This document discusses proposals for establishing community rehabilitation programs in South Africa to address the harms caused by apartheid violations. It outlines principles from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that rehabilitation should help victims overcome damage, restore dignity, and prevent future abuses. It argues that the government has failed to adequately implement reparation and rehabilitation efforts, restricting funds and excluding many victims and communities. It proposes establishing an Apartheid Victims' Trust Fund to support victim-centered, community-based rehabilitation projects throughout the country.

1. Back to Basics
towards community rehabilitation programs for those
whose lives were damaged by apartheid violations

2. Community Rehabilitation
This submission by Khulumani Support
Group aims to taking forward South
Africa’s stalled processes of reparation,
rehabilitation, and reconstruction;
towards establishing appropriate
community rehabilitation measures; and
building victim-centered processes.

3. Basic principles
From TRC’s Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee:
“Reparation and rehabilitation” are words to
describe what can be done to help victims
overcome the damage they suffered, to give them
back their dignity and to make sure that these
abuses do not happen again. Although this could
include money, a financial payment is not the
only form of reparation and rehabilitation that
the Committee recommends. The Committee
looks at individuals, communities and the nation
as a whole when making recommendations to
achieve reparation and rehabilitation.”

4. Key elements in
reparation and rehabilitation:
Aim: to help victims overcome damage,
give back dignity, make sure it will not
happen again.
Reparation is not only financial payment.
Reparations policy is based upon input
and engagement with individuals,
communities, and the nation as a whole

5. What is a “community-based
rehabilitation” program?
The TRC’s Committee on Reparation and Rehabilitation (CRR)
describes community rehabilitation programs as:
“proposals for setting up community-based services and
activities which can promote the healing and recovery of
individuals and communities affected by human rights
violations.”
“It is important that communities which have been affected
by gross human rights abuses also benefit from reparation
and rehabilitation measures. It is not enough to provide
individual victims with resources and services, because this
does not deal with the effects of gross human rights
violations on the community as a whole.”

6. Community-based rehabilitation
programs:
 Benefit communities which have been affected by
abuses
Address the damage to communities as a whole
 “not enough to provide” for individual victims
with resources and services: this implies that
community efforts complement, but do not
substitute for, providing for individual victims
 community rehabilitation programs function at
both community and national levels

7. How does this work in practice?
An example of the interaction between
individual benefits and community-based services:
A paraplegic requires a wheel-chair – this is an individual
benefit. A community-based service will ensure that:
 wheel-chairs are provided to the large numbers of
people disabled from torture and bullet wounds;
 wheel-chair access is part of all public buildings;
 programs to transport people who require wheel-chairs
to public events, shops, schools, and other
places.
Without these community services, people who need
wheel-chairs cannot participate in community life.

8. Using the TRC as the Legal Basis for Developing
Community Rehabilitation Proposals:
Community rehabilitation programs should be “based on the
needs expressed by those people who made statements to the
TRC”. Community rehabilitation programs must restore the
lives that have been harmed through apartheid. Programs
should include:
 On-going medical care
 Psycho-social trauma counselling
 Skills and training programs
 Education and support for children and grandchildren whose
parents were victimized by apartheid
 Investment in sustainable, income-generating projects
 Commemmoration and memorialisation projects

9. These community-based
interventions:
 engage victims and survivors as defined groups within
their own communities
 provide access to skills and opportunities for groups of
victims and survivors who have been and continue to be
are unable to take up opportunities available in our
democracy. CRR looks at these examples of kinds of
groups: disabled, people with physical medical
problems; conflict survivors with post-traumatic stress;
conflict survivors who lost economic capacity, homes
and families
work towards building collective response to issues
stemming from violations that damaged communities

10. “Nothing about us without us”
 This principle of all rehabilitation work states that no
policy should be decided by any body or official without
the full and direct participation of the members of the
group or groups most affected by that policy
 This principle has been adopted by disability rights
movements, gender activists, Black Consciousness,
liberation and the US Civil Rights movements
 This principle should be applied to all policies and
programs to restore the lives and dignity of those who
suffered apartheid human rights abuses.

11. In practice: Victim-centered
& victim-driven programs
Programs that address the restoration
and rehabilitation of victims and
survivors must be founded upon the full
and direct participation of victims and
survivors.
These people themselves must play
crucial roles in all steps taken to repair
and restore their lives, from broad
conception, to management, to daily
implementation of the program.

12. WHAT HAS GONE WRONG?
TRC’s Unfinished Business
It is now 20 years since the end of apartheid. Our
democratic government has put money into the
President’s Fund to provide rehabilitation and
reparation. The money has been supplemented
by several foreign governments and individuals.
This fund now stands at R1,19 billion.
But today, people who whose lives and human
rights were damaged by apartheid still have no
repair and restoration. Many are still suffering
from the effects of loss, wounds, trauma, and
physical destruction.

