Vol.7 No.4
CONTENTS
| Track Two | Vol.7 No.4 | December 1998 |
The Never-Ending Story
How the TRC changed the Nature of Story-telling in South Africa
Journalist Hugh Lewin - also a Commissioner on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) - suggests that the TRC process changed the way that stories are reported here, and impacted radically on the media's agenda. Journalists in this country, Lewin argues, can never again not put human rights at the centre of their news diaries...
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a major media event - certainly the best copy in town since it began its public hearings in April 1996. I'd like to deal with what the TRC has meant for the media or, rather, what it means for the media in the immediate future. I'll also deal briefly with the special TRC hearing held on the role of the media under apartheid, which has significance for the future of all media in the region.
But first, a few words of recapitulation. The TRC was born out of negotiation, we must not forget that: therefore, there was compromise; therefore, the Commission was immediately limited. It tried to tread a path between the victors' retribution of Nuremburg and the way, for instance, of the Chilean truth commission, set up after the declaration of a general amnesty for all perpetrators and whose hearings were held in camera. The South African Commission, on the other hand, firmly encompassed the possibility of amnesty, qualified so as to encourage the perpetrators to come forward with full disclosures about their actions. Its hearings, with occasional exceptions, were open to the public. That was their strength.
The specific mandate of the South African Commission, as expressed in the founding act, was to "promote national unity and reconciliation". A curious concept this: Truth & Reconciliation, with the implicit suggestion that somehow the two go together - reveal the truth and there will be reconciliation. There has never been any obvious guarantee of a connection, and many possible doubts.
Having noted that, and having had an amazing two-year experience as a member of the TRC's Human Rights Violations Committee in Gauteng, I would like to say something about the significance of the TRC hearings and, especially, about the way they were covered by the South African media. I would be interested to hear how they were covered outside.
The TRC was the best and longest-running story of the decade. It produced some of the most dramatic human-interest stories imaginable. (Also unimaginable - for example, would any news editor ever have accepted an account from any reporter of how a group of policemen discover how long it takes to burn a body on a fire, particularly the buttocks, while their colleagues stand by, braaiing their own steaks and downing their cans of Castle? We now know, chillingly, that that was for real - and I think it will remain one of the most devastating images to come out of the TRC process.) The TRC coverage is important for what was reported (and what was not reported); covering the TRC produced some of the most consistent and sustained reporting we have ever seen, in all of the media but particularly in television.
I have felt schizophrenic these last two years, being on the one hand a member of the Human Rights Violations panel, organising and participating in some 15 public hearings with pretty dramatic testimony, and at the same time trying to ignore the fact that I'm a journalist. I've had to respond to the revelations and testimony as a compassionate and listening panellist, allowing the witnesses scope and space to tell their stories on an international platform which they have never had before (and never will again), then offering solace and consolation for their pain, sympathy for their suffering - never being the insensitive digger, the pushy reporter.
It has often been awkward, like finding ourselves having to choose which witnesses would best reflect the turbulent history of a community through several difficult and different years. Would it, for instance, be better to take Witness A, who talks of four deaths at a night vigil, as opposed to a mother who talks of only one death at a funeral? How do you quantify personal loss? How do you measure the intense intimacy of torture and pain? It is like the braaiing of buttocks, and suddenly realising how horrendous it all is, and then finding that it's not you and your reactions that matter - it's the community. It's their story, and they want it told. You are just the medium, the messenger, so make sure you've got it absolutely right. Clear and simple. That, I think, is what the TRC hearings have done for South Africa and the media. The TRC process changed the whole nature of story-telling. By giving this open, front-of-the-lights platform to the people (not the leaders, not the preachers, not the politicians), the real people with their own stories, in their own time, place and language - by giving them that opportunity, we have changed the nature of story-telling and how we report it.
When you listen, for instance, as happened at the Alexandra township hearings, to a mother telling how she returned home one day and saw her child shot, then saw the people who shot him batter his head against a rock to make sure that he was dead, then you can have no predetermined formula for reporting, no easy intro, no trite pyramids. You have to listen and record in a way that wipes you out as 'the messenger'. You can only record, very precisely, what you have heard and how you have heard it. It makes nonsense of our rules and guidelines and so-called 'objectivity'. It's not about sound-bites or the selection of 'main points'. It is a process that takes a long time to absorb, analyse and tell - to see how it can become part of our healing. There can be no 'micro-wave reconciliation' - and certainly no easy summaries of the impact the TRC has had on all our lives.
That's the other major feature of the TRC for the media. Much wasn't revealed in the nearly three years of the Commission's life, but a huge volume of material did emerge from the hearings, and another mountain of material was deposited with the Commission. Now that the Commission's report has been accepted by the President, this material is available to researchers. Journalists must be at the front of the queue.
