Special Hearings — Armed Forces Hearings — 1997-10-07

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you Mr Mendana.  I am sure that we are taking note of the remarks that you have made and to the extent that it is possible and to the extent that it may be something that falls within our mandate, you have made a persuasive plea to us to do an intervention, I am not confident to what extent we would be able to make a meaningful intervention.  As you correctly point out, this seems to be something in the area of the political leadership in Government and in the Government of the day.  I dare say that in the end we will be writing a report which we ought to submit to the State President and in that report we will, obviously, be making recommendations.
 Unfortunately, I am not even in the Amnesty Committee who are the ones who decide who should or should not get amnesty and, unfortunately, there is non of us on this particular panel who sits on that Committee and, as you know, it is a Committee that is as near to being considered judicial as any Committee in the TRC.  The other Committees are not as autonomous of the Commission as that Committee is in the sense that since it has that task of determining who can or cannot be granted amnesty, the Act also provides that their decision to grant or refuse amnesty cannot be reviewed, not even by the Commission and I think the only route that is possible in an event where an application has failed and there is a basis on which it is thought it ought to have succeeded, the route remains that of taking their decision on review, but then that is a separate matter.  
 It may well be that the Amnesty Committee Chairperson or the Amnesty Committee as a whole at the end of the process in writing their report may take a view that there were hard cases that they had to deal with.  Some of which, I think, Leklapa mentioned in the course of his contribution.  I do not know.  It may well be that they may take this view that in terms of the Law as they interpreted it, they were not able to allow amnesty to be granted, but that the broad view that they take of the issues is that the President may well want to consider that some of the cases, even if at a legal plane, are not capable of being considered for amnesty, they are in the nature of things, the sort of cases that the President may decide to exercise his Presidential prerogative.  
 I do say, and I want to emphasise this, that that is a possible route, but then again I am not in the Amnesty Committee and I cannot really persuade them to do so, but we have taken note, very, very serious note of the remarks that you have made.  
 I also would like to say, as Vumangos Ntikinca will know, this problem of political prisoners being placed with criminals is one that we will continue to grapple with for as long as the people who continue to be in charge of the prisons are dictated to by the letter of the Law as they understand it.  Mr Ntikinca will know that there was a person who was kept as a criminal even though he had been charged with terrorism and because the terrorism charge had failed and he was found guilty of possession of, illegal possession of firearms and was sentenced to seven or eight years he was, however, kept as an ordinary criminal.  When everything was pointed out that he was not a criminal and we struggled to persuade the political leadership of that day to recognise this fact.  
 So, those things are going to continue and we have taken note of the sort of things that you have remarked about in that regard.  Again, it will be an institutional thing and I may well say that, to the extent that we will assist, I think there should be a sense in which the political leadership of the PAC should continue to interact with correctional services, with the President, with the Ministry of Justice to see to what extent they can persuade them to see things in the way in which you see them.  
 Now, it, therefore, remains for me at the end of this process to sincerely thank you for having come and I am eternally grateful to you for having been as frank as you were, for having stated your views and your frustrations and your anger and I thank, also, the members of the panel for rising to the occasion of taking Leklapa's anger with quiet solitude.  We take all submissions that have been made today very seriously, because they are submissions which we need to take into account when we are going to be saying in that Commission report we now understand the motives and the perspectives of the armed forces that were engaged in that conflict.  
 We do not have to accept them, is not our duty to do so.  We need to understand them so that we can incorporate them in the body of knowledge that is going to be documented so that it reflects the history of this country as seen by all the perspectives who were involved in the armed conflict and that we hope that that final report document will reflect some of the things that were raised today.  So, it is with that that we feel your contribution was worthwhile.  If during the course hereof tempers flew, interventions came, robust, it is all in the nature of a honest endeavour by all of us to seek the truth.  I do not want anyone of you here to leave with the impression that we were displeased by the way in which you responded.  I think all of you responded in the best way you know how, as honestly and as fully as you could.  
 I must just say, finally, that I need to say that we are in the month of October and the time is running very, very short.  We would, therefore, urge you in relation to those things that you need to submit by way of documents, to quickly let us have those as fast as you possibly can so that we can complete the picture of our understanding of the issues that were at play, including the list that you are going to compile of the repossession units, executions and, lastly, of disappearances.  In fact, the Director of Investigations and I are going to be twisting each others arms, because he is very much aware of the sort of time constraints that we have and there is so much that we can do between now and the end of October or even the end of December.
 I am going to plead and twist his arm and do this so that we can go ahead and try and dig up some of the bodies which are in the Northern Province and some of which are attributed to the PAC or PAC cadres.  Those bodies are lying in unmarked graves and we do get a sense that some of the people who were killed by security police, on investigations that we have made, are people who are Apla people, but we are unable to determine who they are.  So, before we are getting to a stage where, because of time constraints, we are winding up the process of investigation, I think you would assist us to quickly contact us so that we can determine who of those people who are lying in those unmarked graves are your people so that if I succeed with my Director of Operations, we should proceed to the process of exhuming those bodies so that you can give them a decent burial.  So, time is of the essence and there will be no more time for us to do those things if you do not do them with speed.  
 We have a meeting in about five minutes time and I think this is an appropriate time, therefore, for us to say these proceedings are adjourned and we thank you for having made these contributions.