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Text File | 1994-06-01 | 36KB | 659 lines

<text> <title> Human Rights Watch World Report 1992: South Africa </title> <article> <hdr> Human Rights Watch World Report 1992 Africa Watch: South Africa </hdr> <body> Human Rights Developments In 1991, discussions among the main political rivals in South Africa--the government, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)--resulted in various peace agreements. But escalating political violence remained the most serious obstacle to the transition to a post-apartheid South Africa. The violence reached unprecedented proportions in the country's bloody history, claiming the lives of over two thousand black South Africans in fighting between ANC and IFP supporters. Despite the government's stated commitment to a negotiated settlement, credible evidence continued to emerge of brutality by the state security apparatus and its use of the IFP to undermine movement toward representative, democratic structures in South Africa. The government continued to implement its reform process, started in February 1990. In June 1991, it abolished the Group Areas Act, which had segregated residential neighborhoods; the Land Act, which had denied blacks the right to purchase land in eighty-seven percent of the country; and the Population Registration Act, which had classified all newborn South Africans by race. President F.W. de Klerk said in Parliament on June 17, "Now everybody is free from the discouragement and denial...and from the moral dilemma caused by this legislation." However, the prospect of continuing peaceful reform has been dimmed by the violence that has engulfed South Africa's black townships, claiming more than eleven thousand lives in bloody fighting since 1984. The killings, which started in Natal in the early 1980s and spread to the Transvaal in June 1990, assumed various forms during 1991. It initially involved random attacks by IFP members on ANC settlements, and fighting between squatters and hostel dwellers, the most deprived members of communities. A clear pattern of violence immediately before or after peace talks between the ANC, the IFP and the government became a major destabilizing factor in negotiations. An Inkatha "impi," a group consisting of hundreds of armed IFP sympathizers, killed twenty-four ANC supporters on April 29, the day after an agreement had been reached by the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The agreement called on the government to take constructive steps to address the internecine violence by May 9 or face suspension of the constitutional talks. News video footage showed hundreds of men wearing red headbands, a trademark of the IFP. Streaming past police vehicles as they left a funeral service for Moses Khumalo, the assassinated mayor of Soweto and an IFP supporter, they sang and brandished weapons before going into houses and attacking residents. The footage shows police vans twice driving past without taking action. Three days after the May 9 deadline, at least twenty-seven ANC supporters were killed in an IFP attack in Swannieville squatter camp near Krugersdorp. Statements obtained by Lawyers for Human Rights, a leading South African human rights group, reported the involvement of one thousand men in the attack, all wearing red headbands, being escorted by white men and police vehicles. The police said that they only escorted the attacking "impi" back to their hostel, despite eyewitness testimony that some police refused to stop the attackers while other police blocked exit routes from the attack. Only six attackers were arrested, three of whom were later released. On April 1, the government responded to the threatened suspension of negotiations by disbanding the security police and merging it with the Criminal Investigation Department. Then Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok's assertion that the move "will remove the police from the political playing field" was proven wrong by such incidents as the Swannieville attack the next month. On April 18, Minister Vlok issued a ban on the carrying of dangerous weapons including pangas, axes and bush knives, which IFP members commonly carry in "potential conflict situations." But following an argument by the IFP that spears are a necessary expression of their cultural identity, spears, ceremonial battle axes and pocket knives were exempted from the ban, thus failing to meet the ANC demand for a wholesale ban. In 1991, it became increasingly clear that the violence is a legacy of the government's residency restrictions. One element is the hostel system, in which migrant workers, predominantly IFP supporters from Natal, are housed in townships far from their families, in miserable, single-sex dormitories. In the thirty-one townships surrounding Johannesburg, there are 120 such hostels housing 200,000 people. They have increasingly been identified as sources for recruitment, weapons and ammunition. IFP members repeatedly justified their mass mobilization because of fear of losing their "homes." This insecurity, rooted in the government's strict movement and residence control of the migrant work force and past policy of forced removals, assumed an ethnic dimension and was fueled by the ANC's demand that the government abolish the hostel system. The sense of fear and insecurity is a major cause of the conflict between the impoverished residents of hostels and ANC-dominated squatter areas, where similar sentiments of insecurity exist and where "self-defense units" against hostel dwellers have been deployed. Rather than seriously addressing the deeper source of the hostel and squatter problems--the government's policy of containing migrant workers in limited spaces at the peripheries of white cities--the government has indicated only its intention to "upgrade" the areas. More sophisticated attacks increased in the latter part of 1991. With growing frequency, unidentified gunmen shot commuters, mourners at funerals, and groups at political rallies. The most disturbing statistics relate to the alarming rise in hit-squad actions. At least forty-six activists were assassinated by gunmen in 1991. Although the much-criticized 1990 Harms Commission of inquiry into hit squads dismissed claims of their existence within the police force, the debate was reignited with the April 1991 judgment in a case involving two newspapers that are critical of the government, the Vrye Weekblad and the Weekly Mail. (The Harms Commission was flawed in both design and practice. The inquiry was limited to acts committed within the border of South Africa, although many anti-apartheid activists have been assassinated outside the country. Throughout the inquest, valuable evidence disappeared, and government witnesses testified in wigs and other disguises, and were not required to produce pertinent documents. The commission's report, which failed to name any special units or individuals of the army or police as participants in the death squads, was denounced by human rights groups as a "whitewash.") Lieutenant General Lothar Neetling of the security police had sued both newspapers for defamation as a result of their allegations that he had attempted to poison anti-apartheid activists. The court found that Neetling had attempted to mislead both the court and the Harms Commission, which had relied heavily on his testimony. Despite these irregularities and the hit-squad activities now linked to Neetling and the police force, the government has failed to establish another commission to investigate the hit squads. During 1991, reliable evidence emerged corroborating earlier documentation by human rights groups and the press of police bias and involvement in the political violence. President De Klerk confirmed that in 1986 the South African Defense Force had trained a unit of 150 Zulu fighters in a camp called "Hippo" in Namibia. According to the government, they were tr