“Everything suddenly went very dark. I knew that something terrible was happening to me. If I was alive, I wasn’t sure. If I was dead, I wasn’t sure.”
That’s how Justice Albert Louis Sachs opened his Allen Neiman & Alan Sieroty Lecture in Civil Liberties at USC Gould on March 28: with a recollection of the car bombing that nearly took his life 25 years ago.
At the time of the assassination attempt, Sachs was living in Mozambique, in exile from his native South Africa. Security services from his own country had planted the bomb.
Sachs had long been the target of persecution by the South African state. As a human rights activist, he had fought against the apartheid policies of his government since he was a student in law school. He was twice jailed without trial, each time held in solitary confinement, before leaving the country for London in 1963.
Although Sachs hadn’t lived in his home country in decades, he told the scores of attendees that the assassination attempt was not unexpected.
“It was the moment that every freedom fighter is waiting for,” he said. “Will they come for me today? Will they come for me tonight? Will I be brave? Will I get through it?”
Although he was grievously injured, Sachs recalled thinking, “They’ve come for me, and I survived.”
It was during his long and painful convalescence that Sachs’ commitment to the rule of law was put to the test. He recalled that friends and colleagues had promised to find – and punish – those responsible for the assassination attempt.
Sachs opposed the idea, asking what good would be accomplished by killing or injuring his attackers.
“I said to myself… if we get democracy in South Africa, if we get the rule of law, if we get a society where people care for each other, that will be my vengeance,” he said. “That will be my soft vengeance.”
Within just a few years of the attack, Sachs would have a momentous opportunity to imbue a nation’s legal system with his commitment to soft vengeance.
In 1990, the South African government ended its apartheid policies and formally recognized the legality of the African National Congress and other opposition groups. Newly elected President Nelson Mandela appointed Sachs as one of 11 judges to South Africa’s new Constitutional Court.
Sachs also had a window onto South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, established as a means to help unify the country by allowing both victims and perpetrators of state-sanctioned violence to publicly testify to apartheid-era crimes. Reparations were made to many of the former, while the latter were granted amnesty from prosecution.
Sachs said the African National Congress advocated for the TRC’s creation to publicly deal with crimes – such as torture – committed by some of its own members.
“It was from a need for seeking out the hard truths of its own members that the ANC helped form what became known as the Truth and Reconciliation Committee,” Sachs said. “Paradoxically, our truth commission’s origins were not in an attempt to expose the violations of apartheid, they were there to enable the ANC to come cleanly into the new South Africa….as a national project, to document all violations from all sides.”
During a question-and-answer session, Sachs spoke about his conception of restorative justice, a notion that he acknowledged is not addressed in the legal systems of many countries, including the United States.
“This is a country of accountability – thou shalt pay – and pay is saying that you pay in money, you pay in liberty or you pay in your life,” Sachs said. “The notion of restorative justice, of apology, of reintegration in society… discovering the humanity in people who’ve done terrible things to you… that’s not easy.”
The Allen Neiman & Alan Sieroty Lecture in Civil Liberties was established in 2011 by former USC Gould classmates Neiman ’56 and Sieroty ’56. The Justice Sachs event was co-sponsored by USC Visions & Voices.
Photos by Mikel Healey
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