Special Hearings — Children's Hearings — 1997-06-12

DR COLEMAN: Chairperson, the submission arises out of the monitoring that has been done by the detainees' parents support committee and subsequently by the Human Rights Committee since 1981 and is an overview for the purposes of this hearing of the role of children and youth during this period.
 We refer to the children and youth as the glue of township resistance in the role that they played and we describe them as the footsoldiers of the struggle, acting as a network for distributing pamphlets and announcing meetings, providing early warning systems, and their schools became centres of community organisation against repression.
 Very early on the apartheid State became aware of the pivotal role of children and youth and identified them as a serious target and treated them accordingly.
 One can say that an undeclared war against children was waged and that children and youth became the primary recipients of detention and torture, bannings, assassination and harassment of every description.  And this document sets out to summarise that full spectrum of war against the young.
 We divided it into two parts.  The area of total strategy from 1960 to 1989 and the area of destabilisation from 1990 to 1994, and we defined children for the purposes of this document as people under the age of 18 and youth as 25 or younger.
 To begin with, we try to get an assessment, we tried to get an assessment of the casualties of children and youth in this period of 1960 to 1989.  We defined two periods within that, the Soweto uprising of 1976 and then subsequently what we term the national uprising from 1984 to 1989 which triggered off states of emergency and our estimates are on the basis of cross-checking and compiling of various sources, numerous sources including certain official statistics and we determine that the death toll from 1960 to 1989 was as follows:  All ages, 7 000; if we go down to youth only, that works out about 4 200, about 60%; and children within that, would be 25% of the total, about 1 750 is our estimate out of that 7 000.
 Also of course there was injury as a result of the action of Security Forces using teargas, birdshot, rubber bullets, live ammunition and sjamboks and our estimate of the injury is about 12 000 youth, amongst them 5 000 children.  It is also important to mention that a number of babies died during this period from the effects of teargas.
 During this period in the early parts of the period, these casualties were as a result almost completely of security force action, but then from about 1987 onwards, vigilantism began to take over the role of the predominant cause of political casualties.
 And we also defined the kinds of incidents in which deaths would have occurred.  Security force actions against protest marchers, and so on, including funerals, deaths in police custody which we will come to, major massacres, there were 40 major massacres that we can define within this period, we define a major massacre as a period in which 10 or more people died.
 And also deaths in detention to which we will come and assassinations by hitsquads.  
 We also define the category of severe ill-treatment which I think is important to your Commission and we see four categories during this period.  First of all assault and injury by Security Forces in their endeavours to suppress civil protest, assault during arrest.  Assault and torture whilst in detention and assault by vigilante groups to which we will come in a moment, too.
 And we believe that victims of such treatment must run into the tens of thousands.    Just a brief word about repressive legislation under which the actions of the Security Forces were supposed to have been carried out.  It was first of all the Internal Security Act which was permanent legislation and that made provision for all of the human rights violations of which we are aware, detention, banning, imprisonment and execution and the banning of organisations, gatherings and publications.
 Then the Public Safety Act which enabled the State, the declaration of the state of emergency and also the declaration of various regulations which also ... (tape ends) and under the Public Safety Act, there was the declaration or the promulgation of special educational institutions' emergency regulations which were in force from 1985 right up until the end of 1989 and longer, which controlled the movement of school children during school hours and what could be taught and so on and those are listen in the document.
 Another piece of legislation which is pertinent to is the Effected Organisations Act whereby if your organisation was declared an effected organisation, it couldn't receive funding from overseas sources at all and NUSAS, the National Union of South African Students was one such organisation.
 We come now to detention without trial and we regard this as the apartheid State's major weapon of repression.  It was used on a massive scale.  You know we have heard of how in the Argentine and so on disappearances were massive, 30 000.  Here the major weapon was detention without trial and we estimate that at least 80 000 detentions have occurred from 1960 right up until 1990.
 And most of them actually occurred from 1985 onwards during the states of emergency.  And children and youth featured very prominently.  Again we had tried to make an assessment because we are into huge numbers here.  We tried to make an assessment of just how many people were detained and how many amongst them were children and youth and here for this purpose of this assessment, we have drawn from monitoring of our own organisation, monitoring by other organisations and also official information which was obligatory under the Public Safety Act, and certain police affidavits in court revealed a lot of information.
