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Madiba showed us that peaceful reconciliations are possible.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a prison with contact with the outside world, highly controlled by prison captivity. However, this did not prevent him from being one of the most important representatives of the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa. His work earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and his election as president in the first universal elections (with the participation of the entire population without distinction) in South Africa. Mandela's struggle is a history of over 67 years of resistance and encompbades the collaboration of many who organized against racial violence
What is Amnesty? and how did it work in history?
Apartheid was a legal system of racial discrimination instituted in South Africa from 1948 to 1992, which promoted hatred against the black population ( 80% of the total ). Within this political organization, blacks did not have the right to vote, to live in the same public spaces as whites, nor to fully exercise their civil rights. According to the United Nations, apartheid was one of the longest-standing crimes against humanity in modern history. How does a nation recover from such widespread and systematic violence? What can other nations learn from its policy of forgiveness?
Silence and mechanisms of control of apartheid
Mandela visited his cell on Robben Island in 1994, where he spent 18 of his 27 years in prison (Getty Images)
According to anthropologist Alejandro Castillejo, apartheid ]] was fundamentally a "regime of silence", which used all the mechanisms at its disposal to perfect the control techniques. Murder, enforced disappearance, confinement, the ban on public meetings, the mbadive destruction of archives and close surveillance were some of the strategies of domination employed during this period
. the domination of the United Kingdom over the region since colonization stripped landowners of their land and generated mechanisms to prevent the liberation of conquered areas. For that, the political participation of the first citizens in the vote or in the public positions was forbidden and a system of values was strengthened which deprived the blacks of their freedom and reinforced the white domination. Over time, exclusion protocols increased and permeated many aspects of people's daily lives: the busiest public spaces were divided. There were different transports, schools, entrances to public buildings, post offices and courts, which could only be used by people with fair skin. Treatment towards this racial group was preferential although they conform to a minority (20%) of the total population.
To the public mistreatment of blacks and generalized violence, they were added harsher badaults such as enforced disappearances, torture and murders . The magnitude of the problem was so great and the hatred accumulated so powerful that Nelson Mandela's government had to find a way to exercise justice that would not result in more deaths and suffering. For this reason, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was commissioned in 1995. Desmond Tutu, Chairman of the Commission, expressed his mission:
We (the members of the South African Commission ) have been interested in what many may consider as an aspect of justice. Admittedly, the (individual) amnesty can not be considered fair if we believe that justice can only be retributive and punitive. However, we believe that there is another form of justice, a restorative justice that does not refer so much to punishment as to correction, but to the restoration of broken relationships – to healing, to healing. Harmony and reconciliation
. South Africa: The Road to Forgiveness and Remedy
Nelson Mandela Man embraces 6
The purpose of the Truth Commission was to negotiate a peaceful agreement between the two parties : the bulk of civil society who has suffered decades of violence and the perpetrators of power. It was a question of satisfying the demands of justice for the crimes committed against the human rights of thousands of people and, at the same time, to avoid breaking the alliances that have put an end to apartheid . The work of the Commission was recorded in seven volumes of reports, which documented a large number of testimonies and confessions. This was the basis for forming an official version, based on the concrete experiences of the victims and executioners who could talk about what happened in safe places to listen.
According to María del Rayo Ventura, the Commission was a mechanism created during the democratic transition in South Africa to establish a new official project of the nation. The demand for reconstruction of the facts (the truth) and the pursuit of peace agreements (reconciliation) were necessary. The first action of the Commission was to thoroughly investigate human rights violations committed for political purposes between 1960 and 1994.
The restorative justice model sought to recover the silence of the victims and their loved ones without sacrificing the process of national reconstruction. However, it was necessary to feed the deposed testimony and it was a very arduous task, as there were official institutions that were not willing to cooperate because of their involvement in the crimes. This is how Ventura explains:
The evidence gathered by the Commission was not only helpful in the construction of the official report. It was also necessary to have written tests through which these stories could be reinforced. However, this work has been hampered in many cases by the lack of cooperation of government institutions, such as the army, the National Intelligence Agency and the police because these had played a crucial role in the repression of the population. In addition, many documents of the old regime were destroyed, which influenced the way the factual facts of the Commission were built
Huge portrait of Mandela, made with thousands of covers. (EFE)
The Commission had to resort to concepts of religious discourse to obtain some compensation for damage . Naming what had happened and calling for forgiveness and reconciliation were two of the most important things to do to build a new, more free and democratic political system. The Commission has made "recommendations" for compensation for damages. Among these were a summary of the reports for its dissemination and an economic and symbolic compensation to the survivors.
For this reason, a reinterpretation of South African history has been made through specific memory vehicles, such as monuments, statues and museum objects to honor all South Africans who have contributed to the country's democratic process.
The work of the Commission has been harshly criticized over the years, since its model of justice was neither criminal nor its ultimate purpose, punishment . However, the agency was responsible for clarifying many crimes (such as disappearances and murders) that could not have been solved otherwise and found a conflict resolution model that many other countries have adopted in similar situations.
In addition, he put an end to the dominant logic of terror by allowing people to tell their story and, in some cases, to ask the perpetrators directly what they did with their family . Talking (breaking the silence of apartheid ) was the only way to heal a broken humanity. In the words of Castillejo:
Healing and the voice – a voice that always remembers a traumatic past – are central concepts to understand South Africa today; these are horizons of meaning around which the process of rebuilding many grbadroots organizations revolves
At the hearings that were held the victims and their families, as well as the perpetrators, had the right to speak . In this way, the nascent collective memory did not exclude or silence anyone's word. The only good thing to share in these meetings was forgiveness. The amnesty was built with more than 22,000 testimonies of victims who reported, for the first time, the suffering that the authoritarian regime inflicted on them. Without the existence of the reconciliation policy, it is likely that Mandela would not have been able to unify South Africa. It was living proof that people, regardless of their skin color and with a serious history of violence on their back, might agree to create together the country in which they wanted to live. Main image made by José Aguilar @ esepe1 
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