My critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is not recent. It is a position I have held and expressed for decades, in interviews, public debates, academic contributions and published articles, both while serving as South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands and in the years that followed.
As ambassador from late 1996 to mid-2000, while the TRC was still conducting its hearings, I addressed these issues repeatedly in the Dutch public sphere. In a January 1997 interview with the Reformatorisch Dagblad, given shortly after I presented my credentials to Queen Beatrix, I stated that reconciliation is not a mathematical formula. “Verzoening is geen wiskundige formule,” I said.
No one can be told that they must forgive; to do so would be arrogant. Confession alone is not enough. From a theological perspective, confession requires corrective action and sacrifice. Whites would have to take a step back. I described the processing of personal pain as an ongoing process that could not be demanded or reduced to a formula. That pain included nine and a half years of political imprisonment, including my periods of detention, the harassment of my wife by the security police after her release, and the daily effort of trying to build a working relationship with people who had caused harm.
Later that year, in a September 1997 debate in Amsterdam, I returned to the same point: one cannot demand of anyone that they forgive those who tortured them. After the TRC’s final report was published, I stated in a March 1999 interview with the same newspaper that the document was only a starting point, that the “turn-off effect” of denial among many whites persisted, and that people do not need “versuikerde verzoening” (sweetened reconciliation). Perpetrators must be willing to confess and make the necessary sacrifices.
In personal reflections delivered publicly during those years, I highlighted the danger of quick forgiveness in cases of severe human-rights violations. This included academic and ethical discussions around the death of my friend Marius Schoon. Schoon spent his last days trying to prevent the amnesty committee from granting amnesty to the person who sent the parcel bomb that killed his wife, Jeanette, and their six-year-old daughter, Katryn. He taught us that one can recognise the broader political compromise while still saying, personally, “I cannot forgive this.” That distinction has remained central to my position.
I was there. I was part of the negotiating process. In the final weeks before the interim constitution was concluded, we sat in late-night meetings at the Good Hope Centre. Our own intelligence warned us that elements of the South African Defence Force under General Jannie Geldenhuys, with the political and military backing of his predecessor, General Constand Viljoen, were prepared to carry out a coup if the demand for amnesty was not met. The threat was immediate. The elections of 27 April 1994 could still be derailed. Faced with that reality, the decision was taken to accept the process that became the TRC. I registered my unhappiness at the time. Looking back, I must acknowledge that the decisions taken then were wrong.
To describe them now as the product of some remarkable meeting of minds and hearts, or as a carefully assembled jigsaw puzzle, as Thabo Mbeki did at the Khampepe Commission, is disingenuous. It was under threat. It was blackmail by the old apartheid security forces and their political principals, including F.W. de Klerk. When I enter the Good Hope Centre today as a Member of Parliament for sittings of the National Assembly, I often remember those nights. The memory does not soften.
On my return from the Netherlands to South Africa, I co-chaired the Home for All campaign with former TRC Commissioner Mary Burton, who had realised that the TRC had not gone far enough and had in fact gone off the rails. The campaign was launched on Reconciliation Day 2000 at St George’s Cathedral. The declaration called on white South Africans to acknowledge that they had benefited from apartheid, regardless of whether they had actively supported it, and to commit to practical contributions toward redress. We bent over backwards to keep the language mild. The response was rejection and ridicule, and only a small number signed.
In later public comments, including in discussions with journalists and in written reflections, I stated that this rejection and ridicule shocked me and hardened my views on white racism. The campaign demonstrated what the TRC process had already shown: voluntary contrition and restitution would not come from those who continued to enjoy the privileges of the past. In an April 2020 article published on Independent Online, I returned to this experience, noting that nearly twenty years later the time to beg apartheid beneficiaries to address the wrongs of the past was over, and that the refusal of prominent figures to sign the declaration had been telling.
In April 2017, I wrote in an opinion piece that the TRC had functioned like a dry-cleaning shop for the past. It got some of us to recall the experiences of detention and torture, but because it was primarily a political process with the end goal of putting a full stop behind the past, it revealed trauma and then repressed it even more. Experiences of detention and torture do not simply fall away like dust cleaned from clothing.
