In a surprise eleventh-hour decision, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) yesterday instructed its printers to excise an adverse finding against the former president, Mr F.W. de Klerk, from the copy of its report due to be handed to President Mandela today.
The immediate reason for the excision was an urgent application by Mr de Klerk for a court interdict to prevent the TRC from including the adverse finding it the final report.
The TRC had concluded in its preliminary findings that Mr de Klerk was an "accessory after the fact" to covert police bomb attacks on the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches and the Congress of South African Trade Unions in the late 1980s, a finding which Mr de Klerk vehemently denied.
In a statement yesterday Archbishop Desmond Tutu explained that he had initially instructed TRC lawyers to oppose Mr de Klerk's application vigorously, only to be told by the lawyers that to do so they would have to seek a postponement of the hearing.
With the question of Mr de Klerk's alleged involvement in the bombings still an unresolved matter before the courts, Archbishop Tutu ordered the printers to "excise the contemplated finding from the copy of the report that will be handed to the President".
Archbishop Tutu's statement, however, made it clear that the TRC might "finalise" its finding on Mr de Klerk at a later stage, presumably after a court ruling on the dispute.
Yesterday's developments were the sequel to a series of differences between the former president and the TRC's chairman and his deputy, Dr Alex Boraine.
In early disputes, Mr de Klerk accused the TRC of mounting "unwarranted and malicious assaults" against him and of being "entirely one-sided" in its approach to South Africa's past strife, while Archbishop Tutu and Dr Boraine expressed regret and incredulity at his denial of knowledge of atrocities committed by government security forces when he was leader.
In the meantime the ANC, stung by a TRC conclusion implicating it in the killing of civilians and the execution without proper trial of suspected traitors, hit back with a strongly-worded reply. It labelled the TRC finding "capricious and arbitrary" and charged that the commission had "grossly misdirected" itself.
Implicitly but unmistakably rejecting the TRC finding that it had committed human rights abuses during its armed struggle against white rule, the ANC asserted defiantly that it had not resorted to "vile methods" on the assumption that the end justified the means.
Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party yesterday described as "preposterous" a TRC finding that it had established self-defence units to subvert and prevent the 1994 general election. Inkatha, which has complained to the Public Protector about the TRC's purported bias, counter-charged that the TRC had failed to investigate the systematic killing of 400 of its leaders by the ANC and its front organisation, the United Democratic Front.
To add to the drama building up around the release of the TRC report, the Afrikaans newspaper Beeld reported yesterday that three former cabinet ministers, Mr Adriaan Volk, Gen Magnus Malan and Mr Roelf Meyer, and the former head of the National Intelligence Service, Mr Neil Barnard, had been informed that they had been implicated in the death of 60 people during internecine violence between vigilantes and ANC supporters in a black squatter camp in the Western Cape in 1986.