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TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION
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TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION

DAY 4 - 25 APRIL 1996



STATEMENT FROM BISHOP RETIEF



DR BORAINE:

Thank you very much indeed. Bishop Retief, a very special word of welcome to you, Im not sure but I understand that you would like to say something as well, if so then I have to swear you as well. Can I do that?

BISHOP RETIEF:

Yes.

DR BORAINE:

Thank you very much.



BISHOP RETIEF&#9;&#9;&#9;Duly sworn states



MS BURTON:

I am grateful, I believe that Bishop Retief would like to make a statement and maybe Reverend Cameron too, perhaps just Bishop Retief.





BISHOP RETIEF:

Thank you very much, I will be not very long. I just want to put a little bit of perspective on some of the events that took place. First of all I was personally not in the church at the moment of the attack. The service was being led by my colleague the Reverend Ross Anderson who is in the audience.

The Reverend Brian Cameron who is here on the platform with me, was also in the service at the time. I had two children in the church, I had just returned from London that day, and had just recent - just got off an aeroplane.

The news was brought to my home that an attack had been made on the church, I could not actually believe what I was hearing. I rushed off to the church and got there probably about 15 or 20 minutes afterwards. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach because as I walked through the flashing lights of the police cars and spoke to people who were huddled in small groups around the church, they told me of long lines of ambulances that were taking bodies to the hospitals. Nobody knew how many had been killed and nobody knew how many had been injured.

I obviously thought of my own two children. I had two children, a teenage girl and a young boy of 20 who was in the audience at the time. I stopped somebody to ask someone if they knew where they were, and I was told nobody knew, all they saw was bodies being moved. I then walked through the church doors and the scene of devastation is very difficult to describe.

The blown-up pews, the blood everywhere, bodies lying in the aisles with sheets over them and their feet sticking out at the end. 

The first person I saw was Marilyn and the girl named Laura whom she mentioned who were weeping on each others shoulders. I paused and put my arms around them and prayed with them. I remember clearly that she was the first one that I saw. I asked someone in the church if they could find Bruce and Debbie Ann, my children and they said they hadnt seen them anywhere.

I saw groups of paramedics working over people. I went to one group and I discovered one of the paramedics was a member of our church who was on duty on that night. And when I walked up to him he looked at me and said Bishop - Bishop this man has got no legs. It was one of the Russian seamen who to my knowledge had never been in church before and he lost both legs and an arm on that night.

I went up another aisle, all the time looking for my own children and not seeing them and discovered another group of paramedics working on a woman who was lying on the ground and her husband was standing over her. He was weeping, he put his hands on my shoulders and said, Bishop they tell me she wont make it, and she didnt, she died five minutes later on the floor of the church.

It was a night of unbelievable horror and also heroism. One young teenager boy of 17, threw himself over two girls and was killed and they were not. A grandmother happened to take a 3 year old girl to the toilet and while she was out in the foyer, the gunmen struck. And in her fright she ran into the rain and rolled through puddles of water underneath a motorcar with this little grandchild.

And when the dust had settled, she came back into the church to discover that the childs mother, her daughter had been killed and the childs father had been severely injured by bullets. And so the scene of horror was a - it was a terrifically horrific time for us all, a very traumatic time.

We dont know how we got through the night. The next morning the first person who greeted us, greeted me at the church door was the Archbishop, present here today as the Chairperson, he came to pray with us. But I want to just to affirm one or two things. The first is the unbelievable sense of Gods presence that Marilyn referred to.

There is no way that we can describe it and nor would I wish to impose my views on anyone else. I simply want to state to this Commission that everything that we ever believed about Jesus Christ turned out to be true in a moment of crisis. We discovered that He was real, that the great Shepherd put his crook over His flock in a way that I can never ever put into words.

