Beinart criticizes the media for glossing over it:
Mandela refused to grant legal absolution to the perpetrators of apartheid’s crimes until they publicly confessed their guilt. In the run-up to South Africa’s first free elections, de Klerk granted clemency to 4,000 members of the South African police and security services. But after winning those elections, the ANC overturned de Klerk’s action and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which required detailed, public confessions by anyone seeking amnesty. In the words of Mandela ally Bishop Desmond Tutu, who ran the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
“True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth…because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.”
Why, in recent days, has the American media focused so much more on Mandela’s capacity for reconciliation than his demand for truth? Perhaps it’s because, all too often, America wants reconciliation without truth itself. Americans want Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, halt its support for terrorism, and embrace democracy, but when President Obama acknowledged America’s role in subverting Iranian democracy during the Cold War, conservatives flayed him for apologizing for America. In 1995, the Smithsonian was forced to cancel an exhibit on the bombing of Hiroshima when politicians and veterans’ groups called it unpatriotic. In 2010, Obama slipped an apology to Native Americans into that year’s Defense Appropriations Act but didn’t hold a public event to announce it or even issue a press release, presumably because he feared the political consequences of being accused of running down America again.
And let’s not even talk about the Bush-Cheney war crimes. Some truths have to be suppressed for generations.
The Dish 