In October 2025, I published a detailed call for a Private Member’s Bill to nullify the TRC indemnities, direct the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to investigate apartheid crimes, distinguish them from the actions of those who fought against a system the United Nations had already condemned as a crime against humanity, and establish a mechanism for restitution from the assets of those convicted. I described the TRC as a grotesque aberration extorted by right-wing blackmail during the CODESA process, noted that of the roughly 849 perpetrators who received amnesty only a small fraction fully disclosed their crimes, and insisted that forgiveness without justice is capitulation. In recent public statements, I have said that it is high time to consign the TRC to the trash can of history and rescind all the amnesties of the apartheid criminals so that they can be prosecuted.
My own experience remains part of this record. The officers who tortured me at John Vorster Square, including Warrant Officer Nicholas Deetlefs, applied for amnesty. They had beaten me until both eardrums were perforated. I am seriously hearing impaired, having lost more than 70 per cent of my hearing. The damage is permanent.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu approached me and asked that I attend the hearing, accept their apology and say that I forgave them. I refused. I made clear that any amnesty would be granted without my consent, and I told him that I would not participate in the farcical spectacle he was staging. That exchange led to a permanent rift that was never repaired. Under his chairmanship, the TRC became a pseudo-religious spectacle of staged contrition that failed the most elementary requirements of justice. Perpetrators performed repentance and resumed lives of comfort; victims were expected to supply the absolution.
The same pattern appeared in the treatment of Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Tutu demanded that she apologise and placed her under public pressure to do so. Those who tortured her, who lied about her and who unleashed StratCom operations against her were left off the hook and granted indemnity. The demand for her contrition stood in sharp contrast to the indemnity extended to those who had inflicted the harm.
Neither Jacob Zuma nor other leaders of the ANC, including Nelson Mandela, can be spared this accounting. Mandela, as the figure who ultimately accepted the terms of the settlement, bears responsibility for the choice made under the threat of a coup. During Zuma’s presidency, Eugene de Kock, “Prime Evil”, the Vlakplaas commander who oversaw the systematic murder of activists, was released on parole and granted a government pension. A man who directed death-squad operations was allowed to live out his remaining years in comfort, supported by the state. That decision stands as a permanent stain.
It is outrageous that Mbeki continues to insist that the agreements between the ANC and the apartheid regime, extracted from the ANC under duress by threats of a military coup, must still be upheld today. This is especially so given the demonstrable lack of contrition among, and unpreparedness to accept the need for reparation by, the overwhelming majority of whites in South Africa. The sense of impunity that the TRC generated through its fatally flawed amnesty process has contributed to the impunity and arrogance still on display from the majority of whites today. I am outraged, and at a loss for words, that Mbeki can continue to insist on this under the current circumstances.
What I heard from him before the Khampepe Commission was not an understanding of the pain of the victims. It was not a recognition of the consequences of apartheid and of torture. It was not an acknowledgement of what was done to the Calata family and to so many others. He continued with sophistry. He continued with the attempt to justify the unjustifiable. This is not a political chess game. This is not a jigsaw puzzle. It is about the pain of people who lost their loved ones and the enduring suffering of a nation. I did not hear that critical acknowledgement in the evidence of Thabo Mbeki.
There is no moral equivalence between those who fought against apartheid, a system the United Nations had already condemned as a crime against humanity, and those who defended it with systematic torture, murder and terror. The amnesty process blurred that distinction. The decisions taken at the Good Hope Centre under the threat of a coup were wrong. The subsequent decisions that allowed men such as De Kock to walk free with a pension were wrong. The rationalisations offered today do not change that.
The amnesties must be nullified. Remaining perpetrators must be investigated, charged and, where the evidence warrants, imprisoned. There can be no reconciliation without justice, without full acknowledgement and without consequences. I was there. I acknowledge that the decisions of that time were wrong. To pretend otherwise is to continue the dishonesty that has already cost our nation so much.
Ambassador Carl Niehaus has dedicated his whole adult life to the liberation struggle in South Africa. He was a member of the ANC for 45 years before he resigned, and was a junior member of the ANC’s negotiating team during the CODESA negotiations and the negotiations that led to the formation of the TRC. He therefore speaks from first-hand experience, acknowledges his own involvement and expresses his longstanding reservations about the TRC. He is now a Member of Parliament for the Economic Freedom Fighters.
The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of IOL