SOUTH AFRICA ACCUSED Indiscriminate brutality by police and army

Press, 9 January 1986, Page 15

SOUTH AFRICA ACCUSED Indiscriminate brutality by police and army

Cynical and indiscriminate brutality by South African police and the army against blacks has appalled a former Christchurch woman who worked for a year with voluntary groups concerned about such repression. Visiting Christchurch after a two-year absence, Mrs Bridget Farrell has a chilling account of police round-ups of children and young people, beatings, torture, and shootings, and the disappearance of innocent victims. Mrs Farrell was in Grahamstown, a university centre in eastern Cape Province. Black communities had expressed strong opposition to apartheid and the new constitution, unacceptable to them because of its provision for white-controlled Coloured and Indian representation and a complete absence of a voice for the 74 per cent black majority. Most of the districts in which the continuing state of emergency was declared in July are in the eastern Cape Province. Among the groups Bridget Farrell worked with was Black Sash, which offers help to people struggling to deal with oppressive laws and regulations of apartheid. She had access to information on what was happening in black townships — knowledge not available, she says, to tourists nor to most white South Africans. The systematic brutality against blacks by the police and army largely goes unreported in the tightly controlled news media, adds Mrs Farrell. What does get coverage is the reaction of black people to State-supported violence in the black townships. This is labelled “township violence” or “unrest.” Bridget Farrell has “many examples of police brutality” to document her damning criticism. They include the case of a 13-year-old boy on his way to a vigil before the funeral of a black teenager shot by the police. A policeman called out to the passing boy, who ran away, frightened. The boy was chased, caught, and beaten over the head with a rifle butt. He managed to reach a relative’s house where he complained of a headache. He was very sleepy. He refused to go to hospital because he feared arrest there by police. He was given aspirin; by the morning he was dead. Two young men grabbed by police in the street and beaten became indignant because they knew they had done nothing wrong. They complained at the police station and later made independent affidavits about their ■ treatment. Within 24 hours both had been arrested. A group of 20 to 30 children were rounded up one afternoon, taken to police cells, and after being beaten over a period of 24 hours were released in the township. Many could no longer hear properly because of being beaten about the head, and many could not raise their arms after being sjambokked (whipped) and kicked. None would seek medical help. Police and the army take many people, especially young men, into custody after raids on their homes in the early hours of the morning. They force entry, terrify, and beat people in houses, refusing to state any charge against the person arrested. Often, people dragged from their homes are released next day without any charge being brought; others disappear or are detained.

By

KEN COATES

One man picked up on the street in Duncan Village in East London was subjected to electrical torture for 24 hours and then dumped out on the street when no charge was laid. He was not even interrogated. He had no particular political involvement which could “explain” this treatment. A young pregnant woman who had been arrested was beaten and shut in a cell where she miscarried. She was left in the cell while blood seeped out under the door. Reports have been received of police in armoured vehicles shooting children in their own backyards and people in their houses from the streets. Many workers returning home in the evening are whipped by police, either in the vehicles or at police stations. A Port Elizabeth district surgeon, Dr Wendy Orr, gave evidence in October of 153 cases of torture and injury to blacks in detention. Detainees released later reported that treatment improved after her allegations. She has since been removed from prison work and many official files have gone missing. Another young man told in an affidavit of being beaten and then brought close to suffocation by having an inner tube wrapped around his face. He was, he said, made to lie down with other prisoners while police urinated into their mouths. An expression of revulsion and disgust brings the response from Bridget Farrell that while she found police brutality reports shocking, most white South Africans were not exposed to them in such detail. “It is not reported, and the whites generally don’t want to know, preferring to remain insulated and uninvolved,” she says.

“But it is incredible that this should be happening in a supposedly white, Christian, civilised society.” Mrs Farrell was deeply impressed by the commitment of blacks to continue their non-violent struggle against apartheid. Grahamstown became increasingly militarised, the army being virtually part of the policing force. Armoured vehicles were a common sight on their way to and from black townships, as were lorry loads of soldiers, often very young recruits. Conscription is compulsory for white males. Township people felt a state of undeclared war existed as troops were being used against them routinely. The scale of repression is such that the Detainees’ Parents’ Support Committee three months ago reported it was no longer practical to record details of the huge number of public violence-related trials that had poured into the courts nationwide as a result of police action. The police reported in September that 14,000 persons had been arrested on charges of unrestrelated offences before the declaration of the state of emergency in July. This figure must now be around 25,000. In the Grahamstown area, says Mrs Farrell, most of these charges are brought maliciously by the police with insufficient evidence in an attempt to frighten people into submission. When 107 young people were detained in one small village earlier in the year, more than twothirds of the charges had been withdrawn by October after six months of remand appearances. Total bail for the 107 was set at more than $lO,OOO, an impossible

sum for a poor local black community to raise. But for help from outside, these falsely charged young people would have had to stay in prison for months.

