JUSTICE MUST BE DONE NO MATTER HOW LONG AFTER
EVER SINCE people started disappearing under Argentina’s military dictatorship in 1977, women with white scarves have converged on the famous public square in Buenos Aires called Plaza de Mayo, to protest the disappearance of their sons, daughters and grandchildren.
Even though the dictatorship ended in 1983, countless families still do not have answers about what happened to their loved ones, and so women still converge at the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday morning, holding up placards of their loved ones, demanding answers and justice 43 years later.
In South Africa many black South Africans disappeared at the hands of the security police, military, and hit squads under apartheid, and the families still grieve and want answers. But our frustration and demands for justice have not been as public or determined as those in Argentina.
It is the groundswell and momentum of civil society that has pushed for justice over so many decades that has led to a broad consensus in Argentinian society that justice must take place no matter how long after the fact.
The process to prosecute the perpetrators has enjoyed large consensus within the Argentinian cabinet and that has enabled the process to move forward.
In 1981, women in Argentina embarked on what became an annual March of Resistance, an event which lasts for 24 hours to demand justice for their disappeared loved ones.
Many women were detained by the dictatorship and even gave birth in captivity. Five hundred babies were born to these opponents of the regime. The authorities gave them to families close to the regime to raise.
In Argentina the process of justice for the victims began shortly after the end of the dictatorship.
A famous trial took place of leading junta members, particularly nine senior armed force officers.
In 1985 leading figures were sentenced to prison, including Junta leader General Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera. The problems started in 1986 and 1987 when the Congress passed two laws to stop the prosecution of human rights abuses committed under the dictatorship.
As a result, the Conservative President Carlos Menem pardoned the Junta leaders in 1990. But in a landmark judgment in 2001, a judge declared the two laws blocking prosecutions unconstitutional, ruling that “crimes against humanity are not subject to amnesties”.
The watershed moment came in 2003 when Congress, at the behest of President Nestor Kirchner revoked amnesty laws, and in 2005 the Supreme Court of Argentina ruled that no statute of limitations or pardon applies to crimes against humanity.
In South Africa, the amnesties handed out at the time of the TRC are likely to stand, but it is the crimes against humanity perpetrated by security force members who never made a full disclosure of their crimes that should still be prosecuted, especially those in the top echelons who bear the greatest responsibility.
Crimes against humanity not subject to amnesties