Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

MIKE LOEWE: Thank you very much.  This submission was solicited from me about a year ago in Port Elizabeth and that is why I am here today, I had been ... (tape ends) ... 1986 when I was working in Port Elizabeth as a journalist, in which I was detained for 83 days.	I just want to say beforehand that in making this statement, there are names in the statement which refer to people that I still work with, Editors who are clients of ours.  I am the Editor of a company called East Cape News, which arose out of East Cape News Agencies and so there are difficulties.	There are difficulties in saying these things, we still deal with these Editors.  And there are also other journalists in the Eastern Cape who one deals with on a day to day basis.  Whom we believed were informers or working for the State or any one of the categories that had been raised today.		The East Cape News Agency did in fact collect statements from 21 Civil Rights' activists and journalists who were working in Port Elizabeth at the time and in the Eastern Cape.  It is an incomplete list, but we thought at the time it would be a useful contribution to the Commission and we just it off our own bat essentially.	The period that I am dealing with started in about 1984, when I left the University of Cape Town, where I had a history in the Student Media and went to Port Elizabeth and got a job as a general reporter on the Evening Post.	At that particular stage, in the early 1985, the student boycotts began to break out in Port Elizabeth and the Editor of the Evening Post was happy to send me out to report on this.	However, after writing three page leads in one week, I was suddenly pulled off the story.  And informed that I was no longer to write about politics.  I asked him at that stage whether that entailed not being able to speak to black people, and he said yes.  And it was soon after that, a few months later, that he called me in and informed me that I was being sent to the subs room, where I was going to sub under the then coach of the Eastern Province Rugby team.  I didn't last very long on the Evening Post.	There is a context to this which I suppose I should declare.  At that stage and I think Olivia Forsyth was probably responsible for this, myself and another friend of mine who was having a relationship with Joanne Becker, had been approached by the UDF and asked to assist the UDF in getting its opinions and facts and comments and statements into the media, and I think perhaps quite naively had done this.	I think, my suspicion is that Olivia Forsyth got hold of this document.  She was a student, she was a journalist, an activist in Grahamstown.  We had links with her through our University connections and so on, and Becker was fired.  And I think I was pushed out of the newsroom.	I then went off and we began freelancing and I say we, myself and a group of young black messengers at the Evening Post, Herald who wanted to be journalists.  We pulled together into an organisation, which we called our News Agency.	We set up a news agency, which we called Vukani.  It wasn't long after that when the second state of emergency was declared that we were all detained, myself, Mbulela, Linda, were detained by the Port Elizabeth Security Branch.  And to cut a long story short, the guy in charge of that was Carl Edwards.  He had links I think with Craig Williamson.	Other Security Policemen there were people like Lieutenant George Beeton and a man called Richard Rademan who was essentially my age.  He had been to school in the Eastern Cape like me, and was very similar to me.  It was quite an incredible experience to be interrogated, he was my handler, by him.	One of the first things that happened to us was that we were arrested essentially at a gathering called by Civil Rights' people in Port Elizabeth to look at the emergency regulations and to see what they entailed for us.  We were a very scared group that met.	And the Branch raided us with four or five cars, ten of them and took us off to a processing centre where people, black people, where the scene that greeted you were long, long rows of black people standing there, bloodied, full of sweat, the sense of fear was palpable.	And all being processed, and we were all being processed in this way.  From there, we were taken to Rooi Hel or North End prison where I was, we were all thrown into one cell together.  A group of essentially white detainees, four of us, we were given no books, basically it was a prison regimen for us.	And from there we knew that we would be picked off one by one by the Security Police and taken up the hill to Louis le Grange Square where we would be interrogated.  As it turned out, not all of us were given that treatment.  It was I think myself and Dominique Shosan who was a UDF activists and church worker and a friend of mine, plus one other guy.	And the process was one where Carl Edwards would come and visit you in the prison itself and say look, we just want you to write for us.  He would give us a pseudo sort of professional time, we just want information.  