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SIMPSON, WM

Age

Description
Was injured when MK operatives detonated an explosive in a car outside the South African Air Force (SAAF) headquarters in Church Street, Pretoria, on 20 May 1983. Twenty-one people were killed and 217 injured. The overall commander of MK’s Special Operations Unit and two MK operatives were granted amnesty (AC/2001/003 and AC/2001/023). See Church Street bombing, Pretoria.

... Aimed at military personnel it was mainly civilians who were injured and killed. The two men who set the bomb also died in the blast. James Simpson worked in the building across the way from the blast and considers himself lucky to have escaped with minor injuries. // Can you tell us ...
Many of the veterans I know still haven’t, either at all or to any extent, told their family exactly what happened to them, where they were, what happened and why they are still haunted by it and one does need it to be able to get through that.
But the message that was given many people was you’re a coward or there’s something wrong with you, and again there was the attitude of almost a joke, bossies was a sort of a joke. People joked about whether they were or weren’t or whether other people were or weren’t, without really ...
We have to go through years of storytelling before we can forget those stories, while they’re untold they’ll never be forgotten, but they will never be learnt from either. We learn from the Vietnam veterans I think the cost of not dealing with it properly. We learn from them the fact that on ...
Today we know that what these soldiers suffer from is post-traumatic stress disorder. // Our problem with most people who were injured in the border problems and earlier disputes are that many of those men have gone unrecognized, undiagnosed and untreated and we do know from international ...
We have to go through years of storytelling before we can forget those stories, while they’re untold they’ll never be forgotten, but they will never be learnt from either. We learn from the Vietnam veterans I think the cost of not dealing with it properly. We learn from them the fact that on ...
Today we know that what these soldiers suffer from is post traumatic stress disorder. // Our problem with most people who were injured in the border problems and earlier disputes are that many of those men have gone unrecognized, undiagnosed and untreated and we do know from international ...
Many of the veterans I know still haven’t, either at all or to any extent, told their family exactly what happened to them, where they were, what happened and why they are still haunted by it and one does need to be able to get through that.
But the message that was given to many people was you’re a coward or there’s something wrong with you, and again there was the attitude of almost a joke, that bossies was a sort of a joke. People joked about whether they were or weren’t or whether other people were or weren’t, without ...
It’s clear that there’s always been a range of surrogate vehicles through which the state security apparatuses effectively destabilized their opponents throughout the 1980s. Precisely because this is a hidden hand the nature of so-called third force activity has always been covert. It’s very ...
... in the late 1980s. Already a large number of foreign journalists have gathered here. To them, this is a sensational event, something like the OJ Simpson case. But to us South Africans this is a rather sad occasion. We’ll be turning the pages of one of the most shameful chapters of our ...
 
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