Can truth be black and white?

South Africa's attempts to heal apartheid's wounds have been hailed abroad but criticised at home. Seamus Martin reports

Marius Schoon and his wife, Jeanette, were committed to the struggle against apartheid and regarded as important members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. Marius had spent 12 years in jail before going into exile with Jeanette, first to Botswana and later to the southern Angolan town of Lubango. Life was difficult, and food parcels from Jeanette's mother, in South Africa, helped make ends meet for the couple and their two small children, Katryn and Fritz. There were also regular letters from friends in South Africa and overseas.

Not surprisingly, Marius, as an Afrikaner, was regarded as a traitor to the volk by the apartheid regime. Mail was intercepted by the South African security forces; one item had its contents removed and replaced with a bomb. When it arrived, on June 28th, 1984, Marius was at a meeting in Luanda, one of Angola's main port cities. To Jeanette the familiar envelope in the post created no suspicion. She opened it and was killed. So too was Katryn, who was five. Fritz, who was playing some distance from the explosion - some say he was under a table - survived.

Today he is a 22-year-old law student at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. He lives in the mainly black area of Bellevue East with Sherry McLean, his stepmother, who is from Cork. She and Marius met in Dublin at an anti-apartheid fund-raiser after Marius moved to Ireland, where he took up a job with Comhlámh, an agency for returned aid workers.

Two men responsible for the murders were amnestied by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2000. One was a bomb-maker called Roger (Jerry) Raven; the other was Craig Williamson, who was known as South Africa's superspy. By the time of the commission's hearings the truth was already known, as Williamson had confessed to the Observer newspaper in London that he had been involved in the killings of the Schoons and of Ruth First, wife of Joe Slovo, the South African Communist Party leader. Fritz felt reconciliation was never on the agenda as far as his father was concerned.

Fritz does not remember the bombing, as he was only two at the time. He has been told that he wandered out on to the street after the explosion and was helped by some passers-by. The murders did not, he says, cause him emotional pain, but there was a principle involved. This concerned the amnesty of Williamson when it did not seem clear that he had fulfilled the necessary criteria.

In order to be amnestied the perpetrators must make a full disclosure, they must show that their actions were politically motivated, there must be a proportionality between their acts and their aims and they must show remorse.

As far as remorse is concerned, McLean has spoken about driving back from the hearings each day in stunned silence at the cold, clinical way Williamson gave his evidence. Then, on the final day, Williamson's lawyer came to Marius Schoon and said that his client suggested they "go for a beer together".

Fritz feels that the truth-and-reconciliation process was simply a political deal between the ANC and the former government of the National Party. "The bulk of the National Party big guns got off and a fair number of the ANC big guns got off too," he says, adding that some had to be found guilty to make the process look legitimate.

He is also extremely sceptical about Williamson's claims that he thought the Schoon children were in London and not at the address to which the bomb was sent. "Here," says Fritz "was the South African superspy who was unable to find out if there were children in the flat to which the bomb was sent." From the evidence given to the commission it is clear Williamson did not bother to find out.

Marius Schoon had been ill at almost all of the hearings. He had been feeling tired and was losing weight. Ten days after the hearings ended, in 1998, he was diagnosed with cancer. He died three months later, some time before the commission announced its judgment.

Williamson, a grossly obese man, did not, like other perpetrators, have to make any reparations and is now an apparently wealthy man involved in major gymkhanas and other equestrian events in Johannesburg. His lifestyle serves to increase suspicions that the commission has been kinder to the perpetrators than to the victims.

The Khulumani Support Group, which helps victims who have been involved in commission hearings, has 35,000 cases in its database. Its acting director, Tlhoki Mofokeng, is scathing about the commission and the ANC government. The commission had recommended that victims be paid between 23,000 and 27,000 rand (€2,900-€3,400) each year for six years. The government instead announced a one-off payment of 30,000 rand (€3,800).

In many cases families had to investigate the deaths of loved ones in order to find the bodies. This was a costly process involving payment to investigators, the exhumation of victims' bodies, reburial and the purchase of headstones. His organisation estimates the cost of a single test case at 83,000 (€10,600).

There were also many cases, he said, in which perpetrators had been amnestied without meeting the necessary criteria. The perpetrators, in the main, had also been able to afford better lawyers than the victims, who were mainly poor. "Most victims feel betrayed. The majority are angry and disappointed and feel the government failed them."

Another victim who is disappointed with the government and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is Duma Kumalo, one of the group known as the Sharpeville Six, convicted of the murder of the deputy mayor of Sharpeville in 1985 but reprieved after it was discovered that a police witness had lied in court. Kumalo was told of his reprieve after three years on death row and just 15 hours before he was due to be hanged. He spent seven years in prison in all. He says: "I was not physically tortured, but I was mentally torn apart. I used to stay in a graveyard. They prepared me to die, but they did not prepare me to live."

After his release his wife, Betty, regularly checked that he had not committed suicide. He was also helped by an Irish priest, Father Patrick Noonan, after whom he named his younger son.

The last question the commission asked at his hearing was the formal one it asked all victims: what they would like the commission to do for them? Kumalo asked for a retrial, but he didn't get one. He was given an interim reparation payment of 3,800 rand (€480) and got the 30,000 rand later. He still feels stigmatised as a former prisoner whose name has not been cleared by a retrial.

His attitude to the current administration is paradoxical. "I like the government we have, but I hate what they have done to us. I will keep on voting for them," he says. "Under the previous [National Party\] government I would not be sitting here speaking to you. At least this government gives me the space to say what I want to say."

And allowing people to say what they want to say is a vital part of the process. The Khulumani Support Group - khulumani is a Zulu word for "speak out" - carries on where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has left off. At least it allows the victims to tell their stories.