A child's death serves as a reminder that South Africa's reconciliation is not over

By PETER HAWTHORNE /JOHANNESBURG

he awful truth confronting all South Africans was that another black child was dead. On April 11, six-month-old Thobile Angelina Zwane was gunned down as she was riding in a traditional sling on the back of her 11-year-old cousin Francina Dlamini. Dlamini, who was also wounded in the spray of bullets, was crossing through the high grass on the property of Nicholas Steyn, an Afrikaner farmer in Benoni, east of Johannesburg. Though Steyn immediately took responsibility for the shooting--he said he thought the children were intruders--it was five days before police arrested him.

The nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission may at last be winding down its 30-month-long probe into human rights abuses during the apartheid era, but last week the angry, emotional scenes at Thobile's funeral reminded the world that bitter truths will not necessarily lead to serene reconciliation. "Farmer! Farmer! Bullet! Bullet!" chanted a group of black youths outside the funeral, while inside were but a handful of whites among the thousands of mourners.

Even efforts by President Nelson Mandela to smooth the tensions stirred animosity. His visit to the scene provoked accusations from the largely Afrikaner Conservative Party that Mandela was racially biased: where was he, they demanded, during the killings of more than 100 white farmers by black attackers in the past year? Mandela, the conciliator, traveled from Benoni to Bethel, an Afrikaner farming town in the Free State Province, where he visited a terminally ill 12-year-old white girl who had said she wanted to meet him before she died.

Continuing racial violence is not the only challenge facing the T.R.C. Controversial to the end, the T.R.C. has been a traumatic litany not only of horrific truths but also of half-truths, avoidance of the truth, accusations, denials and plain lies. Last month, former President Pieter W. Botha became the first to defy an order to testify before the tribunal. The belligerent stand of the 82-year-old icon of apartheid was not surprising--he has contemptuously rejected the T.R.C. as a "circus" and an African National Congress witch-hunt against the apartheid regime. And as a deadline looms, so too do doubts about the T.R.C.'s ability to be all things to all people.

Mandela has given the T.R.C. until July 31 to provide a final report on the thousands of amnesty hearings and claims of human rights violations, and the more than 50,000 statements it has taken. Only half of the more than 7,000 applications for amnesty have been dealt with--fewer than 150 have been approved--and it is expected that the government will allow some of these hearings to continue after the Commission ends.

And even some of the approved applications may not stick. Late last year, the amnesty committee granted a blanket indemnity to 37 A.N.C. officials, including Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and five Cabinet members--a move the political opposition criticized as evidence of the T.R.C.'s bias. The T.R.C. has been forced to take its own committee to the High Court to test the validity of these amnesties, and if they are found to be unlawful then the A.N.C. members will have to resubmit individual applications.

The recent impasse with Botha--his case has been adjourned until June 1--will probably mean that the tribunal will run out of time and the ex-President will never have to answer questions about his role as head of the State Security Council, a form of war office in the fight against what Botha called the "total onslaught" of communist/A.N.C. forces, or about his responsibility in covert police and military anti-apartheid activities. In amnesty applications before the commission, former security officers have testified that their actions, including torture, abductions and murder, were endorsed by the S.S.C. When the T.R.C.'s chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, visited Botha at his retirement home in the Eastern Cape in November 1996, Botha said he accepted full responsibility for the policies of his government but not for the actions of individuals who had exceeded their authority.

Another concern, shared even by some liberals, is that the commission's inquiry into the A.N.C.'s part in black-on-black violence, in which thousands of people died, has been inadequate. But the T.R.C.'s chief research director, University of Cape Town professor Charles Villa-Vicencio, insists that it will provide "as complete a picture as possible" of the 33-year period of apartheid under review.

Others are more cautious. "The slogan 'Reconciliation through Truth' isn't a bad one," says Anthea Jeffreys, a special research consultant with the South African Institute of Race Relations. "But if we don't get the whole truth, how can we achieve real reconciliation?" Perhaps the most South Africans can expect this summer is justice for little Thobile Zwane--and from the T.R.C., a document in which just some of the truth will have to speak for itself.