And I first agreed, and then I wouldn't write, and two weeks later he came for me.	They handcuffed me, and there was a bit of a scuffle outside the prison and they drove me up to Louis Le Grange square where I was to spend, I think the next three to four weeks, in a cell with the door closed.  Mattress, blankets and a Bible.  Four blankets and a Bible.  The first weekend the door was closed almost permanently.	So you would have a grill door and then a solid door and the idea was that they said they knew I was claustrophobic and that I would break sooner or later, that I would write reams and reams and the used crude language to describe how I would write, it would flow from me like - you can imagine.	And so at that stage the detainees decided that we would write statements.  There was nothing really essentially to hide.  But there was a point of a principle as a journalist to write for these people was pretty repulsive.	But in any way, I did write.  I started off writing simple statements, about my school and where I came from, the Eastern Cape and so on.  This was not enough and eventually they took me up to the 6th floor at Louis Le Grange Square, with a table, just a plant, nothing on it, and Rademan said, he took me up to the window and I hadn't seen the outside and he opened it, he struggled a bit and he opened it and he said, feel the mesh, please feel free to jump, won't you?	And he left me there for half an hour.  Luckily just that sense of seeing the sea, it is an amazing view from the hill in PE, was quite an inspiration, so that backfired.  So I thought great, when they started the whole number.  And they all traipsed in, four of them.  Some with guns.  Carl, and they began to interrogate me.	Essentially what they got out of me perhaps, was they wanted to know about a trip to  Zimbabwe, it was that stage, about 1986 and I eventually revealed yes, I had been, I had spoken with a former conscientious objector friend of mine, Brett Murdel and Brett Murdel had fed me a story about he was disillusioned with the struggle and I fed that to the cops.	It later transpired that Murdel was in fact a high ranking MK Officer and had tried to recruit me.  I had actually declined thinking at that stage, that my role as a journalist was more important than my role as an activist.	And in a subsequent interrogation period a few days later, they were all gone.  It was just myself and Rademan and all he wanted to know was had I been reporting in the townships.  And the answer was yes.  And that was the end of that and then I was left to sit in the cell.	Eventually I decided that there was no ways I was going to get out of this thing and I went on hunger strike.  I became very ill and the police was saying you are not going to get any medical attention, but a man then appeared.  One night I had a very bad asthma attack.  I banged on the door, no one came.	I had stashed a few drugs that they had given me, behind the loo.  I took all of them and I got through the night.  The next morning a District Surgeon called Dr Krige appeared, Alice Krige's father appeared and basically threw the cops out, looked after me, had me submitted to hospital where I spent ten day recovering from severe bronchitis, hole in the lung and so on.	After that period, the police had been laying to my parents.  It was clear that they had essentially lost the fight.  And a long loosing battle that I had, it was clear that they couldn't carry on with the interrogation and I was taken back to North End where it was just one incident where they handcuffed me.  They put someone in the boot, one of their own members in the boot to bang on the back and to shout how Sergeant, Sergeant, where are you going.  Don't kill me.	But I realised that they never gave off their rank and how did this guy in the boot know that he was a Sergeant, so I started laughing loudly and there was this instant silence and a Security cop called Bennie Botha, he was driving the car, he leaned back behind me and grabbed me with my handcuffs.	He was Sergeant Bennie and he grabbed me and pulled me around the back, saying that he was going to kill me and so on.  And Rademan also threatened while I was in hospital, that he would come around and he and George Beeton had played with my drips and so and, and he would say look I am going to kill you if you now get out of Port Elizabeth.	To cut a long story short, at the end of 83 days, I was released, but I was banned.  I wasn't allowed to be a journalist or a member of the ECC or the UDF.    I didn't mind the political restrictions, it was the journalism that I think was the one that I thought at that point.  And after a long battle, first of all my lawyer David Dyason, advised me just go on ahead and I went on, and we formed an Agency called Port Elizabeth News, which was part of a whole group.	At that stage it was developing in the Eastern Cape.  Pen Elnews in East London were run by Frans Kruger, Louise Flannagan.  The Albany News Agency in Grahamstown and that is the Agency that I run today.	They dropped the clauses that came to the court and I ran the Agency for a year and then left Port Elizabeth.  And that is the great substance of my evidence.