13. Closing the door on restoring damaged lives:
Perpetuating and transferring apartheid
damage to the next generations
When the TRC began we believed it would open
the doors to repair damaged lives and
communities. Instead, we have found the doors
closed in our faces.
Over ten years after the TRC closed, government
has made it impossible for most affected people
to claim reparation, or to access resources
needed to restore their own lives.

14. Who makes decisions about restoration?
Who controls access to resources?
The law gives the Presidency final say over
government funds and resources for reparation and
rehabilitation. The Presidency delegated this power to the
Department of Justice’s TRC Unit. The final decisions rest
with the Minister of Finance.
The DOJ took as its mandate that it could only give funds for:
 Individuals identified by the TRC as qualifying for “victim status”; no
person who is not on that list will be given funds.
 Programs established by government departments - education,
health, housing, and cultural activities related to memorialization
– to help victims; but to date these other departments have not set
up programs for this
The result is that the money allocated for reparation and
rehabilitation remains unspent, while people are still in pain.

15. Closing access to individuals
Government has restricted the numbers of
people who can access individual reparation
grants to a small percentage of those who need
them.
After the TRC closed Government said it would
only grant individual reparation to those named
in the TRC list of victims.
The TRC heard around 22 000 cases, referring to
44 000 individuals. But only 16 800 people were
given “victim status”.

16. Why so few “identified victims”?
There were many reasons people did not receive
“victim status” from the TRC. Some of these reasons are:
 The person’s statement was lost by the TRC when taken statements
were put on the computer
 Where a statement included many names about events that happened
to a group or a community, only the person who presented at the TRC
hearing was given “victim status”
 People who lived in rural areas could not afford to travel to give their
statements to TRC statement-takers
 Women who were raped – first because many women do not want to
report rape publically; second, because the TRC did not consider rape a
political crime unless the woman would prove that it was primarily for
political reasons
 Many people who were active combatants at the time when they
experienced gross human rights violations were not included as victims
 Victims of banishment were not included in the reach of the TRC.

17. How many people should qualify
for reparation and rehabilitation?
The TRC gave “victim status” to only
16 800 people in all South Africa.
Compare this with the Khulumani
database, which contains over 90 000
people whose stories indicate they
qualify as suffering damage from
apartheid human rights abuses for
which the TRC afforded official
recognition.
Khulumani is aware this is not close to a
complete or exhaustive list.

18. Cutting down on access to
community rehabilitation funds
The TRC final report listed 128 communities
across the country amongst those that suffered massive
damage from apartheid. This is not an exhaustive list. It ALSO
relates only to those who managed to engage the TRC.
In 16 years since the TRC closed, government has spent NO
money on community rehabilitation programs.
Last year, the DOJ proposed regulations to limit “community
rehabilitation” funds to only 18 communities – two per
province.
The DOJ argues that it does not have resources to provide for
more than these 18 communities; but that it will try to raise
money in future to accommodate other communities.

19. And now – closing the list for
community rehabilitation
The DOJ has decided that 18 communities out of the 128
identified by the TRC should receive rehabilitation funds.
The department says they graded communities according
to how serious and widespread human rights violations
were; then chose two from each province that they
considered the worst affected to make up this list of 18.
(This does not take into account the vast areas where the
TRC failed to document the systematic violations that had
taken place)
We doubt that this process, even if rigorously carried out
for all 128 communities, would provide sufficient and
rational grounds to exclude benefits to 85% of communities
identified by the TRC as severely harmed by apartheid
human rights abuse (omitting those that did not even

20. DOJ appoints an agency to run
community rehabilitation programs
The DOJ says it does not have capacity to establish or
administer community rehabilitation programs. It proposes to
hand over the resources remaining in the President’s Fund to
the IDT to run programs in those 18 communities costing R30
million per project.
The IDT is a parastatal that manages “community
development” projects, mostly infrastructural development, for
government departments. It has no experience of consulting,
conceiving, or implementing processes that could rehabilitate
lives crushed by human rights abuses.
Its recent track record is one of the cancellation of major
contracts awarded to it by National Treasury for failure to
deliver. (See IDT reports to Parliament over the past 3 years)

21. DOJ - IDT pilot programs (2014)
Over the last year and a half, the IDT and
the DOJ TRC Unit have established steering
committees in six of the 18 communities
earmarked for government community
rehabilitation funds that have adopted proposals
for infrastructure projects.
This has gone forward despite the fact that the
regulations to allow this have not been finalized or
gazette. They were only published for comment
nine months ago (Nov 2013). They have not been
finalized or approved. The DOJ claims all
preparatory work has been funded from its own
budget.

