Human Rights Violation Hearings — Johannesburg — 1996-05-02

ELIZABETH FLOYD: The story that I'll be telling, as you mentioned is a very well known story and for that reason I'll try and be fairly brief about it. However this story was well known to those who wanted to hear it at the time and there were people who didn't want to hear and there's now a younger generation who don't know about it.  So I'm going to be fairly brief and then make some comments about what happened in the context of what came afterwards, and also some of my experience in working with detainees extensively through the 80's as part of a team of health workers who cared for detainees on their release.
 As you said, Neil was a trade unionist, a medical doctor and he was also a conscientious objector who had been called up for the army and refused to go. The investigation that we were involved with really came out of the union movement's precursor to what is now COSATU.  During the 70's the unions were incredibly depleted by repression and towards the end of the 70's unions were building up, not in the way that we know them now and around 1980/81 the concern of the security police was that the unions were identifying themselves with political issues and the political history of our country, and they were fairly paranoid about that. And that was really what the investigation was about, it was trying to link up the broad, more left end of the union movements, in with the ANC and construct a Treason Trial.  However when they started with their detentions they had very little information available to them and their strategy was in fact to construct the charges out of interrogation.  So it was certainly an investigation where there was very extensive interrogation where they tried to create their case and there were several ways of interrogation.  We went in on the second ways. So the case was actually being established on interrogation.  
 Before detention Neil had received very intensive security police attention and for around six months before he was detained he was being followed a hundred percent of the time, and followed regularly by five cars at a time. So he was well aware of the pressures building up and one of the possibilities at that stage was to leave the country, although that was not really an option for him, and we were well aware of what we were up against.  A cruel, a dirty and an unjust system and that is partly we were involved in it.
 In terms of what happened, you mentioned the basic outlines.  In February Neil was found hanging from his cell and the question really for everyone was, was he killed in interrogation and hung up or did he in fact take his own life?  In terms of his death there was very intensive coverage in the news about him as a person, the nature of detention and what were the issues that the security police were trying to tackle there, the union movement as it was then.  The investigation involved large numbers of unionists and people involved in the labour movement.  When Neil died the investigation kind of came to an end, well not an end but they tried to wind it up and produce a series of trials. Only one person received a lengthy sentence and the others were either minor sentences or most people came out.  Of that group of people, people were pretty damaged by the experience, there were few that continued normally after that.  Some people subsequently died, Eric Ntongo also died in detention, others died through accidents and the concern out of my experience is how many of the accidents were genuine?
 Even before Neil's detention we were exposed to situations where unionists would find one tyre of a union vehicle had been pumped up and the other had been deflated, and the personal damage to people was very extensive.
 I think with Neil's death, peoples' worst fears about detention were confirmed.  Everyone knew this could happen but I think it still very shattering when it does happen, and what was a little bit unusual about Neil was that he was the first white person to die in detention.
 For the black people involved in our struggle, that was particularly significant, that there was a white person who had not held back when things got really tough and has payed the ultimate price. And the response from people was quite dramatic specifically on that issue.  And I think for me it demonstrates how deep racism in our country goes, that when a white person demonstrates that level of commitment, how much it means to people.
 When I was released from detention two months later, I found the people around us quite shattered by the experience, it was really a watershed for the community that we lived in and people were never quite the same again.  I think with David Webster's death there was another watershed, and yet the events of that period now for me are part of history because they so much has happened since then.
 The inquest then followed and brought to light quite a lot of what had happened in detention.  Now obviously the nature of detention means you don't know exactly what happened.  In a way Neil went into detention and never came out and it was difficult to piece together what had happened, but a lot was actually presented to the inquest.
 More than five detainees out of the same investigation in parallel detention talked about torture and the kind of torture that people were exposed to was solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, electric shock and suffocation with electric shock and I'm going to comment on that sort briefly, partly from our experience beyond that.  Firstly when it comes to solitary confinement combined with interrogation, and particularly combined with the hard torture method when you're in solitary confinement and you have either no or extremely limited contact with other people, when you do come in contact with people you have very few defences left.  If I come up to you here and now and start swearing at you and threatening you, you can ignore it and it can kind of run off your back, you might be a bit disturbed. But when you've come out of solitary you can't keep it out because you're so desperate for that human stimulation and certainly our experience in the detainee service, that combination of solitary and electric shock really was noticeably devastating to people.  
 We know that sleep deprivation completely disorganises people and if it continues for long enough it produces a really psychologically deranged person.    
 The people who have been through torture with electric shocks and particularly with the wet bag, as somebody described earlier, what you get is suffocation as you are shocked.  In the description of those people and one of those people did give evidence at the inquest, is it basically makes you feel like you're dying, so it takes you very much to the brink of death and I think that is a lot of what detention is about in all its kinds of form, whether you're threatened with death or whether you experience that torture.  The fine line between life and death in those situations becomes a very fine line and death is clearly behind the detention system and it's not by chance that we regularly have death in detention.
 In terms of the inquest, a lot of evidence was brought the torture of other detainees, and in addition at one stage I think he would have been visited by a magistrate and reported his torture of receiving electric shock. A statement was then taken by a policewoman and from what we see it was then given back to the security police and it was shortly after that he in fact was found dead. 
 He also indicated to one of his co-detainees that he had received electric shocks. So at the end of the day, while we don't know that he was killed in detention, or whether he actually took his own life, I think for myself the difference is not particularly substantial.  What we do know is that if he hadn't been detained he wouldn't have died, and in inquest the lawyers said that it was induced suicide, but the conditions of the interrogation and the detention pushed him to that stage, and I think that the experience with Neil really taught the public that the psychological effects of torture are very very significant and I think that over the years the security police would find their methods to become more strongly focused on the psychological effects and not just the physical beating up and the dramatic physical assaults.
