IN DEFENCE OF MEMORY

Government holds the key to records that should be part of the nation’s history

It is true that our experience of the present depends upon our knowledge of the past. Czech-born writer Milan Kundera, who at different times of his life was a supporter and critic of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, famously wrote: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

The opening of secret files in East Berlin and elsewhere in the former eastern bloc caused splinters after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Kundera himself had to refute accusations that he betrayed a spy in communist Czechoslovakia. But transparency and the disclosure of the regime’s ugliness became a vital part of reconciliation and healing.

In SA, apartheid-era records were famously trucked to furnaces where they were incinerated to prevent them falling into the hands of the new administration. The deliberate destruction was a way for government to rid itself of incriminating evidence of the torture, forced disappearances, spies and corrupt practices that should have been part of the nation’s memory.

By destroying records, apartheid bureaucrats hoped to sanitise history and shield those implicated from accountability.

Yet not everything was destroyed. A recent colloquium to promote transparency of public records threw light on the records that survived. Cabinet minutes, state security documents, defence archives and even military records weren’t included in the apartheid state’s purge.

But for researchers hoping to pry open these files, the door has most often been shut in their faces. In fact, it appears the democratic government has shielded apartheid crimes from the public, reinforcing the very same secrecy that apartheid thrived upon.

The post-apartheid departments of justice and defence in particular have worked to protect apartheid henchmen by withholding the key to their histories.

Hennie van Vuuren, director of Open Secrets and author of Apartheid Guns & Money – A Tale of Profit, says the department of defence recently withheld at least 400 boxes of documents requested by his nonprofit organisation. The material would have shed light on the sanctions-busting