Richard Lyster said a lack of accountability goes back to the failure to prosecute apartheid perpetrators.

CAPE TOWN - Former Truth and Reconciliation commissioner, Richard Lyster, said that a lack of accountability in parts of government today goes back to the failure to prosecute apartheid-era perpetrators who were refused amnesty.

Lyster was one of 13 commissioners who spoke to Eyewitness News to assess the state of reconciliation in the country today, 20 years after the first human rights violations hearing.

Lyster, an attorney, ran the KwaZulu-Natal office of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with his late colleague, Dr Khoza Mgojo.

It was a province that recorded almost half of all the human rights violations submitted to the TRC and which saw the worst violence particularly from the late 1980s right up until the eve of the first democratic elections in 1994.

He said that the only perpetrators who applied for amnesty were those who were already in jail, and although more than 20,000 people were reported to have been killed in political violence there was insufficient accountability, particularly from politicians.

The TRC had hoped that at the end of its term, those who had not been given amnesty would be prosecuted.

"Because the prosecuting authority far more independent than it is now and we very much hoped there would be prosecutions, that was one of the aims and purposes of the HR violations committee, to uncover human rights violations, to investigate them and to use a carrot and stick approach."

But the Inkatha Freedom Party had initially refused to co-operate with the commission and the African National Congress had tried to interdict its report.

The lack of prosecutions created a culture where many in the new government felt they could do what they liked, he says.

Click here to view History for the Future, a special feature to commemorate 20 years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings.