Human Rights Violation Hearings — Cape Town — 1997-06-10

CHAIRPERSON: I would ask Mary Burton to swear you in please.

STEVE KAHANOVITZ: (sworn states)

CHAIRPERSON: Dumisa Ntsebeza will be your facilitator for the day.

MR NTSEBEZA: Thank you Chairperson.  Welcome Steve and good morning.

STEVE KAHANOVITZ: Good morning.

MR NTSEBEZA: I think one cannot talk about KTC and all related incidents without talking about the Legal Resources Centre, and as I understand you are from the Legal Resources Centre.  Maybe you want to tell us something about the Legal Resources Centre before you testify - especially in the context of the events.
 What is the Legal Resources Centre and what are you in the Legal Resources Centre?

STEVE KAHANOVITZ: Many thanks for that opportunity Mr Chairperson.  Legal Resources Centre is a public interest law firm that was set up approximately 18 years ago.  It was set up by what I would think was a group of lawyers who had a lot of insight they include the current President of the Constitutional court, Arthur Chasscelson, Sidney and Felicia Kentridge and a number of others who believed that it was possible using law to create space for people who were oppressed in this country.
 They believed that there were various contradictions in our law, that there were rights in the common law which could be used to advantage people, which the South African State sought to disadvantage.
 Over the years we've acted for people in those positions.  We have decided that our resources must be used for the poor and indigent to ensure that they can ensure their rights in South Africa.
 We  often had to search for those rights in the law prior to 1994, nowadays we are very pleased that we have a constitution with a Bill of Rights that enable quite a lot of those rights to be sought and enforced more easily.

MR NTSEBEZA: What is your position in the Legal Resources Centre?

STEVE KAHANOVITZ: I am currently Regional Director of the Legal Resources Centre in Cape Town.

MR NTSEBEZA: Now I am made to understand that you are particularly going to be looking at conflicts in the so-called squatter camps in a certain period and I think it is a period with which the Legal Resources Centre was intimately concerned and involved with.
 I do not know how you propose to deal with your matter or do I understand that you want to read your testimony to the record  or do you want to speak to.

STEVE KAHANOVITZ: Mr Chairman, I would like to speak to the document that has been handed to your earlier this morning.

MR NTSEBEZA: Very well then, go ahead.

STEVE KAHANOVITZ: Thank you very much.  Chairperson, first I'd like on behalf of the Legal Resources Centre to thank the Commission for inviting us as lawyers to address you at this extremely important hearing.
 I see our role as a limited one because of the events you will be hearing from the people who were most affected by it, those living in the area.
 That limited role is to explain and to summarise the legal proceedings arising out of the burning of thousands of homes belonging to tens of thousands of people in this area in 1986.
 I was not an eyewitness to those events, but in view of the legal proceedings I will describe, I have learnt through them I believe, and others  at the LRC have also learnt and developed an understanding of what took place here, which I believe will be to the benefit of your Commission's task of understanding our South African past.
 I've taken the oath to tell the truth of the sequence in respect of legal proceedings.  In view of the knowledge obtained during the course of conducting those proceedings, I learnt many things and formed opinions of what took place here.
 The courts before which we appeared at no stage ever had to give a judgement for reasons that will become more apparent later.  Thus the opinions that I will refer to, are not those of the court, nor of others, but conclusions that I have drawn, which may hopefully assist the Commission in this deliberations.
 Before proceeding to the legal proceedings, I must make it clear that this legal activity took place against the backdrop of the horror of an apartheid State which for thousand living in this area, was even greater as their lives were disrupted by police activity and fighting leading to extreme suffering.
 Here in the Western Cape with its Coloured labour preference policy, where pass laws were even more viciously enforced, lies for African citizens of South Africa a more vigorously oppressed, than very possibly elsewhere.

CHAIRPERSON: Excuse me Steve.  I am sorry, can you just pace your presentation, because the interpreter is struggling to keep up with you.

STEVE KAHANOVITZ: I apologise, sure.

CHAIRPERSON: Just a little bit slower, thanks.