'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Legacies of torture, South Africa

This week, I have been focusing mainly on reviewing/revising the three South Africa chapters of my book on Violence and its Legacies. I find much of this project (South Africa, Mozambique) really heartening to work on, because the broad-level changes in the situations in those two countries over the past 15 years have been so evidently for the better. Yes, I know horrendous problems of poverty, social inequality, the legacies of colonialism, the ravages of HIV, and non-trivial problems of governance remain in both those countries.

But still.

Given a choice between South Africa today and apartheid South Africa; given a choice between Mozambique today and civil-war-gripped Mozambique-- well, it seems evident to me which is better.

Along the way, though, in the chapters I've been working on so far in the past four weeks or so (Rwanda, SA), I've had to deal with a lot of narratives of torture and atrocity.

Many, many of the narratives of tortures carried out by SA's apartheid regime seem shockingly familiar today, if you read the many accounts now surfacing of how the CIA (in particular) but also other US government bodies have been treating suspects in the "Global War on Terror". There is something sickening about these governments that claim to be so "democratic" and so "civilized", and that portray themselves, indeed, as "bringing the benefits of civilization to the natives"-- but in fact, often interacting with the actual people of the subordinated, marginalized populations in an extremely barbaric way.

I have this emerging theory that the way the US deals with the rest of the world is sort of a macrocosm for how the White South Africans dealt with their non-White compatriots... Except that the SA Whites were around 11-15% of the relevant population there, while US citizens constitute only 4% of the population of the world. So the sheer chutzpah of our "leaders" claiming to be able to act "in the name of" or "on behalf of" or "for the good of" the rest of the world is that much greater.

Anyway here is an excerpt from my Chapter 5, South Africa from conflict to peacebuilding that will give you an idea of some of the things I find so familiar looking at US government actions today:

Excerpt from Ch. 5 begins:

One survivor who testified [at the TRC] was Laloo Chiba, an early member of the MK. He had been arrested for the first of three times in April 1963. Then, as he told the TRC, he was taken in for interrogation, and was beaten, punched, and kicked by five or six officers for about half an hour:

But what was to follow was far more serious than the assault that had taken place. From behind someone threw a sack, a wet hessian sack over my body so that half my body was covered and I was partially strait-jacketed. I was then flung onto the floor. My shoes and socks were removed and I could feel electric wires being tied to my toes, to my fingers, my knuckles and so on.

They wanted to know who my contact was. To them that was a very crucial issue. I pleaded ignorance. I told them that I did not know. Every time I resisted answering the questions, they turned on the dynamo and of course, violent electric shocks started passing through my body. They did so every time I refused to answer. All I could do was to scream out in pain. I could only scream and scream and plead ignorance. Again, it is very difficult for me [to say] how this entire process, how long this entire process lasted. But I must say that it could have gone on for an hour and a half or even maybe two hours.

After the electric torture was over, I was unable to walk, I collapsed. They then carried me out.

After 1976 [the year of the Soweto Uprising], the behavior of the security forces became more brutal. In September 1977, the renowned Black-power activist Steve Biko died in police custody after sustaining brain injuries during an interrogation. The international uproar that followed Biko's death persuaded the network of "securocrats" who were coordinating all the government's policies by then to start keeping many of their suspected opponents outside the formal criminal-justice system[does this sound familiar?]; and the behavior of security force members operating in that legal vacuum became correspondingly more lawless and savage. In 1981, the police formally arrested political activist Gcinisizwe Kondile and tortured him so badly during interrogation that they feared he would die. Some members of the security forces later told the TRC that, fearing "another Biko", the securocrats decided that Kondile "should be killed and all evidence of his existence destroyed." To bring this about, they released him from custody and then immediately re-arrested him so they could hold him secretly . He was taken to "an isolated spot":

Here he was drugged with 'knock-out' drops acquired from General Lothar Neethling’s police forensic laboratory, shot and cremated over a log fire for seven hours until all traces of his body had been destroyed. During the cremation, the group drank and cooked meat at a separate ‘braai’ (barbecue). [Captain Dirk] Coetzee related:

"The burning of a body to ashes takes about seven hours, and whilst that happened we were drinking and even having a braai next to the fire… [T]he chunks of meat, and especially the buttocks and the upper part of the legs, had to be turned frequently during the night to make sure that everything burnt to ashes. And the next morning, after raking through the rubble to make sure that there were no pieces of meat or bone left at all, we departed and all went our own way."

By 1986 or so, the security forces were proactively seeking out activists whom they would abduct and then hope to "turn", so they would agree to act within the nationalist movement as double agents for the police. One major means they used to effect this "change of heart" was extreme torture, but in these cases, too, the torture often resulted in death. Extreme torture to the point of death was also used to "punish" Black individuals whom the police thought they had "turned" successfully, but who were later suspected of having reverted to their pro-nationalist loyalties...

End of excerpt

... And so it goes on... Mankind's inhumanity to man. Actually, in the book, I didn't even choose the most chilling and gruesome of the testimonies from the TRC reports and transcripts.

The important thing to remember is that at the end of the day it didn't work! Try as they might, wreak what havoc they would, the "securocrats" of the apartheid system could not break the will of the country's true nationalists; and finally in the late 1980s they realized that they'd need to sit down and negotiate the establishment of an equality-based political order with them.

Thank G-d for the discipline and visionary inclusiveness of the ANC! Thank G-d for the miracle of the relatively small amount of violence that--after so many centuries of the depradations of colonialism, and so many decades of apartheid-- accompanied the finalizing of the political transition there. (Though the violence levels between the pro-ANC forces and the secretly state-backed Inkatha forces actually rose to a crescendo in some parts of the country in precisely the years of the most fruitful negotiations, 1990-94.)

Anyway, while I've been working on SA this past week or so, a huge number of other blogworthy things have been happening in the world. I missed 'em. Never mind. Stories like "New revelations about abuses by US government agencies", "Israeli government takes huge new chunk out of West Bank land", etc are , after all, absolutely bound to come round again...