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TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION
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TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION

DAY 1 - 7 OCTOBER 1996

 

CLOSING STATEMENT

 

MS BURTON:

Ladies and gentlemen, that brings to an end the testimonies that we will be hearing here in De Aar. 

You probably know from seeing television about previous hearings, that in other places where we’ve been, the members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have gone to one town and asked people from all the surrounding areas to come them. This time when we realised what long distances people have to cover, as we experienced also when we were in Beaufort West, we decided that it was our duty to go to three different towns over three days and so to allow as many people as possible from the communities to come here in support of the witnesses who have spoken today. 

And so we’re very gratified to see a full hall and we thank you all very much for coming and for supporting this process here today. There are lots of thanks that we have to make, thanks to people in this community who helped us when we were preparing, to Rev Janta, Siswe, Sewonga, Ashaldushu, Edward Twani, and many others who I probably don’t know about, but who have helped to make out work here successful. We thank the De Aar municipality for allowing us to use this hall and to Mr Engelbrecht who helped us with all the planning. 

We thank the florists who provided the flowers. 

We thank the caterer for this hall, George, for all his help. 

We thank the police, Captain Greyling and Captain Saunders and all of their staff who have provided protection for us here and looked after as the members of the commission as we moved backwards and forwards. It’s not easy for them to hear many stories which implicate members of the police force in events that happened and one of the things that we all need to do to transform our society, is to build a police force in whom all of our community can have trust and confidence and then we will really be able to say that we are a transformed country. 

I’d like to thank the members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission staff who have preparing here, the statements takers who have been here in advance, for all the team under our logistics officer, Gail van Breda, I am not sure she is in the hall at the moment and all the team that have worked with her to make this hearing possible. We’ve made their work more difficult by moving to three different places over three days and we are very grateful for the work that they have done. 

We thank our interpreters who have allowed you to understand what was going on in your own language. It’s always very hard work for them and we are very grateful and in fact we will allow you to give them a round of applause to thank them all very much. 

We thank the people who supplied the sound system, because they also have to traipse from place to place with us and do all of that work. 

We thank the media for their constant support throughout all these months and for coming now to record and write about the testimonies that we have heard today. 

And generally we thank the who community of De Aar for your support. We also have drawn on the community for our briefers. You have seen that each of the witnesses have been accompanied on stage by somebody who stands with the, sits with them throughout and who supports them before and after, and this is a very important part of the process and we are very grateful to you for taking on that role. Thank you. We have heard today of a community who have suffered great hurt, a great deal of pain and division and conflict. 

We’ve had many more statements than the one you have heard today and we thank all of those people who came forward to make statements. The statements that we’ve received are just as important, whether you make them here or whether you make them to a statement taker in private. They will all go to form the record that will be part of our history of the years of the past. We are aware of the fact that among the cases that we had that we knew about before we even came here was that of Mr Johnson Gitane. We were not able to contact him before today, but we will be taking a statement from him within the next few days. 

And we are very - very grateful for the testimony and for the hard work that was put in not only by Di Oliver who is here with us today, but also for the work that her late husband, Brian Bishop and her late colleague, Molly Blackburn, and others like them, the work that they did to record at that time, the events of the time, because those things too, go to be part of our common history. 

After all that the stories of pain and hurt and suffering, how do we build reconciliation? That is the task that still faces us all. And some of it have to do with telling of experiences, with drawing forward people to confess to what they did and seeing whether it is possible in people’s hearts to forgive what have happened in the past. Or at least to understand how it happened. And it’s very important for a community like this to embark on that process together. 

We in the Commission can do a little bit to facilitate that process, but it is in your hands to make reconciliation come to your community. We wish you well and we thank you for having had us here in your midst today. I’d ask you to stand in silence to allow the witnesses to leave the hall. Thank you very much. 

 

 

