Special Hearings — Prison Hearings — 1997-07-22

HAROLD STRACHAN: Yes, that is what I was going to talk about next.  Also you see, I had thought in my innocence, you see, that if we could get this article out, whether it was accepted as true or whether I was charged or whether I was found guilty or acquitted, it would make such an impact that they would feel obliged to have some sort of judicial inquiry.  As indeed would be the case in any reasonably civilised country.
 You take Holland, New  Zealand, somewhere like that, if such a revelation were made, there would be an investigation, even if the person they are after would to be found guilty of misrepresentation or perjury to be laying, you know, they would still feel obliged to have the investigation, but the reaction here was close ranks. 
 Prisons Department, please close ranks and the charge sheet, when we got it, there were 11 500 words in the published articles, 1 500 words were challenged in the charge sheet, lines, sorry lines, not words, lines.
 And counting line by line, you see.  Yes, that is right.  And of that proportion of the articles that they charged me on, less than 10 percent, on less than 10 percent could they find me guilty, which they did.
 And the guilt they found in me, the perjury was that I turned around all the petty details, they buried us in courts, that trial went on for ten and a half months and day after day, you know, going down to the place there to record the senior, junior counsel and these guys would say, God, back to the salt mines, back to the dirty dishes.
 They brought prisoner after prisoner, warder after warder, to say that dishes in the Port Elizabeth prison were not greasy and a man as I said, he used to investigate the amount of soap put into the water to wash them and all that, so I was found guilty of perjury on several such charges, you see, but it was sufficient.  Once there is perjury, there is perjury.
 But the big things, they didn't.  They tried to with the District Surgeons for example, but they were able to just prove nothing.  We really nailed the District Surgeons you see.

MR LEWIN: There was also evidence that within the prisons themselves, I mean apart from getting prisoners to come forward and testify against you, they also did various things.  Can you tell us about those?

HAROLD STRACHAN: Yes.  Before I do that, let me tell you about one piece of evidence that was given by one of the District Surgeons in this case.  It was put to him by Adv Nicholas, you know, that the Prisons' Regulation say that every long term prisoner before doing hard labour, must have a thorough physical and a psychological examination.
 And he said to this particular District Surgeon, how long did you take to give these guys this examination and he sort of "hummed and haa'ed" and we whittled away on the amount of time he spent at the prison, you know, doing his duty and we found that the time he spent with the 50, 60, 70 new convicts standing in the frost out there, was an hour and ten minutes.
 Which meant he had 80 seconds for each of them, to do a thorough physical and psychological examination before sending him for hard labour and he became a bit enraged standing in the witness box there and he said, no, no, no, he said, you are engineering something here.
 He said, you know, we learn a skill you know, we are Doctors, he said, why I can remember on one occasion coming, being presented with a man who had been sentenced to death and I looked at this fellow and I said he is not going to make it to the gallows and he didn't, he died the next day.  Now how is that for medical skill.  
 Any way, yes, but now ...

MR LEWIN: Within the prisons did ...

HAROLD STRACHAN: Yes, any way I was sentenced for two and a half years which was reduced on appeal to one and a half.

MR LEWIN: No, sorry, I meant in preparing the case, what happened within the prisons?  Didn't they make some building changes?

HAROLD STRACHAN: I don't know about that, no, Hugh, you can talk about that.  You enjoyed them.  No, when I, after I had been settled as they say, you know, I had one and a half years to push and they sent me back to the very people I had been writing about, especially one guy called Du Preez.
 He was a boxing champion amongst other accomplishments.

MR LEWIN: B.J. du Preez.

HAROLD STRACHAN: Yes.  And I went straight into solitary again and that was real vengeance.  I mean, I wondered if I would ever eat again.  It is so easy to entrap somebody in prison to get a charge against him so that he, or her, so that they will lose meals.
 You know, meals are the big punishment.  And it happened every week at least, you know, they would - I would sit there in total silence all day, you know week after week, and then suddenly they would throw in a dozen very decrepit mail bags and say fix them, you know.
 I would do this.  They would take them off reasonably repaired, reappear ten minutes later with another lot of mail bags and say you haven't done them properly.  You know, and I would say no, but those aren't the mail bags they gave me.
 Are you calling me a liar?  Are you calling me, the warder, a liar?  "Nee meneer", okay, three meals, that means - that doesn't mean you go 24 hours without food, that means you go 38 hours without food, because your supper is at half past three in the afternoon and the breakfast is the day after tomorrow, you know six o'clock, but you know, it happened again and again and again, three meals, six meals, three days.  You know what you call rice water.

MR LEWIN: Could I just ask, sorry to take you away from that.  Could I ask what was the attitude during the case of your lawyers for instance?  I mean was there any doubt amongst them that they were having to put up a case?

HAROLD STRACHAN: No, no, oh no.

MR LEWIN: So there was nobody there that questioned your integrity or what you were talking about?

HAROLD STRACHAN: No, no, well if they did, it wasn't in my presence.

MR LEWIN: And your attitude to the official Prison Department policy in setting up this case against you?

HAROLD STRACHAN: Yes, well I ...

MR LEWIN: Were they fabricating information?