South Africa transformed but not perfect

Back in 1994, in the run-up to the first democratic elections, the leaders of the white dominated security forces told ANC head Nelson Mandela that they would not assure security for the elections unless he promised them an amnesty for their past actions.

The TRC was the body through which applications for that amnesty were processed. But under its inspirational head, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it became much more than that. It was also a place where survivors of apartheid's worst atrocities could tell their story in public, and have their own suffering publicly acknowledged. The TRC established an incontrovertible record of the deeply inhumane nature of apartheid, and thus laid the moral basis for the huge affirmative action campaign the country has seen since 1994.

The TRC submitted its final report to the government last year. It had accepted more than 5,000 of the 8,000 amnesty applications submitted. It had also received 22,000 statements from people who during the apartheid era suffered from politically motivated violence - from either side. Those statements and the videotaped record of the 1,400 or so public victims' hearings held around the country now constitute a powerful record of some of the era's worst abuses. No whites can any longer reasonably claim they "do not know" how badly the long decades of apartheid used to harm their nonwhite compatriots.

What the TRC had no mandate to address was the huge transfer of land and other resources from nonwhites to whites that occurred during apartheid and preceding centuries of white colonial rule. Finding redress for those coerced transfers was left largely to a separate Land Claims Commission. Recent violent events in Zimbabwe have shown the extreme urgency of this issue. The South African government has tried to seek satisfaction of land claims on a consensual basis, primarily by "buying out" the white landowners concerned and restoring those lands to nonwhite claimants. In a 2003 report, one South African official wrote that 36,000 of the 79,000 valid claims had been settled. But no one thinks that completing the land restitution will be quick or simple.

Might South Africa yet go down the tragic path taken by Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe: the path to one-party dictatorship and populist violence based on land claims or other grievances from the colonial era? One person who says "no," is Frederik de Klerk, the visionary white leader who negotiated the country's democratic transformation with Mr. Mandela. He recently said that South Africa's strong record of constitutionality, the base of multiracialism that it has now built, and the strength of its private business sector would protect it from that.

I tend to agree. But huge problems do remain. South Africa, like the rest of that ravaged continent, will need real support from the rest of the world for many years to come.

• Helena Cobban is working on a book about violence and its legacies.

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