 In the inquest the outcome of the inquest was that no one was found to be blamed for Neil's death.  What we saw was the security police under tremendous pressure and they had quite a strong legal team, funded by government and out of our taxpayers' money, and in my own view in patching together the lives of the security police. Really it's very difficult for a detainee to prove that they were tortured when the witnesses are the security police and they consistently denied that there was any such thing.
 If you look at the outcome of that inquest in terms of the legal system, that was the outcome, that nobody was to blame.  For the public the inquest was a fairly successful situation, normally accounts of torture in detention do not get into the press because of the legal system, but because the evidence was presented in court it was extensively reported in the press and the public who wanted to hear, the view was that in fact there was detention in torture, and that the people that were subjected to it were in fact people who they themselves respected and could identify with, and that the system was rotten.
 If you look at the reaction of the security police under those circumstances, their reaction was not so much to kind of feel bad about what they had done but to being very angry at being caught out on it and what we've seen since then is that deaths in detention have been consistently hidden, they couldn't have pulled another Neil Agget. So one of the people who knew him, Eric Ntongo subsequently died. It was made to look as if he had been assaulted but his interrogator admitted that he had died in detention and they then stabbed him to make it look like a murder.  Certainly from my own point of view like Stanza Bopape, where you had a disappearance out of detention, that's what is behind it because you'll notice that we didn't have another Neil Agget.
 Just to come to the people involved and in terms of perhaps why I'm here or what the Commission can do, I think firstly there is an enormous difference that was certainly obvious in detention between security police and the SAP, the uniformed police and the SAP frequently indicated that they were uncomfortable being associated with the security police and sometimes did it quite blatantly in front of them.  I think the SAP have been entangled and I think they have been discredited.  The woman who took Neil's statement about being tortured was an ordinary SAP policewoman and she was obviously disturbed by the situation she had been put in.
 When it comes to the interrogation team, we had the same interrogation team, and there were a range of people on that team, I think within those security police circles there is some room for some of those people to feel unhappy either at that time or at a later stage about what they were involved with and I've recently been exposed to one of them who is now in quite a severe state of distress over that and I think would be coming forward to the Truth Commission.
 But there are also some extraordinary peculiar people in that system, people who in general society would be regarded as psychopaths, who are professional interrogators and so on and it would be extremely difficult, I think for those people to be rehabilitated and I think society needs protection from them.  They are professionals, they haven't disappeared, some of them have gone into other jobs, there are some other dirty units in the police that collect them.
 The head of our interrogation team, Lieutenant Whitehead, had been part of the murder and robbery unit and they certainly shared their technology, so I think that there are different groups within the police with different kinds of functions, and certainly in terms of the responsibility it was very clear that there was a major responsibility particularly from Whitehead who had driven the interrogation team as had Senior Major Conwright.  And then there are professional interrogators and torturers and then because the investigation was huge, they'd pulled in a whole lot of recruits to learn how it was done, who were the less comfortable members of the team.
 I think with the legal team, they were also issues.  That legal team was paid for by government, it was quite a high powered team.  One of the senior members of that team is now a judge and he presided over a new, I can't even remember specifically what it was, but one of the functions of the new government last year.  
 Obviously with a magistrate, the security police could be fairly  confident that they had support within the legal system, to look after them under those circumstances.
 And just in terms of those people, well, kind of what these stories I think can achieve, is that firstly I think there were people who genuinely did not know what had happened and there were also people who didn't want to know.  I think it's critical that at this stage of our society in terms of our transition that people do know what happened and get a feel what was happening to people, and I'm not just talking about '81/'82 but right throughout the '80's, the very very large numbers of people who were detained, thousands upon thousands but not just those people, the other people who were affected in so many many ways, and I hope that your Commission will be hearing more and more about that.  
 In some ways a civil war was fought over peoples' personal lives. There are those people who implicated. who have very specific responsibilities and there's a range of ways that I think you need to deal with them, but there certainly are those institutions in society where I think there are questions about their history, for example the judiciary, and the magistrates and those sorts of systems.
I think it's particularly important that people who currently behave as if there was no problem, and I'm thinking particularly of quite a lot of white people in this country, who have taken on into the new political period as if there was no problem, those people need to understand that there is a problem and while they may not have taken specific responsibility, they can't pretend that it didn't happen.
 One of the things that I notice is that there's a lack of acknowledgement from exiles about what happened in the country.  There has been quite an effort to deal with the problems of exiles dealt with but there hasn't been a joining of history, of acknowledgement that everyone had problems and maybe they were different, but they're equivalent.
 And then lastly, I think the detainees themselves and those affected,  We don't easily talk about these issues. There's almost a culture of silence, we weren't allowed to talk about them, if you talked about them you got hammered.  You got brought into court and kind of charged for making those kinds of statements.  The legislation didn't allow it, the press weren't allowed to publish things, but in addition to that, I think a lot of us took these things on as part of the struggle and felt we must take it upon our shoulders, it's part of what we committed ourselves to.  And that's why you also find that in some ways the damage to families is more dramatic.  So for example for Neil's parents and his sister, they bear this full personal impact of that loss without having made a personal commitment to what he was involved in.
 The other thing that happens with a lot of the detainees is they say it's part of the struggle. Part of the struggle was to destroy you and admitting that the struggle had damaged you or admitting that the security police had got the better of you, so one tends not to talk about those problems. And part of the struggle really was to survive, and we have a lot of survivors, we also have .....(end of side A of tape 14)
(side B starts after some gap in the recording)