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>> 1 Introduction Crimes of Allegiance Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others1 In July 1997, Captain Jeffrey Benzien sat before the Amnesty Committee of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and gave testimony about his illegal activities during apartheid. In the course of this testimony, Benzien provided extended accounts of his activities with the “terrorist tracking unit” of the South African Police, finding and detaining antiapartheid activists and locating their ammunition and weapons. He described his general duties and he recalled the specifics of his most notorious expertise: the “wet bag” method of torture interrogation . He would force a wet canvas bag over the head of a bound prisoner and then alternately tighten and release the bag, repeatedly bringing the prisoner to the brink of asphyxiation while conducting his interrogation. He disclosed this procedure in his testimony: It was a cloth bag that would be submerged in water to get it completely wet. And then the way I applied it, was I get the person to lie down on the ground on his stomach . . . with that person’s hands handcuffed behind his back. Then I would take up a position in the small of the person’s back, put my feet through between his arms to maintain my balance and then pull the bag over the person’s head and twist it closed around the neck in that way, cutting off the air supply to the person. 2 > 3 created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a massive, temporary institution whose mission was to reveal the specifics of widespread human rights abuses and to begin repairing the damage from nearly half a century of violent oppression known as apartheid. Officially introduced in 1948 as a policy of forced segregation, apartheid was designed to control the nonwhite majority of South Africa and to preserve a privileged way of life for the white minority. Over a period of decades, the ruling National Party then enacted apartheid through a succession of increasingly oppressive laws restricting every major aspect of the lives of nonwhite South Africans, beginning with the forcible removal of millions of people from their homes and communities and deportation into segregated homeland areas and overcrowded, underserved townships (Adam 1997; Mamdani 2000; Thompson 2000). Those who resisted faced imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of the government security forces. As the oppression of apartheid grew and the brutal enforcement of the apartheid government became more widespread, so did the violent conflicts between the government forces and the various organizations fighting to end apartheid and establish a democracy. As these conflicts escalated throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and into the early 1990s, deadly clashes eventually enveloped much of the country, with horrific violence committed by all sides. It was during the hearings of the TRC that the brutal violence of apartheid was publicly investigated and openly discussed. Many of the government’s atrocities that had been covered up for decades within South Africa and only briefly glimpsed in the world media were uncovered and documented. Names not heard of outside South Africa and no longer talked about today, even within South Africa—Jeffrey Benzien, Dirk Coetzee, Eugene de Kock, Robert McBride, Adriaan Vlok—commanded the attention of millions of South Africans with their testimony about the violent political crimes they committed during apartheid. Analyses and critiques of the South African TRC have now resulted in the largest literature ever produced about a truth commission, with dozens of scholarly books and scores of research articles, representing a distinctive biblio-monument to the TRC—its goals, its accomplishments , its compromises, and its legacy. In the process, the TRC created a comprehensive archive of the proceedings, housed in the National Archives, with its final report serving as a road map for the TRC archive. 4 > 5 uncovering truth and for helping to promote the reconciliation of longstanding conflicts. Beginning a Study of Perpetrators The research for this book took root at a provocative 1998 conference at Yale University entitled “Searching for Memory and Justice: The Holocaust and Apartheid.” Cosponsored by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights, the conference brought Holocaust scholars together with researchers and officials from South...

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