embodiment of shady dealings, eugenics, drug research and the untouchible nature of former ideologues. He was also known for his arrogant behavior (even after being caught with a car full of drugs and secret documents (the SA secret service was working on an Ecstasy gas for crowd control). He was famous for arrogantly winking at the press, knowing full well he was untouchable.

His story reminded many that the old and new regimes had the same CIA masters, and were intimately linked, their "differences" being purely performance art and empty semantics:

Let us return ... to Wouter Basson. The acquitted doctor started practicing again as a cardiologist at Pretoria Academic Hospital (formerly Hendrik Verwoerd Hospital, named after the apartheid ideologist) and has been working there without interruption since 1994. In spite of the repeated protests of certain of his colleagues, the man that the newspapers baptized as "our country's Dr. Mengele" is on the payroll of the Gauteng Province Health Department and has been kept on in the official organization of the Health Professions Council. For many of those men and women with whom I talked this over in the neighborhoods of Johannesburg and the provinces of South Africa, particularly after the conclusion of his trial, the fact he is so protected raises painful doubts about the permanence of shady connections between the regime of yesterday and the powers of today.

Source: When Bodies Remember: Experiences and politics of AIDS in South Africa by Didier Fassin. University of California Press: 2007. P.168.

SA man beaten to death by Police in service delivery protest.
13 April 2011 - Reverend Tutu, what Truth Commission will YOU have for this man?
What have you accomplished but to change the skin color of the oppressor?
Shame on you and your stupid commission.

A bit of an older report, when the new dispensation was met with a large degree of gratefulness and hope.
Even then it was clear that confession meant getting away, but for the victims there was little compensation, and further spectacle by the press.

Genocide Watch on white farm murders in SA.
Reconciliation? No way.
Is it racial? Well, in some ways it obviously is, although we have shocking crime rates in general.
On an interpersonal level it is not racist (these are people who had good relations with their black workers and neighbors, who are also sometimes tortured and murdered).
However, there is a feeling that such attacks are ignored, old self-defense units forcibly disbanded, farmers demonized in ANC discourse, and a general political radicalization against whites - ranging from implied suggestions to open hate speech.
What Truth Commission can heal this?
These people did not create apartheid.
Is the Commission, and the way it demonized people, mainly through emotive footage and innuendo (and the media coverage) partly to blame?
I do think so.

Anyway, a Carte Blanche investigative journalism perspective on farm murders.
Despite being a mainstream piece of journalism, I must warn: Graphic material, not for sensitive viewers!

White unemployment in SA has risen by 200% in five years.
Unemployment is a burden on all groups, but didn't the ANC promise non-racialism and reconstruction for all?
Did apartheid offer nothing to blacks? A strange argument, seeing that many successful blacks have degrees from from apartheid-era universities.
Anyway, the growing phenomenon of "poor whites" in SA.


Strange that the European royals for whom colonialism was created, and the Anglo-US companies that benefited from apartheid have not paid a dime.