Human Rights Violation Hearings — Port Elizabeth — UNKNOWN

WITNESS: We thought we would provide a kind of a record of that harassment as well as harassment of other journalists during that period who were trying to cover these stories.  This involved journalists being harassed right inside their newspapers and as well as out in the field.  We set about gathering statements.  We also had good contacts with people who were working in the UDF, the End Conscription Campaign, the Black Sash, etcetera.  We, over a period of three days, have gathered 20 statement from these sorts of people from all over the world, from London, Hong Kong, Canada, people who have left South Africa and they are incredible record of harassment that was not perhaps as extreme as some of the stuff you have heard here, but which was non the less vicious and malevolent.  I also dugged up a few photographs which reminded me of that period.  The one I thought would struck home for me was M C Mpanda whom I photographed after he was attacked in Uitenhage by the gillanties.  It is a very disturbing picture.
Information lost due to changing of cassettes.  ...particularly Lieutenant Carl Edward, his brother Lloyd Edwards, Richard John Rademan, Major Roelofse, there are a couple of... there are the names.  We also hoped to have presented a statement from Molly Blackburn's husband, but that has not come forward.  For that I think I will hand over these statements and they can be for your record and for your information.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much for handing over this.  Could I just check whether there are any questions from the panel?
(?) Mike, the mass media have been the object of attack from the left as well as from the right.  I do not know whether that has been your experience.  You will recall that yesterday part of General Holomisa's input was that some mass media were being used in order to carry the propaganda of the government of the day and I would like to know what your comment is on that.

WITNESS: I would like to talk about the period if I may, the 1980's.  It is clear from these statement that the Security Police had very easy excess to Newspaper House and various other newspapers, but the one I am recording is Newspaper House.  Lieutenant Edwards was seen often strolling through the Eastern Province Herald corridors and Evening Post corridors seemingly at whim.  
My editor, Neville Woudtberg, who is still the editor, soon as I began writing about the schools boycott, called me in and told me that under no circumstances will I be allowed to report on Black people...  Well, he said on political matters, sorry.  I asked, "Does it mean that I cannot interview Black people anymore?"  He said, "Yes".  Soon after that the Security Police, I was told by the news editor, had been on to him telling him that I was a UDF radical and activist.  I was called in again told that I was being sent out of the newsroom to the Sports Department where I worked under the Eastern Province rugby coach and I did not last long there.  There are other testimonies there from other journalists like Joanne Becker, Gavin Adams, about the similar kinds of pressure that were placed on their editors.  Sometimes Kosie Viviers was sympathetic but then later on predestined and cold, some of the journalists say.  I think that is symptomatic of the kinds of orchestration that I think Carl Edwards was carrying on behind the scenes.  There are also other testimonies slightly off the point of journalists being beaten in car parks in Port Elizabeth, Peter Dickson of the Herald, being smashed in the face and dragged off his flat presumably to be murdered by suspected CCV agents in Port Elizabeth.  These are the kinds of things that I experienced that we know about.
(?) As I understand you, the context, in fact the whole tender of your testimony is that in the period covered by the Act journalists were usually preyed to a minefield of laws and harassments that made journalism a huge occupational hazard.  Would I be correct in summing up the tender of your evidence as being that?

WITNESS: Yes, there were very severe legal restraints.  It just was a question of how far would you go to break them because those laws were there to sensor a huge event, a huge upheaval, massive repression, etcetera.  So editors were ethically bound to try and get around those laws.  They were not just laws and it is a question of how far did they go.
(?) But do you agree that it was not only editors but also ordinary journalists?  Peter Hani was one of those people who was incarcerated for instance in the Transkei, not so?

WITNESS: Sure.
(?) Tony Head was masers from publishing these sort of things.  Donald Ludes, Percy Qoboza.  You yourself were detained.  Were you not?

WITNESS: Yes, I was detained for 83 days.  We were attending a gathering of concerned White people of Port Elizabeth when the second State of Emergency was declared at a branch, people are named, came bursting in, they threw us in their cars.  They were aesthetic.  They were so exited.  They drove us off to Algoa Park Police Station where I think one of the most horrific scenes greeted us.  Long rows of people just whipped of the streets being shouted at, processed, etcetera.  The thing took 83 days in which I landed up being held at Louis Le Grange square for 20 days.  It was only after I went on a hunger strike and became very ill and a doctor saved me.  I would like to put on record that the district surgeon, Dr Krige, did not tolerate the Security Police's attitude and invasion of my rights at that stage and he threw them out.  He admitted me to hospital after I had a very severe asthma attack and I felt that I was going to die.
(?) Even though you were released, for two days you were restricted, were you not?

WITNESS: Yes, they banned me in terms of the Emergency Regulations, but we decided to ignore the ban.  We did not think it was justified obviously and we just ignored it.  We started up the agency again and we carried on reporting.
(?) Did it affect your work as a journalist in some ways?

WITNESS: It did.  I kept a more of a low profile.  I news edited.  I sat in the newsroom.  I sub-edited.  I was working with free lance journalists from the townships, people like Mbulelo, Linda, Chris Kwazi and those kind of people.  They did a lot of the reporting.  Just for a while.  I did the job for a year and I eventually left.  The Security Police, Richard Rademan, had threatened to kill me if I did not leave Port Elizabeth.  While I was in detention he delivered this threat and I stayed afterwards for a year.
(?) Did you ever find that the restrictions that were placed by Section 205 of the Criminal Procedure Act where you were being compelled to reveal your resources that that was one other way in which those reporters who were reporting violations of human rights were being targeted?

WITNESS: I think a whole range of laws were used against journalists, but I never experienced that.  I think the police just decided to throw me in jail rather.
(?) Yes, but the newspaper community, as far as you know, will find that particular piece of legislation harrowing and hampering?