22. IDT pilot projects:
stakeholders and consultation
DOJ regulations propose that the IDT should hold
“stakeholder consultations” in the 18 named
communities to identify what projects they will put
into place. These “stakeholder consultation” meetings
elect local steering committees to guide the IDT project
in their area.
In pilot consultations so far, stakeholders have been
municipal officials, provincial government political
office-bearers, some church representation, and other
community-based structures (including some political
organisations). “Victims and survivors” of apartheid
violations do not have reserved places at these
stakeholder meetings or on the steering committees.

23. Programs that work for us
Victims and survivors have built programs
that lead to improving lives and
communities
These projects at grassroots levels have
rarely or never received resources from
government.
These projects provide working models for
community-based rehabilitation, that have
proven their effectiveness in healing the
trauma in communities and families.

24. DOJ’s solution does not work
for us as victims and survivors
The DOJ’s proposed legislation will:
 leave NO RESOURCES to provide reparations to the
majority of individuals who have not received any
reparations grants from government.
 EXCLUDE on communities that need access to resources
for rehabilitation (only 15% of those identified by the
TRC are being accommodated).
 Create programs that do not target victim’s needs, and
that exclude processed to support the re-empowerment
and development of victims and
survivors.

25. Government has allocated funds
for reparation and rehabilitation
Government has not ring-fenced funds
already dedicated to victim reparation
and rehabilitation.
The President’s Fund must be used for
the purposes to which they were
originally committed – to provide
resources and support for victim-based
programs within communities.

26. We CAN build community-based
rehabilitation programs
Many civil society organisations have created
success stories in communities across the country.
Some examples from Khulumani’s work:
 The Khulumani Art and Narrative for Healing and Heritage
community-based process
 The Khulumani Victim Empowerment Program
 Khulumani Youth Forums dealing with issues of the next generation
 Gogos Going Green alternative energy projects
 Khulumani craft collaboratives
 The training community facilitators to deal with stigma in
vulnerable communities
 Khulumani groups working in small-scale organic agriculture
 The Khulumani Apartheid Archive, recording the proud histories of
ordinary citizens who took forward the struggle against apartheid.

27. Towards integrated restoration,
reparation and reconciliation
We need to structure a framework for
rehabilitation and restoration that
builds upon basic principles, and uses
models that we know work for us.
The TRC’s Committee for Reparation
and Rehabilitation spelled out not a
series of separate and isolated steps,
but an integrated program of individual
reparation, symbolic reparation, and
community rehabilitation.

28. Towards integrated redress
 Individual reparation gives financial grants, but also educational,
medical and housing/welfare services… Individual benefits work
towards community rehabilitation. Traumatised people need
individual support to regain their capacity to participate in
communities and to build better lives.
 Symbolic reparation includes developing people’s histories
through community narratives, drawing on history, art and
culture. This lays the framework for building community
solutions, towards supporting the economic development of
victims’ in heritage and other activities within their communities.
 Community rehabilitation programs work to create collective
frameworks that allow these needs to be met – where the
community advances as people bring to it their newly restored
dignity and strength.

29. Building a new funding structure
Government needs to make funds for
reparation and rehabilitation available for
victim-centered and victim-driven
community-based projects, throughout the
country.
All people and communities that meet the
agreed criteria (established by the TRC
frameworks) -- those whose lives have been
damaged by apartheid human right violations
-- must be able to access these funds.

30. This trust fund should support:
 Projects set up by victims themselves within damaged
communities; where victims identify, instigate, manage
and implement their own projects that address their own
needs (rather than having projects done in their name
without them)
Reproducible models of community rehabilitation projects
that have been tested on the ground. Funding support
must enable these to build capacity to reach the many
areas where lives were severely harmed by apartheid.
 The setting up of a national funding structure that has the
capacity to identify, verify, and resources projects to
redress the lives of victims and survivors. Some proposals:
a Reparations & Rehabilitation Trust Fund or a Victims’

31. An Apartheid Victims’ Trust Fund
A Trust Fund must be structured with
representation from victim organisations at
community and national level.
A first step must be a national needs assessment and
consultative process that engages victims and survivors
throughout the country – both those identified by the TRC,
and those left out.
The Trust Fund should develop criteria and principles for
support for reparation and rehabilitation programs,
addressing individuals and communities.; these should be
confirmed at a national consultative conference.

32. What could this look like?
Some thoughts include --
 Provision of funds for victim-centered projects that build on existing
models that have been running in victim communities. If each of the 128
communities identified by the TRC accesses R2 million for such projects, this
would total R256 million– and the impact would be transformative.
 Approved projects must meet clearly defined reparation and rehabilitation
criteria (determined through national consultation)
 Provide resources to national organisations to develop and help implement
programs, to ensure on-going project support. A possible budget for this
aspect could be R50 million per year.
 Review the failed policies to provide individual reparations, and develop
mechanisms which make possible access for those who have been unable to
access these.
 Include programs to provide housing, health-care and educational support
from relevant government departments but also from civil society
organisations with experience in these areas

33. Thank you. Amandla!