Reframing Forgiveness for Terrorism
JOHANNESBURG — Somewhere in
South Africa, if the news outlets are to be believed, a man once convicted of a slew of murders, torture and kidnapping as the leader of an apartheid-era death squad is walking free. His friends say that, having once been an abnormal man in abnormal times, he is seeking a normal, if anonymous, life.
After serving almost two decades of a sentence of two life terms plus 212 years, Eugene de Kock, 66, was granted parole last week. It was arguably the greatest single act of mercy to emerge from the anguished debate in South Africa over reconciliation and justice that also seizes many other societies seeking to heal the scars of their past, from Rwanda to Northern Ireland.
Given the brutality of newer times, it is a template — requiring perpetrators to show remorse for their transgressions in return for victims’ forgiveness — that might one day be tested in other parts of the world plunged into deepening trauma.
That might seem improbable: Imagine the hooded “Jihadi John,” the hidden face of the Islamic State’s public assassins, trading blood-curdling invective for the language of atonement.
Yet, consider that Mr. de Kock, nicknamed Prime Evil, headed a unit accused of equally macabre and brutal killings. And when his deeds were exposed, they challenged many South Africans to confront the secret barbarism buttressing comfortable white lifestyles.
One difference, of course, is that Jihadi John’s role is played out in slickly produced videos. In South Africa, the secret police squads like those commanded by Mr. de Kock operated in a murky half-light where expediency, brutality, impunity and political imperatives in the struggle to maintain white minority supremacy were all fused together.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a prominent South African psychologist who spent long hours interviewing Mr. de Kock after his conviction in 1996, said that “as behind-the-scenes engineer of apartheid’s murderous operations, he had been faceless and nameless.” His deeds were seen to be “unspeakable,” she wrote in a 2003 study based on those conversations.
So why, then, should Mr. de Kock walk free, his liberation cloaked in official agreement not to divulge the timing of his release? Why should he be entitled to what a friend, Piet Croucamp, called a “soft landing”?
The justice minister, Michael Masutha, said one reason Mr. de Kock had been freed was that he had helped the police investigate apartheid-era crimes and locate the remains of South Africa’s “disappeared.” Another was that his freedom contributed to “the interests of nation-building and reconciliation.”
But his decision drew much protest. Radio talk shows filled with voices saying that the onus for forgiveness had fallen on the black majority, while the bulk of relief was offered to its white beneficiaries.
Mr. Masutha said the families of Mr. de Kock’s victims had concurred in his release, but clearly not all of them approved.
“I cannot forgive him and will never do so,” said Catherine Mlangeni, whose son, Bheki, a human rights lawyer, was killed by explosives in the headphones of a booby-trapped cassette player.
Since hearings by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, contradictions have accumulated: If midranking officers are to be held to account, why not their political bosses, the ultimate enforcers of apartheid? Were transgressions by all sides in South Africa’s long and bloody struggle — black and white — scrutinized with equal acuity? And what about those, including the majority of whites, who simply looked the other way?
In his interviews with Ms. Gobodo-Madikizela, Mr. de Kock declared that “the dirtiest war you can ever get is the one fought in the shadows.”
The sunlit glare of YouTube propaganda surrounding Jihadi John may offer a macabre new twist to that assertion. And in South Africa, 21 years after the end of apartheid, the conflicted response to Mr. de Kock’s release showed that the shadows will take much longer to lift.
that fukkboy Zuma
