TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/081489/08148900.016

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 100 lines

LAW, Page 44

Taking Apartheid to Court

With U.S. help, legal activism is on the rise in South Africa

By Bruce W. Nelan


    In the conservative farm belt of South Africa's eastern
Transvaal, Jotham Zwane, a local black leader and successful
hauling contractor, was becoming a problem for whites in
neighboring Amsterdam. After leading a protest in his township, he
was arrested and released. But later, when his home and three
trucks mysteriously burned one night, he was rearrested, convicted
of being "idle and undesirable" and banished from the area. The
local authorities then moved to seize his land and what was left
of his house.

    For most black South Africans, such a story would have ended
in forcible dispossession. In Zwane's case, his despairing family
sought help from a legal-aid organization in Johannesburg called
the Legal Resources Center. LRC lawyers obtained an order against
the authorities and won permission for Zwane to return and rebuild
his home and business.

    Such outcomes are increasingly common as South African blacks
call on legal activists to challenge the apartheid system, often
with help from groups and lawyers in the U.S. Encouraged by their
success, more and more lawyers and organizations are entering the
struggle. After lengthy legal battles this year, the Alexandra
Five, charged with treason for trying to create autonomous local
government structures, were acquitted, and last year the
Sharpeville Six, sentenced to hang for their part in the murder of
a black township official, obtained commutations of their death
sentences. Perhaps the biggest advance is the recent working paper
of a government-appointed law commission, which has proposed a
South African Bill of Rights, an end to apartheid laws and an equal
vote for all South Africans.

    Few lawyers expect such a complete transformation overnight.
The campaign to provide blacks with legal defenses began after
World War II, when both African National Congress President Oliver
Tambo and nationalist leader Nelson Mandela began their careers as
lawyers. The fact that Tambo is in exile and Mandela in prison
illustrates how perilous that course was. The LRC had its origins
in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising of 1976. The brutal
government crackdown following the protest prompted a group of
liberal lawyers and professors to try to set up a free legal-aid
service for blacks. U.S. lawyer Jack Greenberg, then head of the
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, helped design a program.
With money mainly from American foundations, the LRC was founded
in 1978. Since then, it has grown from a staff of three full-time
lawyers with a $100,000 budget to 30 lawyers, half of them white,
and a budget of $2 million.

    The LRC's success has spawned a network of allied
organizations. Among them: the Pretoria-based Lawyers for Human
Rights, which presses private law firms to take public-interest
cases; the Black Lawyers' Association and its offshoot the Legal
Education Center in Johannesburg; and the Institute for Applied
Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. All
participate in a thriving exchange of students and professors
between the U.S. and South Africa. Says John Dugard, head of the
Institute for Applied Legal Studies: "These days, even high-court
judges are making study trips to the U.S. Our legal education
system is looking more and more to the U.S. experience."

    But even those American legal scholars who were instrumental
in helping create the South African legal-aid programs do not see
them alone as an effective antidote to apartheid. Last week more
than 200 black activists took another approach by opening what they
referred to as a "defiance campaign." They marched to eight
whites-only hospitals, where they demanded and received treatment.
Greenberg, now a professor and dean at Columbia University,
believes a wholesale change in the country's constitution is needed
to eliminate white domination. Judges in South Africa do not have
the power to strike down laws as unconstitutional, so Parliament
can and does deprive citizens of their rights by passing statutes
that the courts are unable to reject. Says Julius Chambers,
Greenberg's successor at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund: "The law has provided some limited protection, but you're not
going to have any major breakthroughs until you have a changed
constitution."

    Still, South African civil rights lawyers praise even small
gains in a country that has detained 54,000 people without charge
in the past ten years. "The message we take into the black
communities," says LRC lawyer Mohamed Navsa, "is, `We are here to
tell you that you do still have some rights, and we will defend
them.'"

    Antiapartheid activists are convinced that the increase in
legal challenges has changed public perceptions and laid a basis
for the law commission's extraordinary working paper. The final
report will be presented to Parliament early next year and, while
there is no likelihood that the government will embrace the paper,
the debate will give new legitimacy to civil rights workers, who
are too often seen as dangerous leftists in South Africa. State
Judge Jack Etheridge of Atlanta, who recently spent seven months
in Johannesburg, insists that the best counsel is to "test the
government" in court. As the legal activists know better than most,
there is no quick fix for South Africa. But they have made a start.


-- Peter Hawthorne/Johannesburg and David Muhlbaum/New York