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

You must understand that I’m not necessarily against the principle of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but about the way I knew it would be manipulated. And it was manipulated. I was there. I appeared four times before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for hours on end. It was a witch hunt from the one side, a one-sided effort and to this day nobody can convince me that it was the other way around.

Knowing full well that this was going to happen, I saw Mandela in his office on this issue. I told him in more or less the same words as I am using now what the problem was. But let me say that from the outset he was always very much against my view’ He said, ‘I cannot stop them, we will have to get the past out to cleanse ourselves, so to speak, from the sins of the past,’ of which old Kader Asmal was a very strong advocate. I told him, ‘Sir, the only thing we’re going to achieve by this is to cause resentment. There have been brutal issues but what is the difference between the security forces and the security police hammering and killing people and ANC fighters so to speak killing innocent women and children on farms. What’s the difference?’

Then I reached agreement with Mandela and I took Johan van der Merwe, the head of the police, to Mandela and it was only the three of us. Formerly van der Merwe was head of the security branch, so he knew exactly what was going on. We went to Mandela at a safe house somewhere in Johannesburg and we discussed it. We told him that much as we understood the issue, it would bring no permanent relief from the pains of the past. We argued at the time, rightly or wrongly, ‘Let’s leave the past and look to the future and carry on. It’s not only our people, we don’t deny that we have been wrong, in many brutal issues, but surely you and your side were not angels - to a certain extent you were even more brutal – let us look at the Magoo’s Bar bomb and so on’ Let us let sleeping dogs lie.’

To the credit of Mandela, he never agreed with us. He said, ‘Well, I understand your argument but I don’t agree with you, we have to open up the past, we have to inform people what has happened, that is the only salvation to our problematic past, to start the process of healing.’

My argument to this day will be surely be that it didn’t heal anything/ It might have healed a few people but it will always remain a very contentious issue. The fact is, Mandela never agreed that the TRC shouldn’t carry on. That comes back again to the issue of a breach of confidence and trust – had we reached agreement at the time of the Pretoria Minute, I think the old man would have said, ‘Well, let’s get it past ourselves.’