S. Africa Hearings Set On Political Crimes

The commission investigating politically motivated crimes committed during white-minority rule plans to hold its long-awaited first hearings next month.

Chairman Desmond Tutu, an Anglican archbishop who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to apartheid, announced Thursday that hearings will be held April 15-18 in the southern coastal city of East London.

The Truth Commission has been flooded with applications from people wanting to testify, Tutu told journalists.

President Nelson Mandela appointed the 17-member panel late last year to investigate crimes committed on all sides and to consider requests for amnesty.

Mandela says that uncovering details about murder, torture, disappearances and other crimes is crucial to building the racial reconciliation he has championed since becoming South Africa’s first black president in 1994.

Some whites fear the panel will carry out a witch hunt against the mostly white security services.

In apparent response, Cheryl Carolus, secretary-general of Mandela’s African National Congress, announced shortly before Tutu’s briefing that the party would seek to withdraw temporary immunity granted 73 members in 1990.

The immunity concerned an ANC team that returned to South Africa from exile to negotiate an end to white-minority rule. Since then, the immunity has been renewed annually.