Human Rights Violation Hearings — Soweto — 1996-07-23

MURPHY MOROBE: I must say it is also a very important thing that at one meeting I have actually spoken about.  That to go through those events of June 16th and subsequent events is a very traumatic experience and I think that families have been torn apart, there are many children who have been left fatherless or motherless without any assistance.  There are many of us who actually were sent into exile, into camps in foreign lands.  Some of them have come back, some of them have serious phycological and mental problems.  You have many of us who went and ended up on Robben Island in different prisons who were subjected to some of the most humiliating torture by the security police.  Clearly it is something that does require some kind of coherent programme
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to rehabilitate and assist those people to come to terms with life.  It might be that we have not seen those effects very directly right now, but it is quite definite that in years to come you will see some of these effects translating themselves into a whole range of antisocial activities.
 Already it is happening.  The fact that people come out of jail, they do not have any jobs, you know, there is no support mechanism.  If they happen to be unfortunate, unlike us, who happened to be prominent who might find it easy to get jobs and they happen to be just another activist who was also making a valuable contribution, there is no way in which those people are recognised and some support put in place for them.  I think that it is a serious problem.  
 I was reading the other day about Zimbabwe, what happened after the Zimbabwe war.  That many of those gorillas who were sitting in the camps and fighting the war they themselves had a similar experience.  Some of them have become, got into crime, some are becoming, you know, wild bands running around robbing and so on.  We are going to have those things if we are not already having them because I am sure in some of the things relating to crime that are happening, some of the people who might have been involved in the past, would be involved in these things because there is no other avenue for them.  I think that trauma is not so much someone who has a mental breakdown.  It is also the things that people on account of them not finding any support eventually decide that normal society has no way out.  I just go into a bank, I get R100 000,00, R1,0m.  It is much better than sitting in the queue and waiting for soup on a cold day.  I think that we have those kinds of problems that I think Government or certainly through the 
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help of the Truth Commission we could begin to look at how we could deal with this.
 I was in jail for about six and a half years.  Three years of which were on Robben Island.  We had major arguments in jail about the question of work because on Robben Island they would not give us work because they said there was no work to do.  We actively campaigned, those of us who were in the ANC, campaigned that it is important that there is something for us to do in jail because a mind without any work really decays, you know.  You then get into all kinds of things because once your mind strays, you know, you get into all kinds of antisocial activities and I think from our point of view if you come out of a jail experience of 20 years or 15 years without having worked, it must surely destroy your soul because what is a human being without work.  
 Those people that came out of jail also do need some kind of counselling because I have seen many of the people often they are bright people.  You might not see the problem, you know, at first glance, but we do not know ... builds up when they do not find any support and for a, in our society you are a head of the house, you come back, you do not find a job, you have been in jail, your kids are growing up and it is quite traumatic.  I think that without proper trauma centres that will begin to understand the impact, the phycological impact of these years.  We have to learn from Zimbabwe and their experience after the war.  I think they are living through the things that they did not take account of.  
 When we were detained in the past we had the benefit, for example, of organisations like the Detainee Parent 
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Support Committee that use to play a valuable role in giving support to parents and, you know, relatives of people in detention, but with the unbanning of organisations after 1990 many of those support structures went because funds for non-Governmental organisations who could do those things were no longer forthcoming.  The question and the challenge for Government now is what it can do to at least try to reconstruct some of those structures that can perform these kinds of services because I do not believe that Government, on its own, can actually do a proper job.

CHAIRPERSON: I just want to thank you for all the insights that you have given this Commission.  We had looked at your statement before, but as you began to share your testimony we really got a deeper understanding of your perspective.  All what you have said is valuable to us and we hope you will be prepared and continue being a partner in our attempts to formulate the reparations policy and we will be mindful of all the suggestions that you have given us.  We thank you.

MURPHY MOROBE: Thank you.
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