Special Hearings — Political Party — 1998-05-06

UNKNOWN: Thank you.  The one question that I have Mr Chair is not explicit from the submission but on is able to draw an inference thereof on page 14 under the popular justice, the peoples' courts as organs of peoples' power, particularly paragraph three thereof where mention is made of the Amabutu.  Now my question is were these Amabutu, if my understanding of Amabutu is correct as meaning also SDU's, and I want to believe that my understanding is correct, were these SDU's, were they set up at the recommendation of the UDF and what happened in the 1990's to these structures?   That is the question.

CHAIRPERSON: Right thank you Mr Mpshe, would you like to answer that one Mr Cachalia?

AZHAR CACHALIA: Chair if I could just say that on the point of that Amabutu did not necessarily mean in the mid '80's SDU's.  SDU's was really a later development.  Amabutu's were in a sense groups of young activists in our communities who saw themselves as in a disciplined way carrying out what the instructions of the leadership would have been.  In the case in point we refer to them particularly as peoples' volunteers investigating crimes relating to peoples' complaints.  I think it's only really in the early '90's with the developments of what happened at that point that you see the development of SDU's and SPU's.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, do you want to follow that up?

UNKNOWN: That SDU as it developed then, would I be wrong if I say that was actually the birth of the later SDU's, because if one looks at what the Amabutus were doing and what SDU's were doing, to a certain extent there is some commonality.  Would my inference be incorrect?

AZHAR CACHALIA: Chairperson you may find a bit of difficulty here with answering that question.  Actually none of us I think are really experts on this question.  I don't see any of us sitting here with sort of direct knowledge involvement or being involved in an SDU, organising an SDU or, it's really, I don't know how competent we are actually to deal with that.  We can say it's not as though there was any sort of UDF manual which said how you go about setting up an SDU, what are the rules and how you compose it those sorts of things.  They were phenomena that were taking place, I don't want to say in an unorganised way but certainly not something that we can be very helpful about, I think ourselves.  I don't know if you want to add to that.

MR SIZANI: First of all I want to agree that Adv Mpshe is right when he says you can draw inferences of similarities in actions of Amabutu and SDU's, in particular that aspect of them that tended to defend the community from attacks.  We in the Eastern Cape in particular, we didn't have a phenomenon called SDU's, but we obviously did have Amabutu and Amabutu in particular, I'm sure the Commissioners have received a lot of information both from submissions from families of those comrades who disappeared or were killed and perhaps from your own investigations, in particular in the Eastern Cape where there was a concerted effort by the regime to target certain houses of political leaders and activists.  The tactics that they were using for instance, if I may quote just a few examples were to, if a group of Amabutu were sitting assembled around a particular house like the house of Comrade Ngoyi or Comrade Fazi or Mama Quina and so on, they would come and disperse them with tear gas or water canons and following that dispersing they would then come and attack and burn the house and so on.  Amabutu were vigilant in searching for imminent attacks and possible arrival of Amaafrika or the SADF or the police, and Amabutu in that sense, yes were protecting the community and were seen to be volunteers in defence of the community.
 But their was an aspect of Amabutu that tended to also link and liaise with community structures like street committees and area committees in order to investigate.  For instance in the Eastern where we saw at some point at some time in the Eastern Cape a most marvellous experience which I would really want to relate, where shebeens were seen to be sources of violence and rapes and sometimes even murders and there was an instruction from the residents' association to close them at nine, so that after which you would not find the rapes and the murders and the steeling and the burglaries.  The Amabutu monitored that situation and reported to the street committees and area committees and it was a marvellous experience, I must repeat, to relate but was also another aspect of Amabutu which for me is written very little about by many people who did the investigation of this particular phenomenon.  
 For instance there was a time when stabbings in the township was rife, a source of deaths over weekends; you must recall that the newspapers over those days usually gave statistics on Mondays about how many deaths occurred over the weekends and stabbings were one of the sources of deaths.  There was a sort of declaration by the residents association to declare the carrying of knives, almost like the current government declaring the carrying of dangerous weapons in public banned, those days the carrying of knives was banned.  The Amabutu carried out that particular instruction by monitoring the actual carrying of knives because the phenomenon of carrying of knives in most cases was in fact among the youth and therefore Amabutu being young were looking after their peers, like Comrade Terra was explaining here the phenomenon of being part of the peer group and if you were to be found to be infringing on those rules, you were isolated out and being part of those people who had disciplined to protect the community.
 Yes Amabutu were a very very good phenomenon which if we were to emulate now, well yes because the subs is encouraging community policing where the community participates in rooting out crime, protecting children from being raped, from protecting women from being abused and even stopping houses from being burgled; by the community looking out for those potential perpetrators of this kind of activity.  
 I'm saying that Amabutu played a very particular significant role during those days which the current government wants to emulate in different form.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  I think the key sentence on page 14 which will stand in the record, the formation of peoples' courts as organs of peoples' power never became the official policy of the UDF.  It could well be that there were people who indifferent in both camps but it wasn't part of the official policy as you stated and I think that that's important for us.

MR SIZANI: The point to beg though Mr Chairperson around that was that the guidelines which guide the feelings of the UDF were such that if you engaged in activities and campaigns that were not contrary to the policies of the UDF, the affiliate would be allowed to perform those functions and in this case street committees and area committees were assisted by Amabutu to advance orderliness within the community despite the fact that it may not have been an official policy of the UDF.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you I'm going to serve other questions that commissioners may want to ask; this is your final word Mr Mpshe and please keep it brief.

UNKNOWN: Yes Mr Chairman I was going to ask for indulgence just to follow up on that.  A simple question Mr Chairman, what happened then to this structure of the Amabutu during the '90's when the MK came in, and that was my final question?

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Sizani are you able to answer that?  What happened, did they disappear?