Human Rights Violation Hearings — Durban — 1996-10-24

CHAIRPERSON: It may seem to some people that being banned, being denied to - the opportunity to practise your livelihood, is small compared to the scale of things that have happened, but everybody carries pain differently, every pain is unique.   If something is your bloodline and it's flowing in you and it is stopped, you feel your vitality draining away.   He wrote to me when I was away in Europe in 1976, "It is one of these days", the day in which he was writing, "in which the world seems to be too much for me and I can only be an impotent observer of it".

CHAIRPERSON: Richard was alive in argument, in debate, in groups of people, and those of you who were there would remember what it felt like to feel that electricity, that liveliness.   Over the years people would come to the house, the banning order was very effective, it had cut him off, people would come to the house to talk to him, to ask his opinion, to discuss things.   But it wasn't the same as standing at the university, at meetings, talking, being part of the discussion, growing with how things were developing in South Africa.

CHAIRPERSON: When the opportunity came for him to go to Germany, to be offered this scholarship, he was very enthusiastic about it.   It was a chance.   He felt his mind was being stymied.   He just didn't know, he didn't feel part of the academic stream.

CHAIRPERSON: However, the Minister of the Interior refused him permission to leave South Africa.   The terms of his banning order prohibited him from leaving the magisterial district of Durban.   He was also denied a South African passport.

CHAIRPERSON: His five year banning order was due to expire in March 1978.   He was not certain whether his banning order would be renewed.   The fact that his application to go to Germany being refused made the likelihood seem very very possible that the banning order would not be lifted, and, in fact, be renewed.    In January 1978 friends of ours from Germany, who were mounting a campaign at the diplomatic level to get the State to rescind its decision so that Richard could travel to Germany, they arrived.   They were not granted visas to enter South Africa.

CHAIRPERSON: I travelled out to Botswana to meet them, on the morning of the 6th of January, is that right?   Yes.   We were stopped at the border.   I was clearly the focus of their attention.   My luggage, such as it was, was searched.   I was stripped searched and interrogated about my motives for travelling hence.  I remember a lull in the conversation, the interrogation. It stopped.  They left the room.   There was a loud phone call made to Durban.   Obviously there was much laughter, there was much talkings about and comments on whatever was coming back from the Durban end of the conversation.  The phone was then put down, we were told we could continue our journey.

CHAIRPERSON: We arrived in Gabarone late, very late at night.  The first thing I did was to phone Richard and tell him what had happened at the border.   That we were safely in Gabarone was a relief to him.   We talked openly about who I would being seeing the next day and what he and the children would be doing.   We would talk to each other the next time, the day before I was due to leave.  I was only meant to be in Gabarone for three days.

CHAIRPERSON: On the night of January the 7th, I went to bed. After having had dinner with Jenny Curtis, who was later to be blown up together with her daughter by a bomb sent by Craig Williamson, Jenny Curtis and her husband, Marius Gwynn(?), Jenny dropped me just before midnight at the house of Jan and Ken Zunckel.   I got ready for bed, and then as I lay down to sleep about 40 minutes after, I felt and heard Richard at my side.   I was too sleepy to hear what he was saying, but I was much comforted by his voice.

CHAIRPERSON: Half an hour later there was an urgent knock at the door.   An urgent telephone call had come for me from Durban.   There was no telephone in the house in which I was staying, so we had to go where I could find a phone.  I tried to phone home, the lines between Durban and Gabarone were down.   I then remembered that the exchange from Gabarone to Johannesburg was automatic, so I phoned Elona Kleinschmidt, a friend of ours, in Johannesburg, and asked her please to phone home to find out what was happening.

CHAIRPERSON: Half an hour later I heard what had happened, those moments before I heard and felt Richard next to me.  I heard Elona's words, I didn't understand them.   The world I was ... (inaudible) ...  and was unrecognisable.   We were all of us, family, friends, no longer ourselves.

CHAIRPERSON: The journey back to Durban, there was no - there was then no sign of the security police, it was unreal.  Arriving back in Durban was nightmarish.

CHAIRPERSON: It was also a time - it was a time of ... (inaudible) ... pain and many ironies:  one of which was being addressed as Mrs Turner by the police;  being asked to go and identify Richard's body.

CHAIRPERSON: That night the feelings, being ... (inaudible) ... as the children will tell you later, never goes away.   It stays.   There is something we do not understand, we need to know who it was who pulled that trigger.   We know that the events of that night at known to the people who watched us.   I have said to the commission in my written statement that we were watched all the time.   We know from neighbours that the security police had access through their hedges to what was going on in our house.  We know through the police that our house was bugged.  Our telephone line was bugged.  Everything we did, as I have said, was recorded.

CHAIRPERSON: There is information.   We need to know who it was?  We know the people who were heading the various departments at the time, who would have given permission or if not, if they deny giving permission, was certainly would have been aware what was happening.   I would ask the commission to subpoena Colonel van Steenkamp, who was then head of the Durban Security Police;  Colonel Stadler, who visited often our house in the middle of the night to shine torches in our faces, to wake us up to make us aware of the fact that he knew what we were doing was not to be tolerated by the State.   There were various other security police who we kept bumping into during the daily course of our activities.   It became so - during the time, so much so that you would see a face that was familiar and you would smile and then a minute later you think, "Oh, My God, that was a security police person I smiled at".   They were just so pervasive, so ever, where you could not distinguish them from people that you knew just as your eyes travelled across a room.

CHAIRPERSON: In addition to Colonel Steenkamp and Stadler, there is Andy Taylor.   There is MacPherson.   And numerous other members of the security police, who visited us, who watched over us, who tapped our conversations, I would ask you to ask - to subpoena them, so that we can know more about what happened that night, so that they can actually reveal the information they know.

CHAIRPERSON: Our lives have been completing invaded by the shadow but pervasive presence and the structured activities of the security police.  It is now time for the shadows to be dispelled and the wounds to be dressed.  We look to the truth and reconciliation committee as the only means presently available for this to be done.

CHAIRPERSON: I would also ask, by way of restitution, for the truth and reconciliation committee to raise a chair of political science in the name of the Richard Turner at Natal University.   I would like there to be a chair, Dr Richard Turner chair in political science.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.