Special Hearings — Conscription Hearings — 1997-07-23

DR TOMS: Thanks very much Wendy.  It's nice to have a colleague on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and it's appropriate to come after Richard, because Richard and Peter, the other statement that you've heard, represented really the core of the first wave of objectors, very much religious based objectors to the SADF at a time when it was incredibly difficult and they were an incredible inspiration to me always in the process of getting to the point where I got to.
 I really form part of the second wave of objectors after the law was changed to allow for religious pacifists to do community service, and many religious pacifists and people who would find very creative ways of claiming to be religious pacifists did that community service and did amazing good work in the country.  And it was in a sense then a different group of people linked to the End Conscription Campaign who then took on a political challenge and were very politicised in their challenge of the SADF and what it was doing in the country.
 I am going to try and keep very short and just try and share a bit of how I got there, my experiences in prison and I think that is more than enough.
 For me I had my call-up to the army in 1978, that's when I had to start in the army for two years.  I had left Medical School in 1976, the June the t uprisings add that and been sort of politicised in that process and my year in internship in Kimberley I queried what should I do?  And typical, the way I approached things I asked many people's advice and that, and this is before Richard and Peter, so people like Archbishop Dennis Hurled actually said look go into the army, don't leave the country, because that seemed to be the option, and actually the day that I travelled to start my training I cancelled my flight to London.  That's how close it was.
 And then I spent three months doing basics in Pretoria.  At the end of that, when I was sent to the Ciskei as a medical doctor to work in the Homeland, my whole experience started to change as to what I was willing and not willing to do.  I tried to go into the army remaining true to my principles and that's very difficult.  I asked questions in these propaganda lectures we got from the Dominies and that and of course immediately was targeted as an "opstoker" and wasn't very liked.
 When we went to the Ciskei we first had to report in Port Elizabeth and we were requested by Military Intelligence to basically spy on our patients.  We were there as doctors in military uniform to be the - to win  the hearts of the people, one, and to be the eyes and the ears of the SADF in the Homelands, to pick up problems, to report them back to Military Intelligence, which of course I refused to do.  But it immediately showed that your role, even if you tried to be principled within the SADF, was completely compromised.  You were a cog in a machine that really just churned out war and destruction.  A cog in a machine that defended apartheid.  
 From there I was sent to Namibia for six months in the operational area.  By that stage I had refused to carry a gun, I was a non-combatant.  My officer there, when he found out that I refused to carry a gun sent me to the most dangerous area under his command, which is bordering on Ovamboland, and my experiences there was working with the mission hospitals and visiting the army bases.  That the nuns and the people of Namibia saw myself in that Lieutenant's uniform in the SADF, even as a doctor, they saw me as an occupying army.  They saw me, ja, as oppressors of them and of their country and there was this incredible coldness from the nuns, the Lutheran nuns particularly.  They had no other option but to utilise your services because there were no other doctors.  But you could see that they disliked having to do that, and they were in no-ways buying into the situation that we were helping them.  They realised we were there to oppress them.
 And I think that took me further in my sort-of quest to be true to what I believed.  So that when I finished my two years in the army I came out and started Empelisweni SACLA Clinic in Crossroads, the old Crossroads, the squatter community just here because I wanted to be part of the solution, not part of the problem to our country.  I had been at the SACLA, the South African Christian Leadership Assembly conference while I was in the army in July 1979 where I had been challenged to become part of the solution.  I happened to be gay, it was mentioned previously about some of the trauma that gay people went through in the army, and I really respect that.  Add one of the reasons I didn't go to a rural hospital was I felt I needed to be in an urban setting, as a gay person.
 I started this clinic in Crossroads from nothing.  We built it with builder's rubble and that and some of my friends from the End Conscription Campaign started to help us.  There experientially one saw what apartheid was all about.  So my resistance to apartheid and to the army was not something from a book or from some intellectual view of life, it was experiential.  
