S. Africa Report Sows Division

The release of a long-awaited report that was supposed to help heal deep wounds caused by apartheid has instead caused divisiveness, with both former liberation fighters and apartheid's main party attacking it.

Former President F.W. de Klerk, whose efforts to dismantle apartheid won him the Nobel Peace Prize along with President Nelson Mandela, said today the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report "holds the seeds of future conflict."

A process that began with a cleansing ceremony has ignited political conflict. It's a bitter irony that the two parties who created the commission launched last-minute appeals to alter its report.

The commission on Thursday published one of the most important reports ever produced in this nation's tortured history, laying bare abuses committed during the era of white minority rule.

But the National Party, which ruled during apartheid, blasted the commission's "failure to achieve reconciliation."

Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, who will likely be elected president next year, criticized the commission for failing to include in its report the African National Congress's response to a detailed condemnation of abuses it committed while fighting apartheid, including the torture of dissidents and killing of civilians.

With Mbeki's backing, the ANC unsuccessfully sought in court to block the report's release. The move angered retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid champion who chaired the Truth Commission.

"I didn't struggle in order to remove one set of those who thought they were tin gods to replace them with others who are tempted to think they are," Tutu told reporters in Pretoria today.

The report was compiled after 2 1/2 years of hearings by the commission, which had the power to grant amnesty but only to those who asked for it and who confessed fully to politically motivated crimes.

"If reconciliation and unity are to become a reality in South Africa, the energy and commitment of all its people will be required," the 2,750-page report concludes. It urges South Africans to "reach out to fellow South Africans in a spirit of tolerance and understanding."

The report says the president should call a national summit in 1999 to ensure all sectors of society are involved in considering its recommendations, which include teaching schoolchildren about human rights, racism, gender discrimination, and the rights of children.

The report also recommends:

• That the government consider establishing human rights bureaus in government ministries.

• That restitution "for those who have suffered from ... apartheid discrimination" be provided, possibly through a one-time levy on corporate and private income, or with each company listed on Johannesburg Stock Exchange making a one-time donation of one percent market capitalization.

• That liberation movements apologize to those whose human rights they violated.

But it also calls on the government to consider prosecuting human rights violators who didn't seek amnesty. De Klerk denounced the proposed levy as "punitive retrospective taxes." Tutu conceded wrongdoers could escape justice if deadlines on prosecution expire. "They may get away from the judicial (system). They will never get away from themselves," Tutu said.

As expected, the report lays the heaviest burden of guilt on white governments that made non-whites second-class citizens and ruthlessly crushed dissent. The report, contained in five hardcover volumes, is sometimes difficult to read. It gives accounts from thousands of prisoners who were beaten, given electric shocks and raped during apartheid.

Some wounds may be too deep to heal.

"The only thing that really made me break was when they threatened to kidnap my four-year-old nephew, Christopher, bring him to the 13th floor and drop him out the window," anti-apartheid activist Zahrah Narkedien is quoted as testifying in one of the commissions hearings, which were held across the country.

Narkedien said she will never recover from her seven months in solitary confinement. "I was damaged. A part of my soul was eaten away as if by maggots .. and I will never get it back again," the report quotes her as saying.

Mandela conceded the report would not produce instant reconciliation. "Its release is bound to reawaken many of the difficult and troubling emotions that the hearings themselves brought," said Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for fighting apartheid.

Furthermore, some whites will think it is a witch hunt launched by the black majority now in power, with some blacks seeing it as an escape route for the minority that oppressed them for so many years.