Special Hearings — Media Hearings — 1997-09-15

JOHAN PRETORIUS: Oh yes, okay now I remember.  Yes with hindsight, no for sure. I mean many of us are going through processes now where we, I wonder what would the right word be, not agonising, but we're going through like many other people who were involved in a situation like we were in the SABC or elsewhere, you know we're saying to ourselves now why didn't we do something about this, why didn't we know?  Could there have been a way, why did we miss this?  Yes and with hindsight. And don't tell me how we could have avoided it.  When I think back and I've thought about this many, many times, how we could have avoided landing up in a situation in which we did.  I don't know, because every time, we also heard  certain rumours because our journalists were also on the ground. We also heard certain rumours and certain things but as soon as we moved, tried to follow it up we ran up against a brick wall. Basically because we were part of the organisation that had to comply with those strict acts.  I mean it happened many a time that a junior civil servant interpreted the security of the state in a totally different way than we did and we couldn't get a yard past him.

MR LEWIN: So would you agree then that there was a certain culpability there?

JOHAN PRETORIUS: With the SABC journalists?  Ja sure.  Adding onto what I've said here, if these things occurred, if apartheid was kept in place and especially the human rights violations occurred as a result of our actions even though we did not know about anything, yes, there is a culpability if they should have occurred but don't ask me to determine to what extent.

MR LEWIN: Thanks Chairman.

<UNKNOWN>: Dumisa.

MR NTSEBEZA: Thank you Chair.  Now I don't know whether I heard you correctly.  Did you say that because there was, as a fact, a state of war in the country at the time, necklace murders etc, etc, that that also was a reason for the SABC as a public broadcaster to take a stance in support of the security forces of the day? Did you see that as the duty of the SABC?

JOHAN PRETORIUS: Yes, I saw it as a duty of the SABC. Just to clarify I said the country was in a state of low-level civil war and the declared policy of the UDF was to make the country ungovernable and in the process there was bloodshed, there was violence.  It was the duty of the public broadcaster or the state broadcaster in those days to be against people who try to make the country ungovernable, there is no other way.  Whether I agreed with this or not, that's not the point. The fact is under the prevailing circumstances the SABC had no other choice.

MR NTSEBEZA: Is it not so that even at that period, when there was a declared policy of the ANC to make the country ungovernable, there was a corresponding period of gross violation of human rights by the security forces, tortures, deaths in detention, long periods of imprisonment, killings, abductions and I think the whole story of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission today, let alone that it was also the story that should have been unveiled by the Harms Commission, but then I'm not going into that, but even that period there was a deafening silence on the part of the SABC, your media to equally highlight the misdemeanours of the security forces as they occurred?    And the question is, wasn't it the role of a public broadcaster to bring to the people of this country, and I mean all the people, not just that section of the people that felt threatened by the so-called declared policy of the ANC to make the country ungovernable, but wasn't it the duty of that public broadcaster to say, people of South Africa, this is what is happening? Whilst the security forces have a duty to defend us, there is an uncomfortable truth that is coming through.  We have 30,000 people in jail as a result of the state of emergency, ranging from ages 13 to 30 and over, people are dying in detention, people are tortured etc etc.

JOHAN PRETORIUS: Yes  Mr Chairman, through you, yes I agree with you, it was the duty, it should have been the duty. But unfortunately, and I don't want to pass the buck, unfortunately many of the these things we did not know about and I know everybody now says I didn't know, I didn't know, but the fact is we did not know about many of these things. And those that we did get a whiff of, or an idea of, a notion of we just couldn't follow up. And I can give you the assurance that even if we had done so, there would have been big problems from the state in terms of the Act.   So I grant you, yes it was the, it should have been the duty of the public broadcaster to highlight this but there were circumstances prevailing.  Number one, many of these things we just did not know about.

MR NTSEBEZA: I would like to believe you Mr Pretorius but, and we don't have the time unfortunately to test those averments, but in the examples that I've just given, it's not as though we had to believe them. There's a difference between believing what is being said and knowing what is happening. And I'm not asking for a legally defined knowledge based on total evidence.  I tell you now that your medium was part and parcel of covering the Harms Commission and everything else that went around those sort of Commissions, Vlakplaas operations and all that. And so to the extent that there was that exercise, there was definitely a viewpoint that suggested that there were hit squads in the country and that the security forces and their conduct was something far beyond a legitimate mandate to secure the country from the inroads of communism and terrorism and whatever.   Your medium used to project on to the screens actions by security forces in the townships.  The SADF's presence in the townships was commonly known by everybody and there were always reports that in quelling the violence, in trying to prevent people from necklacing others, there were excesses.  Now did you consciously conduct researches as a medium that were intended to verify the allegations of torture, of uncontrolled and untrammelled shootings by security forces in the townships and stuff like that?    Or even when you did conduct those researches, the truth became so uncomfortable that you decided consciously as a medium to uphold a viewpoint that was in line with the total onslaught theory rather than expose the truth in a fair way, even accepting what you said about fairness and objectiveness or (...indistinct)