Special Hearings — Conscription Hearings — 1997-07-23

WENDY ORR: John, it's very difficult to respond to a testimonylike yours.  It engenders so many feelings in all of us.   Inme it engenders feelings of horror, of pain, of anger, but I thinkmost overwhelmingly of sorrow that young men like you and notonly those that were in the SADF but those who were in MK andAPLA and other forces, that young men like you had to deal withthat insanity, and if there's any contribution that the Truthand Reconciliation Commission can make to healing and reconciliation,which is after all our aim, we're going to need to deal with theissues and challenges that you have raised to-day.  I salute yourcourage.  I know it's not been easy for you to be here to-day.
 I remind you that this is not the end as you yourself know, there'sstill a long way to go and we wish you every support and courageand affirmation in that journey.  Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you Wendy and thank you John, I reallyappreciate your coming.  The normal reaction to extreme experiencesof trauma is to just banish it and forget about it particularlyif there's a culture of encouragement by people who are seen tohave been in the leadership of institutions such as the one withinwhich we are operating, but you have not allowed the banishmentof the memory of the trauma.  Part of the reason for us to holdthese hearings is to understand very deeply the kinds of experiencesthat people like yourselves went through, but beyond that, totry and encourage those who were in the leadership of those institutionsto minimally explain to people like yourselves as a form of reparationand reconciliation between your own identities now and your identitiesthen.  We are hoping that they will be touched as well, becauseyou mention for example the senselessness of it all and you'reright, many of the things totally unspeakable, and we are reallythankful that we've had the opportunity to get a glimpse of someof those unspeakable activities there.
 To use Wendy's words we really do salute your courage to comeand speak about these thing, thank you very much.  
 We're going to read just very short summaries, they are shortsummaries of three people on the Agenda.  The first one is SamSole and the next one is Reverend Torr and the last one is EricRautenbauch so we'll ask Piet to just quickly zip through thesummary of Sam Sole's statement, thank you.
SUMMARY OF OTHER STATEMENTS FOR EX-CONSCRIPTS

PROF MEIRING: The summary statement of Sam Sole readsas follows
 This first hand account of the experiences of a SADF soldierin the townships of the Eastern Cape was originally written in1985.  At that stage Sam Sole was a national serviceman and iscurrently a journalist for Tribune in Durban.  He submitted thisaccount as a submission to the TRC in response to our call forEx-Conscripts to tell their stories.                                                                                      In his account Sam Sole tries to break through what he calls thestranglehold of the press and our own self serving blindness byportraying the staggering gulf between the official instructionsas members of a disciplined, effective and respective securityforce each individual's conduct must at all times be responsibleand courteous.  This is the personal message from Brigadier vander Westhuizen and the daily and nightly behaviour of the Whitetroopa and the police in the townships.  
 He takes his readers with him on patrol in the townships sittingbehind the thick glass and steel of the Casspirs where they arein turn bored and excited, they want action, they are callous,they are enormously arrogant he says.  For Sole the central imageof this time is as we heard that story of the small Black boythat was chased and caught and hit in the Casspir.  
 Sole describes how throughout his time in the townships the armyhas been mixed with the police.  Though disciplined communicationcontrol were greatly superior in the army and the allocation oftroops into small allocated units as he says often allowed theSADF members to become a law unto themselves and mirror the behaviourof the police not merely their attitudes.  
 Sole says he not only tries to describe the insane situationin which he found himself but also his own reaction to it.  Hesays and I quote ,
"My own guilt at my inaction in the face of this brutalityas well as the sheer physical impact of it created an enormoustension and conflict of behaviour.  My response was enough toget me labeled a "Kaffir Boetie" and a "Kommunis"yet it is impossible to isolate yourself completely.  You havebeen living fart to fart with these people for nine months.  Theyhave humanity although they abuse it in others and you have tocontinue to live with them so you are forced to compromise yourselfand treacherously you lose that sense of outrage until the nexttime."  
 There's a few examples he quotes of incidents which explain whythe SADF almost immediately inherited the lack of credibilityand  bad reputation.  Of the police he says, 
"One night another fire, we are hanging around and suddenlyone stone smashes the windscreen of an SAP bakkie and two copswith shotguns bound off like dogs let off the leash.  They stalkedthe one lone stone thrower and corner him, he continues his desperatebarrage and they shoot him head.  He's about sixteen, he was akid."  
 Then he adds another example to that.  Sole concludes his accountwith a reflection on the difficult choices facing those who haveto do conscription and he emphasises the need to look for constructivealternatives just to running away from it.  He says,
"For me the army and my involvement in the unrest has beenan education if a traumatic one that has situated me more concretely. I can now try to think and act on the basis of experience ratherthan intellectual exposure.  However, others have long ago had,had that education.  History moves fast, both faster and slowerthan we imagine.  Perhaps if we do not take sides now the decisionwill be made for us."  Thank you.