Special Hearings — Armed Forces Hearings — 1997-10-10

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: Mr Chairperson, let me start by saying that legal forms of struggle, though not extra parliamentary forms which we've had to use from the formation of the ANC were effectively illegalised in 1960. That was a culmination of a series of legislation, but what is clear that by 1992, they equipped themselves with the Sabotage Act to be followed by others which started with the detentions without trial, because previously until then the law allowed 12 days maximum detention before a person was brought to trial.  So there's a whole series of legally empowered unconventional measures that were made legal.
 But our experience in detention goes back to 1963.  The first death in detention was 1963.  I think the second was also 1963, the late Looksmart Ngudle. By 1965 at least 6 people were already dead in detention, political people.  I myself was detained in that period and the methods used were already, to put it mildly, unconventional.  Just about everything that became formalised and generalised, electric torture, the helicopter, sleep deprivation, standing on a brick, beatings, they were all there. Their refinement was such that the participation of the district surgeons was also there.  I was visited by a district surgeon.  The court records will show that when I appeared in court I stated exactly what had happened and the judge said, well I've noted what you've had to say, I'll forward it to the Attorney General.
 It is at time that Babla Saloojee was also thrown out of the window.  Timol was '72, '71, and I think by that time, by the time of Steve Biko we're talking about number 46. So all these methods of 
torture, some culminating in death in detention, were already there in 1963 and it is interesting that some of the generals who appeared here, and have appeared in the Truth Commission records were warrant officers, sergeants, lieutenants, Lieutenant Viktor and van der Merwe, they were lieutenants in 1964 torturing me.  They rose to become generals.  The same Viktor who was in Bisho, the same Viktor who was in charge of Soweto post '76, the same Erasmus was warrant officer, personally not only assaulted me but assaulted my then wife. 
 So I'm saying, to present it as they do, that only when the revolutionary onslaught had reached a point where the normal methods were inadequate and they were under pressure from their superiors, did they resort to this, is completely inaccurate.  
 Lieutenant Viktor and Lieutenant van der Merwe of 1964 had just returned from a training course under the Portuguese Pedepolice and the other one under the French in Algeria.  That was their training.  Their first experimentation with the Portuguese instrument which has holes in it on a piece of plank, which starts off with larger diameter on one side to a taper, which is used on the soft part of your body, so that when you are hit with that, even in the gentlest of slaps, sucks your skin into that hole until it is total agony. Colonel Swanepoel the notorious Rooi Roos was there.  Johan Coetzee was there, van der Berg was there 1964, was in the 
room when I was being tortured. 
 So I'm saying I find it very very strange that this explanation is given, that it is only roughly somewhere in the eighties when the revolutionary onslaught had reached untenable proportions, that they resorted to unconventional methods.
 Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, produced hundreds of prisoners for Robben Island. They came there in '63 facing split charges.  Thomson Ndewete was serving 21 years and served the full 21 years for an offence which was split into membership of ANC, an unlawful organisation, collecting funds for the ANC, attending meetings of the ANC.  Those were split into three charges.  This was done, and I'm talking about the entire judicial systems, it was done by the police who were detaining you using the 90-day law, torturing you, covered up by the district surgeons, dockets sent to the State Prosecutor, the prosecutor prosecuting and splitting those charges and the magistrates and judges sitting there, know they were administering that law. And whenever you raised your torture and illegal act, what were patently unlawful, the judges, he did in my case, Judge Boshoff said, "I've heard you, I will send that report to the Attorney General".  He was not prepared to consider that, as an issue that would determine the relevance of the evidence that the police were putting and the prosecutor was leading in that case. And I'm talking not just of some prosecutor in some magistrate's court, 
I'm talking of Attorney Generals.  the prosecutor in my case was Attorney General Masters, Attorney General of the Supreme Court of Transvaal.
 So I think that issue is a vital issue because, as I said earlier, I became aware, we knew that there was somebody called the Republican Agency as the intelligence service.  We knew that there was a security branch but this body hit us in the sixties. In my detention I found that a number of them were on the payroll still of the South African Railways Police. Our studies have shown since that the Railways Police was used by the National Party when it came to power in '48 as the venue, an institution where which they built their own security arm so as to infiltrate the entire police force and turn the police force which they had inherited from United Party rule to become the sole instrument of the National Party. That is our information.
 The Intelligence Services similarly started with the Republican Agency. Amongst the first exposures of its activity was its concentrated effort on getting journalists on their payroll as spies and that led then subsequently to BOSS, to NIS but the continuing attention to recruit journalists to use them not just to portray a certain image of the struggle of the then government but also to be sources of information on activities of what they regarded as counter- revolutionary activities started then.  Gerald Ludi was 
amongst the first to be exposed that way and so was Gordon Winter who was writing for the Sunday Express.  And it is the same Gordon Winter who then features later on in books of the infiltration attempts in 1969-71 around comrades like Winnie Mandela.
 So to argue the way they have argued leaves a huge gap in their having to explain the practical reality of the tortures and the deaths that took place in detention and some of the mass assaults that took place in the case of industrial relations problems as well as general attempts to mobilise people. One of the revival instruments of the Mass Democratic Movement was the Human Rights Committee in the late sixties, the second was the Trade Union Movement which culminated in the strike of 1973.  You will find that the reign of terror that obtained in this country between 1965 and 1973 which led to almost a total absence of any form of mass protest was achieved by means of that repression using what they now call unconventional methods which I understand to be methods that were illegal in terms of their own immoral laws.

CHAIRPERSON: Ronnie Kasrils.