In Grahamstown, mourners ran down a side street to catch up with a funeral procession but were fired on by police, who killed two young people and injured a man. Police reports said the crowd stoned a policeman’s home, but dozens of statements from young people present stated this was untrue.

Fifty-eight young blacks were arrested and charged with public violence. After months of remand appearances, the charges were dropped. “The effect of this on the young people and their families can be imagined,” says Mrs Farrell. She says that this accident also illustrates control of the news media. The original press report consisted of the untrue police version. The reporter later filed another report which, because of deadline pressure, was not cleared by the police. (The Police Act requires that reports of this kind must be censored before publication.) The journalist, a woman, and other newspaper staff were charged with contravening the Police Act. Eventually, the reporter was subjected to so much policepressure that she left the country. (One of the most blatant examples of police lying was in connection with the widely reported shootings of blacks near Uitenhage, Port Elizabeth, last March. A judicial inquiry found police had invented the story that their armoured vehicles had been stoned by funeral mourners “in order, in part, to justify the shooting.”) Mrs Farrell says that evidence exists for blacks fearing to seek medical treatment after being beaten up by police. There is no doctor in Grahamstown’s black township. A day hospital is part of the »Government system and its files can be inspected by the police, as are patient files at the public hospital in the town. Anyone treated is vulnerable to arrest on a charge of public violence. Support for resistance to apartheid comes from all age groups. It includes young people, especially those involved with the Congress of South African Students, recently banned, their parents, and the elderly, who remember the struggles of the 19505. “A tremendous feeling of community solidarity is expressed at funerals through singing and speeches which stress the ongoing struggle and the need to make sure deaths have not been in vain,” says Mrs Farrell. She likens aspects of the struggle by blacks to the resistance of the Free French to the Nazis. The president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the Rev. Allan Boesak, described the Nationalists as the spiritual children of the Nazis in their attitude to black South Africans. “Where black communities feel they are threatened by paid informers, by blacks employed as police, and those seen as part of apartheid structures like the community councils, it is likely those regarded as collaborators will be treated much. as the French treated war-time collaborators,” she comments.

In spite of bans against community organisations, an effective black boycott of the white business area in Grahamstown was in force for much of the latter part of 1985. Blacks hope that white chambers of commerce will respond to national boycotts by bringing pressure on the Government to end apartheid. Boycotts may cause white businesses' to fire black workers, but blacks say they are willing to endure the loss of jobs in the struggle for an end to apartheid.

Most white South Africans, says Bridget Farrell, live a blinkered, insulated life without access to the realities of what is happening. She noted a keen interest in emigration, preferably to Australia, especially marked in families with sons nearing conscription age. Many have a conviction that blacks hate whites and any concessions will lead inevitably to vengeance on whites, a sort of siege mentality. This is often based on guilt feelings about the treatment of blacks.

“The everyday concern of most whites is the social round, sport, and entertainment, as if they are unaware of the terrible suffering being inflicted on the black population in their name,” Mrs Farrell says.

While some see the National Party as the problem and favour controlled reform, there is only a small, dedicated group working for real change. “They identify with the United Democratic Front, an umbrella organisation of 600 antiapartheid groups working for a non-racial future based on basic human rights for all.”

Mrs Farrell talks of the warmth, courtesy and loving acceptance she experienced from blacks. She says that Mrs Molly Blackburn, whose tragic death in a car accident was reported recently, was a member of the Cape Provincial Council, the Progressive Party, and Black Sash. “She used her status unremittingly to document the struggle of people, through affidavits, going into black townships in spite of police intimidation, fighting battles in the courts, and writing and speaking about what she knew.” Mrs Farrell says she was privileged to meet in the eastern Cape a substantial number of whites who have “crossed over to the struggle,” and who are totally committed to working for real change. They have become part of the majority.