Special Hearings — Prison Hearings — 1997-07-22

JOSEPH SEREMANE: Thank you sir.  And with due respect, owing to the constraints of time, perhaps I should start with the bottom end of how I would have concluded.  I come here on behalf of my family.  I come here to express the feeling of betrayal by compatriots and comrades.  I come here to express our disappointment and the way we feel cheated of a dear little brother, a promising young man, a brilliant young man.
 I come here to talk about the hypocrisy that is taking place in our country.  I also come here to make a contribution to my own people who have power that perhaps from that contribution, from all these pains that we hear, they stop doing these things.
 There is one thing that is messing up our country, it is the lack of sincerity in our country.  It is the lack of recognising other people's contribution if they don't belong to your camp, if they don't belong to your tribe, if they don't belong to your race, we are still victims of fragmentation, we have achieved very little until we have changed.
 That is my brother.  I have sat, I have walked, I have contributed, I have met people inside and outside the country.  I have risked my neck, my life, I have helped across the spectrum and I am the one to sit here and not know what has happened to him.
 And it pains me when I hear the (indistinct) of shallow honour and integrity of disclosure, yet underneath it is (indistinct), vilifying those who can't speak for themselves, they are called rapists, murderers, mutineers.
 I want to ask for the true records of those trials in Quatro camp.  I want somebody to come and tell me what my younger brother actually did that he deserved to be shot like an animal being put down after being brutally disfigured so that of his best friends could not recognise him.
 I want that comrade of mine to come up and be honest and say and tell a little lie at least to the family, a little white lie and say we shot him accidentally when we were practising.  We will be satisfied.  Why do you cheat me of my brother's bones?  Why do you think our contribution is worth nothing?
 Why do you think we ran and volunteered to risk our lives, calling for your own return home, for justice, supporting you in your call to be treated under the Geneva Conventions and you couldn't treat your own that way?
 Just say the truth, come back and tell us.  We have been tested, we can forgive, we can reconcile, yet we are also capable of forming third forces to hit back, but that is not what we want, we are looking forward to a better South Africa.   A South Africa that will respect the integrity of everybody, irrespective of their colour, creed, tribe too and social standing for that matter, and worst still we must get out of this ideological straight jackets that we can only think of people, only as they belong to your straight jacket, outside your straight jacket, they are expendable commodities that you can wife off as you please.
 Let's come to our senses so that I knew, I smelt danger when I came back from detention myself and I found my younger brother gone and I never knew where to until just a few weeks before late Chris Hani was slaughtered, hearing it from ex-Quatro victims themselves and one of them lost a brother, left a brother, shot like a pig at Quatro camp and then they told me the story, but I sensed in my travels throughout the world in my kind of work I was doing, I looked for my brother very quietly and silently.
 I knew what was happening in the country.  I was in Robben Island and I saw what was happening in all the areas.  The kind of thing that was happening where people were just destroyed out of shear rumour, shear suspicion that you could be labelled anything and you die the next day.
 Therefore that made me very quiet, I looked for my brother very silently and quietly.  I never asked a soul where he was, but I listened very keenly and it took me more than ten years.  I never heard anybody mention him.
 I have gone to East Berlin without passports, I have met comrades who should know or could have known.  They said nothing and the young chappie resembles me, we look alike.
 Suddenly nobody has ever come across this young Seremane, suddenly nobody has ever known him, suddenly nobody has a record to show what kind of trial he had, he faced.  Was he defended or was he not defended?  And where was the accountability that you couldn't account to his people and say he is dead?
 Yesterday and the many, many months people have come here to complain about their experiences in prison.  I have been on the Island, I have gone through hell.  I have been tortured, nearly lost my life - 1976 to 1978.  I have seen what it means to be tortured.
 But when I think of Chief Timothy and compare the way he died, to my suffering, my suffering is nothing and I have decided not to say anything about that, it is just pointless, it is useless.  The system in a way resembled accountability because when they were finished with me, they threw me on the lap of my people and said there is your rubbish, we are through with it.
 And my people can't come and dump those bones and say we are through with those bones.  I can ask for my court records and find them and go through the trial today from the system, but my movement can't offer me a piece of paper to show me how they conducted the trial.  Why, oh why can a small boy leave classroom and move over to Angola wherever and turn out to be an expert South African spy who eludes all our machinery, security machinery for over five years?  I don't believe that story so that I am asking sir, that my request first was that we should in stead of having this kind of thing, we should have a full inquiry on these deaths of Quatro camp, dig them separately from our platform of the TRC.  We still want truth, it is going to be hard to forgive when you don't know exactly what has happened. 
 We cannot just say it is our Government, therefore let's have it.  Questions have to be answered because without the questions, the weaker ones are going to go back and do it again.
 So that I got the story through two people and it was difficult for me to come to this TRC, I was fearing for the safety of this two young people, they are like this one.  One is in the army today, and the one is in the police force in one of the provinces and I grappled with this difficulty.  Here are young men who have gone through hell and they have given me the story, they have given me their account, affidavits and they were willing to sign them, but I go there and say and expose them, are they not going to be victimised?
 And I tried, I said well, let me meet somebody, let me meet the President and just disclose how we feel the pain without going public, like on this platform.  But it is hard, like the young man says access to our leadership is very difficult.  I tried to explain to the secretary that it is not necessary that I want to see the President for my own sake, but it is to protect young people.
 That did not make sense and it was after a month I tried that, that one of them - his life was attempted - they shot at him by his colleagues who were guards at Quatro camp and our Security Forces right now and I said what do I do now?
 Even now, I don't know, but I just felt that for the sake of my family and the memory of my younger brother, I must come and say it and my family are saying you Jo, you are going to pay a price again, you are now going to disturb even this Government, they will victimise you and again, I saw I had to make the same decision that I made when I faced the system that if it is for the truth that I must die, so let it be.
 If I continue living without saying and enquiry about Chief, then I might as well think that whatever I am getting is blood money.  Thank you sir.