 From that we are able to arrive at what we regard as a conservative analysis that there were as already said, a total of 80 000 detentions amongst whom there were about 48 000 youth, in other words 60% of those detentions, this is during this period to 1989.
 And within that about 20 000 children, 25%.   And as far as age is concerned, this went down to as young as seven.  Sometimes entire schools, preparatory schools were detained.  As far as the sex, the gender of detainees were concerned, we found that something like one in eight, about 12% of all detainees, were women and girls.
 So that we would estimate that 10 000 women and girls were detained in this period of whom 6 000 would have been youth, 25 and younger, and 2 500 would have been children under the age of 18.
 Torture and assault in detention.  Here again we estimate that one in four detainees, would have been abused by torture or assault before they were finally released.  This estimate we make from countless numbers of interviews with detainees after their release and we regard that one in four as a very conservative figure.
 And of course assault begins at the arrest stage.  Interrogation follows and that could take place either in army camps, under the control of the South African Defence Force or in prison cells by the members of the SAP particularly the Security Police.
 And torture during interrogation can only be described as routine and that included electric shocks, suffocation, beatings as we've heard this morning, suspension, sleep deprivation and so on.
 It is important to note what the purposes of torture were.  They were basically to extract names of colleagues for additional detentions, to extract confessions and information and to intimidate and to try to pressure people into becoming informers.
 And of course a by product of torture and assault in detention, is death in detention.  It is inevitable.  And deaths have occurred.  We assessed that, or we have records of 73 deaths which have occurred in security detention during this period.
 And with them, there were of course deaths of young people.  So of the 73 deaths that we have recorded, we know the ages of only 53 of them and within that 53, a third of them, were young people, 25 years of age and younger.
 And there was even one young man under the age of 18 who died in detention.  And it is actually interesting to examine the official causes of deaths in detention.
 Such is the familiar ones like suicide by jumping, accidental fall from the 10th floor and so on, slipping on the soap.  What happens frequently is a verdict given within Magistrate's court or inquest courts, of suicide by hanging.  This comes up at a rate of about 50% of all deaths in detention, suicide by hanging.
 One has to ask the question, how many of these suicides by hanging were genuine and how many were simulated.  And whether they were simulated or induced by the conditions of detention, it is a tragedy either way.    One needs to note that detention or the fear of detention brought about what we call a large body of internal refugees, people on the run being scared of being picked up for detention and incarcerated for one, two even three years.
 So lots of young people lived away from their homes on the run, living a twilight existence.  Hostage taking was another rather disturbing event.  When the Security Police arrived at a particular home and they could not find the particular person that they were looking for, the particular child, they would take a brother or they would take a mother or the father and say when your relative is found, then we will release you.
 This became an issue which Minister Vlok at the time, in June 1987 challenged us about and we submitted evidence to him and that was the end of the story, everything went quiet.  Another point I would like to mention was the vendetta against COSAS.  COSAS, the Congress of South African Students, had a membership of over a million students and became absolutely a focal point in the struggle.
 And inevitably they became a target of a bitter vendetta by the apartheid State.  And Security Police made a determined bid to detain its leadership and within one month of the declaration of the state of emergency, on the 21st of July, over 500 of its members were already detained.
 And of course those who were detained, were being tortured to reveal the names and whereabouts of their colleagues.  This was a frequent pattern.
 And then very shortly thereafter, on the 26th of August, COSAS was declared an illegal organisation and membership of it was an offence.
 Then something which has been alluded to earlier today, mass detentions of schools.  The special regulations that we heard about earlier during the state of emergency which would allow the Security Forces to go into schools, was extraordinary and as we've said here, some of the actions in detaining entire schools, must have convinced the outside world that here was a government gone mad.
 There were a couple of instances on the 22nd and 23rd of August, over 800 school children were piled into trucks and taken away and kept overnight and then 360 of them were charged the following day, including an eight year old, if you can imagine that.
 Another report was a school in September, all 786 pupils and 33 teachers as well of a Soweto Secondary School, were loaded into trucks by heavily armed police (indistinct) and detained in terms of emergency regulations for boycotting classes.
