Johannesburg - GOOD Party secretary-general Brett Herron is worried that, to date, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has recommended the further investigation of about 300 apartheid-era cases, of which most perpetrators have died of old age.
Herron, during a speech in Parliament today, said that he had recently visited the Constitutional Court to meet a group of elderly people who have been sleeping outside in an effort to pressure the state to honour what they regard as their right to reparations for apartheid injustices.
“Yesterday, the Western Cape High Court reopened the inquest into the death in detention of Imam Haron, more than 50 years after nonsensical police claims that the cleric fell down a flight of stairs were accepted by the apartheid court. Imam Haron was interrogated and tortured for 122 days.
“Last week, the NPA announced it had referred 129 unsolved apartheid-era cases to the police for further investigation,” he said.
Herron said that in the case of Haron, who was one of 90 activists who died in detention between 1963 and 1990, there has yet to be a single successful prosecution in any of the cases.
“The President’s Fund, meant to pay reparations to apartheid victims, sits with billions of rand in the bank. Why raise this now? Shouldn’t we just ‘get over it’, as the official opposition and its conservative friends say, particularly given the ruling party’s evident disinterest,” he said.
He said the TRC process of restorative justice was designed to develop a sense of national unity from the ruins of apartheid.
Herron said that the President’s Fund paid limited reparations to victims identified by the TRC, but its Community Rehabilitation Project Team, established in May 2017, has yet to implement a single project.
“Elderly victims of apartheid-era abuses shouldn’t have to sleep outside to get the attention of the minister or president, and the rights of families of victims to justice shouldn’t be ignored any longer.
“The state is failing the families on whose backs, lives and limbs our democracy was won. And it is failing our nation’s chance at restorative justice, healing, and nation-building,” he said.
The Star