Special Hearings — Children's Hearings — 1997-06-12

MS COLEMAN: Well, because of the lack of time, I thought that you have my submission, it is an overview of what our experiences were in the detainee office.  It is the debriefing of detainees.  What we did for the submission was, we did 485 cases from our books as a sample for you and from that 485, we chose 200 statements in full which we have furnished to you.
 So that you get a feel for what the children were saying.  I think you are giving me about 10 minutes, is that correct, well in that 10 minutes, I am just going to not even give you an overview of this document because I don't think there is any point, I would rather just tell you about a particular case that I feel that should be looked into and why and that is the case of Nixon Perry who was 16 and he was killed in the Welverdiend police station.
 He was taken in with a group of children, they were taken in individually and interrogated and assaulted and his friend said, and I have the statement, that Nixon went into the room, they heard him screaming and then there were silence.
 The interrogators came out of the room, they closed the door, they went into another room and went on with the interrogation.  Well, Nixon was killed by those policemen and the post-mortem showed that he had severe head injuries and bruising all over his body.
 Now, there was a next death in detention, which was a man by the name of Clayton Sithole.  Clayton was the reason why President De Klerk set up an independent Commission of Enquiry into his death.
 Although we had been calling very strongly for an independent Commission of Enquiry into Nixon's death, that was totally, we never, ever got a response from the President on that issue or from the Minister.
 But he had the Commission into Clayton Sithole and he had committed suicide, which we had expected.  I don't know the circumstances, I don't know whether he was assaulted and tortured and that is why he committed suicide, but he committed suicide, but the 16 year old was not looked into.
 Thereafter there were two more deaths.  One of Michael Zungo and another young man, both of which are in my documents and I would ask the TRC to investigate as to why there wasn't independent enquiries into that and actually investigate those cases for me.
 Then I thought, I don't know if there is much point, but I thought I would just tell you about a young man who worked in our offices when he came out of detention for the fourth time.
 He was taken into detention when he was 15 and he was the most charming and delightful young man.  He is what you would call a young leader.  He just had the most wonderful personality and he worked in our office and during that time, he did a film for us at our request.  He appeared in Children under Apartheid.
 The reason why I am telling you about Sithole Edblumo is because I know you have heard about him before, he was eventually executed - one shot in the head after being on the run after having on the Wednesday in our offices, being taken by the Security Police to John Vorster Square, four days later he was found, he was interrogated in John Vorster Square for four hours, he was then released from interrogation, he was then - he told us because he came back to the office, he told us that he had been questioned only about the film, why he had made the film and they wanted him to admit that the DPSC had made him say that he had been tortured and assaulted, well that child was tortured and assaulted and he was held in solitary confinement.
 And that was on the Wednesday and on the Sunday he must have died, because his body was found on the Monday.  And that was, you know, I know because I was in the office myself when he came back from having been interrogated, that that was the reason for the questioning, the Children under Apartheid.
 Now, what I would like to spend a bit of time on talking about, is the destabilisation, because in all the years of monitoring, repression, which I did in the office, I think the horror for me was the destabilisation period because up to that time, people knew who the enemy was.
 They knew that they were fighting an Apartheid system and they knew they were fighting the system.  And so therefore they coped, they coped with their detentions and they might have had psychological damage, they might have had all sorts of illnesses and terrible things happened, but what happened from the 1990's was just unacceptable, it was violence at the degree that was just awful and I was in Boipatong the morning after it occurred and what I saw there, actually blew my mind.
 It was a very organised, systemised attack on the people.   They described the painted faces and sometimes they would see the white of the hand.  Women and children were killed, pregnant women, it was horrific.  Now why I am talking about that is that I think that the TRC has a particular duty to address the traumatised society that has occurred from the East Rand, the unleashing of the violence on the trains, Soweto and all the other places that it happened.
 You can't expect that society to return to normality.  I can't go into all the psychological effects because we don't have time, but you've got a traumatised society, you've got families that are split and broken, you've got orphans, you've got all sorts of things that had happened and I think until we deal with what has happened, I don't think we are going to be able to rectify what has happened in the 1990's.
 Sure, you know we had repression for years and then that is the one thing I wanted you to look at, is maybe addressing, maybe counselling services, but real, good counselling services that are accessible to the communities, to get school teachers trained so that they can pick up children that are disturbed in the classes, the universities to have some sort of counselling service.
 Because those are the people, the youngsters who have come out of this period.  The universities shouldn't be disregarded, they are also places where you have got young people who urgently need help.  And then the other thing I wanted to say to you was really my conclusion, was that no one, no one didn't know what was happening in this country to children, everyone knew.
 We made all sorts of deputations and delegations to Ministers, we spoke about it, we spoke overseas, we weren't just being rash, we had facts and we had figures.
 But the response was to discredit, to ban, to censor rather to address the situation and I think for a President, and there were a couple of Presidents in that period, to deny knowledge of and to accuse maverick policemen or soldiers, is so grotesque as to laughable.
 Were they the ones who were banning, were they the ones who passed the censorship laws to stifle any revelations of the reality of what was happening?  Were they the ones who withdrew passports from people informing the world of what was happening and were they the ones who did not set up an independent Commission of Enquiry into the death like Nixon's?  And were they the ones that were responsible for the Boipatongs and the operations of that ilk?  I say it was a carefully managed system and a President or Minister has to be made to answer for this traumatised society that we have inherited today.
 For that they have to accept responsibility.

MS MKHIZE: Thank you very much, Audrey.  I would like to ask you this question.  In your submission, you refer to the plight of the young White teenager, I should think you are referring to what was happening at that time, and you said many had to grabble with the idea of being conscripted into an army to fight a war that they didn't necessarily believe in.
 And you haven't said, we haven't heard much about that.  Can you just indicate to us as to what exactly happened.  What were your observations at the time?