Tutu and Franklin:
The Present
(continue)
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: And it's a shorter period. And the government is a government made largely of people who were themselves victims, and are determined to have a new and equitable dispensation. But even, even then, one, the perpetrators, by and large, were available, and many of them, not all of them--but many of them came forward to say they had committed these atrocities, these violations, and so you were able to have dealt with that by saying because you have made a full disclosure, we will give you amnesty.
But, you see, we've also had in this particular process the element of reparation.
DR. FRANKLIN: Yes.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Where we are saying we know that you could never compensate anyone for a gross violation, that they have experienced the death of a son, being tortured, and so on. But you do say we are making reparation, the nation acknowledges that something wrong was done, and we are symbolically saying with this check, with--and some of the people were asking for things like, Can we have a tombstone? Can we have a school named after the person? That in that way, reparation would be made as you were trying, as they say, to level the fields. It is going to take a very, very, very long time for that in fact to take place.
But another of our recommendations is to say to the various sectors of our community, the business sector, the health sector, the legal profession--all of these who, in one way or another, benefited from the apartheid dispensation--You have a particular role to play in the new society, the new South Africa.
For instance, we are saying that the business sector benefited from cheap labor provided by black people, and, to some extent, contributed to the poverty that so many black people experience, and the gap between the rich and the poor is too wide, and it is dangerous, even for the affluent. It is in their interests, that that gap is narrowed, and so one of our recommendations is that you, you've got to do something, urgently, to, to get, to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor.
DR. FRANKLIN: Yes. We looked to the same prospects ourselves. The difference is that the advisory board, of which I was chairman, did not have itself the authority--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yeah; yeah.
DR. FRANKLIN: --to do any of these things. We could make recommendations, and, and we, we viewed the future in, in a similar fashion that you viewed it. But all that we could do was to recommend, for example, that the president establish a, a permanent council for the purpose of, of--of trying to realize the objectives and the goals that we were seeking. A, a President's Council on the 21st Century. President's Council on Race; whatever it would be called.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yeah.
DR. FRANKLIN: But this council, then, would undertake to do some of the same things to encourage the business community, to realize its own involvement, its own obligation, its own well-being--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yeah; yeah. Yeah.
DR. FRANKLIN: --to, to take steps to level the playing field in the economic sphere. The same thing we hope to do in, in, in housing--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yeah; yeah.
DR. FRANKLIN: --and in health, and in the general administration of justice. We were very disturbed, for example, at the widespread discrimination against minorities with respect to the meting out of justice--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes; yes.
DR. FRANKLIN: --the meting out, the dispensing of justice. The profiling of young black people who look a certain way and act a certain way. The profiling which causes the cons--the, the, the enforcement officer to conclude that these people--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Must be.
DR. FRANKLIN: --are involved in something shady--
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yeah; yeah.
DR. FRANKLIN: --or illegal.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yeah; yeah.
DR. FRANKLIN: We, we make the recommendations. Our vision of the future is clear. Our power to create the kind of future that we want is very limited.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Yes; yeah. Although we were a statutory body in the sense that we were brought into being by an act of parliament, not as, in your case, where it was an executive--
DR. FRANKLIN: Order.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: --order; yes. We, too, in the sense, ultimately, could only make recommendations to the president, which he would then take to parliament, and then perhaps implement. But the act, the law, that brought us into existence, did put down as one of the things that we were to do, as part of our mandate, the granting of amnesty, and then, also, the recommendations with regard reparations. And so, in a sense, this makes the government be under obligation to do something, and they have already begun making out those payments.
But the other thing that we, we spoke about in the new society we envision, was one where the judiciary was not as it was under apartheid, where it, it collaborated with apartheid and its injustices. In fact one, one judge, a former judge, president, has apologized for the way in which the judiciary colluded with the executive arm of, of government when they were not as aggressive in defending the minimal rights that were still available to people.