It was a very real experience for all of us, members of the press I believe sensed that, spoke to me about it, members of the police sensed it and spoke to me about it. Members of the police sensed it and spoke to us about it, and we had an experience of the reality of our faith that is very difficult to actually quantify or verbalise. Id like to say that we recognised immediately as a congregation that we were caught up in the spiral of violence which had taken our country at that time.

We realised that we were not the only victims of violence nor were we the first of the many massacres that our land has experience nor were we the last. I think that the attack on a church full of worshippers struck a very raw nerve in the community. But we recognised that our sorrow and tragedy was nor greater than anyone elses, and so we felt a special empathy with the many-many people who had suffered so horribly during those years of violence in our land.

Stories has unfolded that this Commission which by comparison make what we experienced pale into insignificance. We had a one off experience but the stories that have unfolded here are stories of years and years of being victimised by violence. So we recognise that theres nothing special or exceptional about what we went through at that time.

Id like to say, however, that the congregation unanimously without any coaching, without any prompting from me or anybody else extended immediate forgiveness to the perpetrators. When I arrived on the scene, the television people at the time approached me to ask me whether I knew what the congregation was saying. They got there before I did, some of them and they were interviewing the members of the congregation who were extending forgiveness and reconciliation which many people found amazing in the light of what had happened. I did not know what the congregation was saying and I needed to be told what they were saying.

And what I want to say here today is that the reconciliation and the forgiveness and the hand that has been stretched out to the perpetrators was a spontaneous act, it was part of the out working of the things that we believe. That it has never been withdrawn and that hand of reconciliation is extended today.

Advocate, you asked earlier on what the reaction would be if the 17 year older who was arrested - was freed under Amnesty. I dont know if you are aware sir that a member of our church, my own son who is now 26 years old and in his final year of training for the ministry, went on behalf of the church to the prison to speak to him and to extend the churchs forgiveness to him and to hand him a Bible and to assure him of our prayers.

Even though we were not in a position to make any judgement about his guilt or otherwise at that time and nor were - were we saying he should be freed - but we simply want to express to him that the act of reconciliation on our part is genuine and real and is to this day simply so because we are Christians. Thank you very much.

CHAIRPERSON:

You are not - no. Well we - yes.

DR ORR:

Bishop Retief, thank you for those moving words. Can you tell us how many people were injured and how people were killed on that night?

BISHOP RETIEF

11 People were killed, several of them were Russian visitors, who were visiting us that night. We have a special ministry to the Russian ships that pass through our ports sometimes they have scientific boats sometimes fishing vessels and we bus people into our services. There were 55 people injured as far as we know. Now the reason why we adding that is because discovered months afterwards that there were some people who were injured who in their shock did report their injuries because they were light injuries. But there were officially there 55 people injured and 11 killed on that night. Some of those injuries were very severe and, as you have here before you today, some maimed for life.

CHAIRPERSON:

This Commission is charged with seeking to tell the story of the conflicts that have arisen as a result of our political dispensations and we have often and often been horrified as Bishop Retief was saying by some of the awful things that has been done one side of that conflict. 

But we have been hearing as now the atrocities committed on the other side. And we listen with horror all of us, and realise that we are a country that is a wounded country with wounded people and seeking healing.

And we want to express as keep expressing to all our sense of revulsion at the awfulness which are recounted to us. And on many on occasion we have, and I think our country has been deeply touched, deeply moved by expressions of incredible magnanimity, generosity of spirit in the part of those who have been victims of these foul deeds.

And you have given us another example of - of that and somehow we have to keep telling people that I think we are - we are an extraordinary country that has some extraordinary people. And perhaps despite ourselves God wants to hold us up as a people, as some kind of the example for the world which is wrecked and torn apart by all sorts of animosities and hatred. Thank you very much. 

Thank you for your spirit of forgiveness which joins the spirit of forgiveness of so many others. And we pray that you are given comfort and strength as you now and again relive your nightmare, thank you. 

BISHOP RETIEF

Thank you.













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