The UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation ... assert that victims of human rights abuses have a right to prompt, adequate and effective reparation. A duty exists in international law to provide reparations to repair trampled rights and the harms & indignities that resulted.

A government & its leaders are legitimate if they embrace: 1.Dignity. 2. A concern for justice through balancing power & responsibility. 3.A concern for the public good. It follows that the resolution of the 'unfinished business' of the TRC through a commitment to comprehensive reparations will powerfully indicate our choice to fulfill our promise & our potential.

An Opportunity to Start Afresh

Our struggle for liberation was one of the world's greatest statements on human freedom. Has our comprehensive liberation been frustrated or are there still possibilities of recovering a truly liberating & human transformation?

The South African TRC demonstrated to the world previously unimagined possibilities for moving from a system of political oppression that progressively dispossessed and impoverished the majority of the people, causing massive trauma to the society, to a society founded on principles of social justice and respect for human rights & fundamental freedoms.

While the public domain is cluttered with the unhelpful rhetoric of 'revolution', conditions for the securing of an authentic transformation may presently be emerging. O'Sullivan describes the phases of transformation as:

STEP 1: Acknowledging the threats
STEP 2: Critiquing what underpins the current 'disorder'
STEP 3: Creating a new history

Step One: Acknowledging the Threats by Ending Denial

We underestimated (or denied) the terrible social pathologies that are a legacy of apartheid – the dislocation of families; the imposition of poor housing, inadequate education & health care; & the destruction of hope through high levels of youth unemployment and underemployment, the demoralising impact of HIV/AIDS on individuals & on communities, causing increasing individual & family poverty – compounded by the alienation & ruthlessness which
seems to pervade criminal activity.

Scars of the violence remain – in burnt-out houses dotting the physical landscape of the communities, in the physical and psychological impact on victims, survivors and perpetrators...These are the realities that lie buried under the surface of contemporary day-to-day survival – unspoken, unaddressed, unresolved.

Apartheid was an efficient & convenient system of managing & optimising the exploitation of human & natural resources (Njabulo Ndebele. It caused loss on an unimaginable scale – loss of land, of the fulfillment of potential, of meaningful participation in employment, of educational opportunities.

Step Two: Critiquing what underpins the current 'disorder'

We squandered the possibilities of fulfilling the construction of a truly human society by not sufficiently valuing the contributions of all those who testified to the gross human rights violations that they had endured (representing thousands of others who were affected but who were not afforded the opportunity to testify in public.)

We failed to realise the construction of a moral universe provided for by the generosity of spirit demonstrated by those who for so long carried the burden of loss & tragedy. They gave up quests for vengeance, retaliation or retribution.

Peoples' contributions provided opportunities for individuals to transform their moral indifference, denial, paralysing guilt & unacknowledged shame into personal & social responsibility.. The "grammar of justice" (Wittgenstein) was expanded & the survival of the "ethical precepts that spring from an African world view" were celebrated (Soyinka). The process revealed the possibility of constructing a "communitarian moral universe" that might be inclusive of the needs, interests & well- being of others (Gyekye).

The processes demonstrated that justice involves both the use & application of the law as well as the embrace of human practices that create a civil society where all people have equal claim to human dignity & accept responsibility for the well-being of each other as citizens.

During apartheid, "the invasion of the civil & political rights of the individual enjoyed priority" – torture, judicial executions, restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly & movement. "Today, poverty & the failure to deliver essential services to the majority constitute the main threat to human rights" & are experienced on a community basis. (John Dugard)

While the TRC did open a unique public space in which some of the most disenfranchised members of the nation participated and offered their account of oppression, the promise of the creation of a public sphere in which status is disregarded, participation is inclusive, members rely on rational discourse, and issues that were previously monopolised by the state are made problematic (Habermas), was not fulfilled as civil society became 'demobilised'& 'sidelined'. (Karen Snow)

While Habermas' theory is the claim that discourse in the public sphere draws power from the state to civil society, rendering the state progressively accountable in the long term, in South Africa citizens failed to build a polity in which the state is ultimately accountable to the people – rather we have seen a growing social distance & disconnection between those who govern & the 'governed'.

Step Three: Embracing the Chance to Create a New History

The purpose of history is to provide a receptacle for all those myths and oddments which oddly we have acquired and from which we would become unburdened to create a newer world – to transform the future into the present.

How can we create a new history?

• Redressing the past through deliberately and consciously reversing the passive status of those affected by the injustices of the past
• Putting 'survivors' at the centre of processes of redress, rehabilitation & reparation
• Returning reparations to the national agenda – not overlooking them or leaving them to be the last item on the agenda of transitional justice
• Prioritising the most vulnerable – especially women & children who have suffered displacement, sexual violence, familial care burdens, limited access to health care & to education
• Restoring an obligation to communal well-being and sustaining some creative sense of self-respect in relation to the community
• Restoring human environments where persons can experience mutual respect, friendship, warmth, participation in shared tasks of value (responsibilities) & some cultural linkage – where aspirations may be fulfilled & good may flourish
• Investing in communities to create working local economies that restore competence and freedom to "have or to do basic things that you value" (Sen) so as to be able to contribute to the well-being of the community thereby restoring the moral dignity of community members

The overall purpose of reparations is to restore the dignity of survivors, to accompany the rebuilding of affected communities and to facilitate the reintegration of survivors through supporting their access to livelihoods and their participation in the construction of working local economies – beyond mere symbolic gestures and words.

You and I must be free, not to save the world in a glorious crusade, not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain, but to practise with all the skill of our being the art of making possible.