493 - Niël Barnard, interview by Tony Trew, Overberg, 17 November 2015.

During the Pretoria Minute, Thabo Mbeki, Joe Slovo, Fanie van der Merwe and myself were instructed by Mandela and de Klerk to retire to the snooker room and draw up a common understanding of amnesty which would mean that we would bury the past right now, everybody would be free and there would be no witch hunt and we would just bravely soldier on. We drew up a document. We were all very upbeat, the four of us, and we were going back to the plenary to inform them we had reached agreement.

Then all of a sudden Kobie Coetzee and Gerrit Viljoen appeared to see what was going on. Kobie Coetzee immediately flatly refused that there should be so-called across-the-board amnesty. So I and Fanie took him aside and told him, ‘This is the last chance we have to stop the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If you want all the sins of the past made public – which I don’t agree with – let’s go on with it.’ But the government refused that. It’s no secret today, at that meeting Thabo and Slovo told us, if we don’t accept it right now the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be the end of it all.