 Perhaps just to raise one specific experience which led me to publicly refuse to serve in the SADF.  In September 1983 we had a situation where many women and children came down to join their husbands in Crossroads.  It was not a political thing, it was to be part of a family.  And they were making these little structures of branches that they cut from the forests with black plastic over them.  As we all know September is the Cape Town winter so it was raining a lot, and for three weeks day in and day out the security forces, the riot police came in their casspirs, they'd bring camouflaged casspirs in their dark green, light green camouflage uniforms and rip down these structures, pull the plastics and branches to a spot and burnt them in front of everybody.  And then at four o'clock they would go home to their warm homes and their warm families knowing that they would return the next morning and do the same thing.  The women were left trying to get something during the evening to make another shelter for the night knowing the next morning that it would be ripped down and burnt.  
 The one Friday, after three weeks of this some of the women held on to those branches and to the riot police that constituted a riot and they used teargas, rubber bullets, which I don't know if you they are six inches long and about an inch and a half in diameter of solid rubber, and police dogs to quell the riot, and we were having to treat the results of that.  So we had kids with severe respiratory distress from the teargas, people with dog bites.  I remember one time having to go out and see a mother who had a 24 hour-old baby that was left in the rain because her structure had been torn down.  
 And a reporter actually, so you see these reflective things do help, a reporter asked me, he said does this make any difference to you?  I said, well, because I had been thinking this whole thing through, I thought in no ways could I from that point on ever put on that SADF uniform again.  Because you see to the kids and to the people in Crossroads those riot police in camouflage uniforms were the Amajoni, they were the soldiers and to put on that uniform would be to identify with those Amajoni who had actually been oppressing the very community that I served.
 I think that it was the experiences that led me to be able to stand up and be part of a very exciting organisation, the End Conscription Campaign.  I think it did amazingly good work.  The results was, because I refused in 1983, I got called up in 1984, I was preparing to go to prison the American Ambassador intervened under the Constructive Engagement Policy, we specifically asked him not to intervene but in true American style he ignored that and so that call-up was withdrawn 10 days before I had to report.  
 I then continued very actively in the End Conscription Campaign.  And particularly the SADF dirty tricks department from the Castle started their issues.  They seemed to enjoy having a lot of posters that they used to produce.  The first one said, "Ivan Toms is a fairy?", which is an interesting one.  And then they proceeded to get more vindictive and said "Toms Aids test positive", which is not true and it was on a billboard this size all the way down Adderley Street and Strand Street and the highways, and there was another one saying "Ivan Toms dumped by lover Graham Perlman", which happened to be true.  (Laughter).  
 Add that was about five days before my next call-up when they were intending to put me in prison. That they withdrew again, that those posters went up five days before the call-up.  And then ultimately in November 1987 they called me up, I reported and refused to serve in the SADF and that resulted in my trial in 1988 where I was sentenced to 21 months imprisonment in Pollsmoor Prison.  On review in the Supreme Court it was reduced to 18 months.  I served 9 months of that imprisonment and then came out on appeal and we won our appeal in the Appellate Division in Bloemfontein.
 That was a different experience to the detention barracks.  I think just to remember people like David Bruce and Charles Bester in that second wave of objectors, and people like David and Charles who, they had done no military training so they were sentenced to six years imprisonment.  I mean Charles Bester was an 18 year-old Christian and he stood for his principles and accepted that.  With winning the appeal we were released.  
 In prison we were treated as common criminals.  They wouldn't acknowledge that we were political prisoners, so we were with rapists and murderers.  I myself got assaulted by a psychotic prisoner in the bathroom as he tried to rape me.  The interesting thing was that when we went to the court case around that I was the one, as well as him, but I was the one who was in handcuffs and shackles going to the court.  
 So, because they of course, like what happened with the objectors in DB the warders told the prisoners that we were all communists and tried to isolate us away from the rest of the prisoners because they were very afraid that we would influence them.  We did influence them in the end.  The one prisoner tried to hang himself and that was the one time I was allowed to do some medical work and then from then onwards he wanted to join the African National Congress because he believed that at least we were supportive and caring people.
 I think overall, just to say, that that second wave of political objection was a very important wave and Richard and Peter and people like that in that first wave and the second wave, and the work of the End Conscription Campaign effectively meant that ultimately we no longer have conscription, and for that we are really thankful.