 There was the issue of mothers and babies in detention.  There were young pregnant, and we have given examples here, and there were young pregnant women in detention.  Young women giving birth in detention, young women nursing babies in detention and young mothers separated from babies whom they were nursing at the time.
 Hunger strikes, there were numerous hunger strikes and in the Detainees' Support Committee almost on a monthly basis we would receive letters from detainees, smuggled out of prisons, saying we are on hunger strike, please explain our plight to the world and we have one example of that in this document.
 The national hunger strike of 1989 was a very important event in that all practically all, detainees who could, went on hunger strike and this was about 1 000 of them and this actually pressured the authorities into releasing them and this had the effect of throwing open the gates of the jails.  This was after people had been in detention for over two and a half years.
 We also discovered the existence of rehabilitation camps where young detainees were, some of them, were advised look, we will take you to a rehabilitation camp and this is your way out of detention and there we will - you will live in comfortable conditions.  Obviously there was a sting in the tail, that these people were pressured to become informers and to engage in counter mobilisation organisations.
 And we list the camps that were discovered, there were about six of them in various parts of the country.  As far as the impact of detention on children is concerned, I am sure that this is going to be a subject of much debate and much investigation.
 And we make our offering in that direction with a few documents which we included in this one.  Just briefly, the banning and restriction of children and youth.  Many people when they were released from detention, were banned.  In other words they had to be in their homes at certain hours, they couldn't go to meetings, gatherings, they couldn't associate themselves with various organisations.  In other words what was happening was that there detention was being extended into their homes.  And this was at no expense to the government and some of these detention orders were quite extraordinary in that a person would be obliged to report twice to a police station on a daily basis and what - all that they were doing was going backwards and forwards between their homes and police stations and doing nothing else.
 And of course, they could not engage in any formal employment.  Political imprisonment, of course in the unrest, very large numbers of people were arrested for all kinds of reasons and brought to court and charged and to a certain extent convicted and again we have tried to assess the numbers.
 And it is assessed by us that during this period around 100 000 youths, aged 25 or less, have been arrested and tried in court with about 60 000 convicted and sentenced for politically related offences.
 And about half that number would be under 18.  And of course it is important to note that not all sentences resulted in imprisonment.  One aspect of political sentencing were political executions.  
 We have recorded, we have on record names of 49 prisoners who were executed by hanging.  And amongst them were 16 who fall into the age group of 25 or younger.
 And their names are listed in the appendix.  Organisations - a large number of youth and student organisations were banned either under the Internal Security Act or under the state of emergency regulations.  
 The first wave of bannings occurred in October 1977 after Soweto.  Nine such organisations were banned.  The second great wave occurred in 1988, when 13 youth and student organisations were banned and of course, we have already spoken about COSAS.
 Gatherings - for 15 years there was a blanket ban which was renewed every year for prohibiting any outdoor gathering of a political nature.
 Then in 1986, there was an additional blanket ban which was introduced, which forbade any indoor gatherings which related to advocating a number of things, including educational boycotts.  And then apart from these blanket bannings, countless thousands of individual gatherings were banned and of course the consequence of disregarding such orders, amongst the consequences were getting yourself killed or being assaulted or arrested in the course of gatherings which now became illegal.
 Banning of publications - obviously the student press became a target and our assessment from all publications is that something like 10 000 publications were banned by the, or regarded by the publications control board, as undesirable and that possession or distribution of these was an offence.
 There was one particular student newspaper, called SASCO National, which had a circulation of 60 000 copies.  The apartheid State set out to smash SASCO National and amongst the things they did was, they banned certain editions for possession and made two attempts to ban all future editions.  Then they detained and banned the two co-editors and finally the premises and equipment of SASCO National were destroyed in attacks by persons unknown.
 And then briefly about informal repression and within informal repression which is the repression outside of the law if you like, extra legal or couvert repression.  We have three headings.  One is the National Security Management System, one is Vigilante Groups and one is Hitsquads.
 A great deal has already been said about the National Security Management Systems with the State Security Council at its head.  It was a structure without any (indistinct) foundation, but it was responsible for the formulation of State strategy and actually for directing the conduct of all security operations, whether they were overt or covert and as such, we believe that it has ultimate responsibility for exercising all  the forms of repression which we already covered and also for the covert ones which we will allude to briefly.