Apartheid

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Once the time for possible forgiveness arrives, there should be an opportunity for
coordinating the search for truth and reconciliation, on the one hand, and opportunities for
amnesty, on the other. A crucial question is how far that amnesty should be allowed to extend.
In South Africa, it was obviously allowed too far. Furthermore, it was applied only to one end,
the wrong end, of the decision-making hierarchy of the state, i.e. only to the lowest levels. Not
that the apartheid assassins did not deserve punishment, but, in effect, the state and the TRC
exonerated the entire civil society and all the top and mid-levels of the state from the entire
range of apartheid crimes. 753 With regard to reconciliation: just as it is taking centuries for
America to get over 400 years of racist slavery, with its total impunity for still existing
perpetrators, such as governments, royal families, banks and other large corporations 754 , and
with Western Hemisphere Blacks still being systematically disadvantaged, it may take
centuries for South Africa to get over 350 years of apartheid, though it does not have to do so.
Yet, with regard to South African criminal justice and the TRC, still, something is better than
nothing.
For some of the family members of victims, the TRC was also useful merely for
finally confirming to them that their child or spouse, etc. was indeed dead. The point of
unearthing secret burials was not just to prove that crimes had taken place but also to help
provide emotional certainty. It brought to rest a great deal of anxiety as well as false hopes.
Although not dramatically, it did bring closure to mourning in some instances. 755
In the end, I confess to being somewhat of an optimist, though a long-term one,
regarding reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. Jews as well as Muslims have had a much harder
time through history in getting along with Christians, especially European Christians, than
with each other. As Zionists continue to live their eurocentric, 19 th -century dream of ethnic
supremacy, the rest of the world is moving on, and most of it has moved on already. At this
stage it is a matter of making the Zionists catch up with the rest of the world, as well as
defeating them. And in this way it is a very similar struggle to the resistance against apartheid
in South Africa.
5. Justice?
As long as South Africa played a strategic role for ‘The West’ in the Cold War,
apartheid there was also applauded and financed, and at the very least tolerated by the western
elites. For the Palestinians and Israel, the stakes are no less geopolitical, but there is also the
added complication of oil in the region to which the USA, most of all, wishes and intends to
have ‘strategic access’, with scant regard for the people or for human rights in the region.
We will perhaps have to wait for an economy and a technology carrying it that are less
dependent on oil in order for the USA to let up its crucial and deadly support for Israel and its
apartheid system. In the same way the US elites dropped South Africa’s racist and
undemocratic regime when the perceived need to defend the world against communism
‘Plotted to Kill’ UN Chief, 1998; Thomasson: Letters Say Hammarskjold Death Western Plot, 1998; N.N.:
License to Kill, October 2002. On Belgium’s role in the matter, see Nguyen: Belgium in Quandary over Role in
Lumumba Killing, 2001; Nguyen: Belgian King Knew of Plan to Kill Lumumba, Stood By, 2001, Misser: Mrs
Lumumba Speaks, 2002.
753 See Stanley: Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2001: 525-546, and above.
754 In 2004 , US lawyer Edward Fagan (see footnote 758 on his attempts to sue apartheid profiteers and his
success with sueing Third Reich profiteers) helped launch a lawsuit against Lloyd’s bank and insurance of
London, the US government, and others for reparations over cultural and physical genocide of Africans and
various other crimes against humanity in the context of the Atlantic system of slavery. See Walsh: Slave
Descendants Sue Lloyd’s for Billions, 2004. On the heavy involvement in these matters of Barclays Bank,
Barings Bank, and others, see Mac Mathúna: Slavery and London, 1999.
755 See Suleman (director): Zulu Love Letter, 2004.