To mention just two examples of what awaits us. What you saw on "Special Report" every Sunday night (Max du Preez's team produced some 84 programmes, which they're now reducing down to six tapes) was a selection of some 10 percent of the testimonies heard at each public TRC hearing; and those testimonies were a selection of some 10 percent of the testimonies made by communities. There remains the bulk of the testimonies made to the Human Rights Violations Committee - the final figure is 20,300. Each has its own story, each needs telling. Plus there are thousands of stories of those who didn't testify, and why didn't they? Then there's the nearly 8,000 amnesty cases, with appliciatons from the perpetrators, and what of the other perpetrators? This is our challenge as journalists: to begin delving into these stories and unravelling, firstly, the mass of information the TRC has collected and not yet analysed, and secondly, the mass of tantalising leads which now need to be chased. It will take years, of course, and a great deal of commitment from journalists (and from their bosses, to drag them into realising the importance of investigative journalism), but it must be done.
To quote another example of stories to be told: One of the stories which should have emerged at the TRC's media hearing, but which died becuase of lack of time, was to do with a certain 'Operation Viktor'. This involved an operation set up in 1989 by the security police to intervene in the Namibian elections, centred round launching a newspaper to generate support for the non-SWAPO parties. Senior policemen became temporary businessmen, operating a 'foundation' and employing, at vast expense, a number of SABC and ex-Transvaler journalists and numerous unsuspecting Namibians. The foundation apparently bought large numbers of vehicles for the operation, with offices and computers. The nine-month operation ran into millions (one figure mentioned R67 million) and was a complete disaster. At the polling station where 14 of these over-endowed South African agents were working, the parties they supposedly supported polled only three votes. Finally, it was said, Koevet heavies had to be brought in to retrieve some of the vehicles which their temporary owners were reluctant to give back.
'Operation Viktor' was only one of several similar operations. Along with a great deal else, it didn't make it to the three-day hearing on the role of the media in September 1997. This was typical of the TRC process: so much to cover, too few resources and too little time. Never enough of anything - leaving a sense, I think for everyone, of somehow being cheated, frustrated yet often elated at what did emerge.
The TRC's media hearing also left us in the media with much to do. Basic to the hearing was the question: Could the media during the apartheid years be held directly responsible for gross human rights violations; or (by general consensus the more likely question) could the media be held responsible for creating a climate in which, for instance, what happened to Steve Biko was acceptable? The comparable implications for the media in other countries are, or course, clear - and they define the essence of our trade.
In the end the media hearing - held, with symbolic irony, in a studio at the SABC, apartheid's loudest mouthpiece - produced two surprising things for me. The first was the degree of simmering rage which emerged: not directed at the National Party press, which refused to participate in the hearing and which had slavishly embraced, supported and proselytised for apartheid; and not really directed at the SABC, the unashamed official organ of apartheid. Rather, it was the rage of black journalists directed at the old, so-called 'liberal' English press, which we in exile had fondly regarded with such admiration and which, at the hearing, a whole generation of journalists so passionately condemned for its hypocrisy and ultimate complicity. It was, for me, a useful reminder that whatever else it was, we were dealing with a press which functioned within a society where a whites-only population consistently voted in a whites-only government - where the common lack of basic human rights united journalists with their audience at every moment of the day. And the bosses did not seem to appreciate this.
An incidental point: the bosses could provide no reasonable explanation of the fact that they did nothing, often for years, about the known government agents/spies who functioned in their midst. Nor - something that should send chills down our spines - was anyone very clear about what the situation is today with the spooks and their probable successors.
The second main point about the media hearing for me was actually first made at a hearing of the Human Rights Violations Committee at Nelspruit, very much a frontier town. During that hearing, we uncovered an incident that had taken place in 1986 - ten years after June 16 in Soweto - which was an almost exact replica of Soweto: kids dancing down the streets, singing, being killed and wounded by police. At the Nelspruit hearing was a young editor of the local newspaper, Die Laevelder. He wrote an extraordinary editorial after listening to the testimony of survivors of the shooting, in which he asked why nothing had been reported of the incident in his newspaper those 12 years before, and he explained how he had gone back to the files and an editorial in which his predecessor explained that there was onrus, unrest, in the township and that this newspaper was not going to report on it because that was precisely what the opstokers, the agitators, wanted.
At the media hearing Max du Preez spoke as one of the latter-day 'alternative' editors whose publication was forced out of existence for its remarkable exposŽs of a number of apartheid's dirty deeds, all consistently ignored (or denounced) by the established media. Max's testimony emphasised the essentially complicit role of most of the media during those same years where the Laevelder editor imposed his form of self-censorship, and he answered the question about responsibility and accountability. His words are a reminder which should haunt us daily, wherever we are, wherever we say with pride that we are journalists:
If the mainstream newspapers and the SABC had reflected and followed up on all these confessions and revelations (carried in Vrye Weekblad), every single one subsequently proved to have been true, the government would have been forced to stop, to put a stop to, the torture, the assassinations and the dirty tricks. It would have saved many, many lives.
