Nelson Mandela Demanded Justice Before Forgiving White South Africans - The Daily Beast:
In the early 1990s, when Botha’s successor, F.W. de Klerk, proposed creating an interim government in which whites would retain a veto, Mandela refused and for a time withdrew the ANC from negotiations in protest against the white government’s complicity in a massacre against ANC supporters.
And perhaps most important of all, Mandela refused to grant legal absolution to the perpetrators of apartheid’s crimes until they publicly confessed their guilt. In the run-up to South Africa’s first free elections, de Klerk granted clemency to 4,000 members of the South African police and security services. But after winning those elections, the ANC overturned de Klerk’s action and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which required detailed, public confessions by anyone seeking amnesty. In the words of Mandela ally Bishop Desmond Tutu, who ran the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth…because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.”
Why, in recent days, has the American media focused so much more on Mandela’s capacity for reconciliation than his demand for truth? Perhaps it’s because, all too often, America wants reconciliation without truth itself.