‘Truth and Reconciliation’ as Risks
| Date | 01 June 2000 |
| Author | Emilios A. Christodoulidis |
| Published date | 01 June 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900201 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
‘TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION’
AS RISKS
EMILIOS A. CHRISTODOULIDIS
University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
ABSTRACT
This article aims to situate the fascinating and deeply controversial work of the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa within a theoretical context that may
explain how its attempt to overcome the tensions between truth seeking and amnesty
giving stumbled on its use of law to bring about reconciliation. It locates the root of
the problem in the dual nature of the TRC as public confessional and legal tribunal,
and underlying it the incongruent logic of law on the one hand and reconciliation on
the other, the former requiring the reductions of risks, the latter requiring risk to be
embraced.
ACCOUNTING FOR TORTURE
‘“YOU DO NOT INTEREST me.” No man can say these words
to another without committing a cruelty and offending
against justice.’ This is how the modern mystic and Christian
anarchist, Simone Weil, begins her treatise On Human Personality (Weil,
1989: 273).
Jeffrey Benzien was one of those who came before the Truth and Recon-
ciliation Commission (TRC) to exchange truth for amnesty. He came to say
how as a security policeman in the 1980s he had developed a torture tech-
nique known as the ‘wet bag’. It involved placing a wet cloth bag over the
head of the handcuffed suspect and twisting it tightly shut around his neck.
Before the suspect suffocated, Benzien explained, the body would go slack.
This is when he knew it was time to release the bag and get on with the
interrogation. Benzien was instructed to demonstrate the technique and he
did that; he stepped from his seat, crouched over a volunteer and applied the
wet bag.
A member of the audience, Tony Yengeni, ANC activist and member of
parliament, at the time a victim of torture in the hands of Benzien, does not
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200006) 9:2 Copyright © 2000
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take the opportunity to get back at Benzien. Instead he tries to understand.
He asks: ‘What kind of man uses a method like this one on other human
beings, repeatedly listening to those moans and cries and groans, and taking
each of those people near to their deaths? What kind of man are you, what
kind of man is that, what kind of human being can do that, Mr Benzien?’
Benzien replies: ‘I ask myself that same question every day, sir’. He con-
cludes: ‘With hindsight, sir, I realise that it was wrong and for that I apolo-
gise . . . I can only say that I am extremely amazed and very happy to still be
in South Africa today – and I am still a patriot of the country.’
When I first came across this I thought it a remarkable exchange. How
great the redeeming power of the word! But there is more to be said about
this incident, about the accounting of it. In fact, Tony Yengeni had to pay
dearly for this moment, the demonstration of the cruelty that had been
inflicted upon him, his redemption. Benzien resumes his seat and in the true
spirit of ‘full disclosure’ levels him the blow: ‘Do you remember Mr Yengeni
that it took you thirty minutes before you betrayed Jennifer Schreiner? Do
you remember pointing out Bongani Jonas to us on the highway?’ ‘And,’
adds Antje Krog in her excellent book Country of My Skull, ‘Yengeni sits
there – as if begging this man to say it all; as if betrayal or cowardice only
make sense to him in the presence of this man’ (Krog, 1998: 73). And from
the Cape Times: ‘And so continues the torture of Tony Yengeni. Yengeni
broke in under thirty minutes, suffocating in a plastic bag that denied him air
and burnt his lungs, under the hands of Benzien. In the mind of Benzien,
Yengeni, freedom fighter and anti-apartheid operative is a weakling, a man
that breaks easily’ (Krog, 1998: 73).
But I would rather not make too much of this last point. I would like to
keep the fact that Yengeni wants to know why; that Benzien will attempt an
accounting. In this, something is restored. In the words of Cynthia Ngewu,
mother of Christopher Piet who was murdered by the security forces, one of
the 22,000 to come before the commission: ‘This thing called reconciliation
. . . if I am understanding it correctly . . . if it means this perpetrator, this man
who has killed Christopher Piet, if it means he becomes human again, this
man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back . . . then I agree, then
I support it all’ (quoted in Krog, 1998).
Torture is pure negation. Torture is the undoing of communication,1it is
‘reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans’, as Elaine Scarry put it; ‘it
brings about’, she says, ‘an absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own
reality and the reality of other persons’ (Scarry, 1985: 52). As such, it does
not merely violate the ethical, it annihilates it. In all cases torture and the
infliction of pain aims at the annihilation of the Other; this is true of all ratio-
nales under which torture is undertaken: the extraction of information, the
defeating of the tortured or their elimination. In South Africa, in October
1998, former foreign minister Pik Botha conceded that words such as ‘elim-
inate’ and ‘remove from society’ were commonly used in the State Security
Council, apartheid’s power centre. But in the other cases too, even where
speech is used, interrogation annihilates the addressee by displacing him onto
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