None of South Africa's main political actors has escaped identification as a perpetrator of human rights abuses in the massive report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released amid high drama to President Nelson Mandela yesterday.
However, the apartheid state - and by implication the National Party which controlled that state for 46 years - was characterised as the "primary perpetrator" in the five-volume report, leaks from which provoked intense controversy in the past few days.
Contrary to the anticipation of many, the African National Congress, which spearheaded the struggle against apartheid for most of the period under scrutiny - 1960 to 1994 - did not escape censure from the commission in its report of nearly 3,500 pages.
The report did acknowledge, however, that of the three main parties in the armed struggle - the apartheid state, the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) - the ANC made "the most conscious effort to conduct its armed struggle within the framework of international law".
That acknowledgment raised the question of whether the ANC had blundered in seeking (unsuccessfully) an 11th-hour court interdict to prevent publication of the report in its entirety or, alternatively, of the commission's findings that it had committed gross human rights abuses in the course of its struggle.
The only ANC leader mentioned specifically as a perpetrator was Ms Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, former wife of Mr Mandela and president of the ANC Women's League. She was found to have known of, participated in or sanctioned violent or murderous activities of the Mandela United Football Club, a vigilante gang which acted in her name.
The ANC emerged relatively unscathed from the report: where the ANC was a signatory to the Geneva Convention and tried to conduct its liberation war within the parameters laid down by the convention, the PAC regarded "every white citizen as a member of the security establishment" and deliberately targeted civilians in what was described as "a gross violation of human rights".
Another predominantly black political movement, the Inkatha Freedom Party, was found to have committed atrocities against political opponents in the majority black community and against people within its own ranks whose loyalty was in question.
Predictably, right-wing opposition organisations did not escape censure. Several well-known personalities were held accountable, including Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the neo-fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement, and Constand Viljoen, leader of the Freedom Front and a former chief of the SA defence force.
At the handing over of the re port to Mr Mandela, commission chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu presented South Africa - and, by extension, the truth commission - as "a beacon of hope for those places like Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Rwanda, so different from Sierra Leone where just last week they executed 24 people by firing squad".
In his acceptance speech, Mr Mandela alluded to the ANC's grave reservations about the report. "It will seem artificial to some to place those fighting a just war alongside those whom they opposed," he said, "(but) I accept the report as it is, with all its imperfections, as an aid that the TRC has given us to help reconcile and build our nation."