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people's warExplanation Shaun and John who fought this war were told they were protecting their country and their people against the threat of communism. The church and its chaplain said they were fighting for the Christian faith. The politicians said they were killing and dying on foreign soil because their country ... Church street, Pretoria 1983. Amanzimtoti, 1985. ANC bombs remind ordinary white South Africans there is war. // The bomb that caused the biggest emotional outcry exploded in Church Street, Pretoria, in the late afternoon of May 20. 1983. 19 People were killed and 219 injured. The ANC claimed ... In war there are two aspects that are involved, if not three. One is the physical involvement where people are stabbing or shooting one another. Secondly is the question of the moral or spiritual involvement where your heart or your spirit will tell you that you’ve got to do this. So the trend ... Here we found the war overnight or within a couple of months completely transformed. The protection was our responsibilities. We could not send our troops in uniform into the townships because if you send a man in uniform there they are immediately seen. So we had to find some other ways of ... ... if one can learn from other countries, and certainly the Chilean Truth Commission, they took the position that the recommendations that went forward was that people should not hold public positions where they were involved in gross human rights violations. // Even if they were fighting a just ... I don”t want to be involved in a semantic level regarding the meaning of certain words in this document. I want to emphasise that words like ”eliminate” and ”take out” for the members on the ground, who were in a war situation, referred only to killing people. That the whole of South Africa and the people of Natal can see that there was a war against the ANC. That there really was a third force… there was a third force. Senior officers can deny it but those of us who were involved in it can testify. There is no other word for it. // People who still ... It was a brutal and chaotic war that lasted for nearly five years and many of its battles were fought in and around the hostel compounds of the South African townships. Many people have told the Truth Commission about the terror associated with these fortresses and their inhabitants. The green valley of Willowfontein situated on the other side of Pietermaritzburg is also home to many internal refugees. // After the seven days war, after the death of my mother, my child and my fiancé in March 1990, when Ntombela attacked, burning houses in the Mnayandu, Shange and Ashdown areas ... ... landed. Another came painted with army colours and dropped off some more police on the opposite side of Ngquza hill. They then all started coming towards us. We did not even expect any clashes, because none of us had weapons except Wana Johnson had a gun. He had come with his revolver, our ... ... about his freedom than he was about a sense of justice. He wants South Africans to accept that people like him had played a necessary part in the war that had engulfed the ... ... of certain words in this document. I want to emphasise words like ‘eliminate’ and ‘take out’ for the members on the ground who were in a war situation referred only to killing ... In 1986 a bloody civil war erupted in KwaNdebele and neighbouring Moutse. To make the small poor homeland of KwaNdebele viable for independence the South African government planned to incorporate two non Ndebele regions. One of them was predominantly Pedi speaking Moutse. But the people of Moutse ... ... Nelson Mandela walked out of prison Reggie Hadebe was the ANC’s deputy chairman in the troubled Natal Midlands and working hard to end the civil war. He never made it. Police say it took three snipers to finally kill him. More than a 100 guns taken in raids have been tested. The guns have ... ... in this country, because he’s talking peace. People wanted all the time the image of chief of staff to remain on him so that he must be a man of war, betrayed forever, but Chris died for peace. How shall we convince people about ... ... of ideology, of power structure, almost every one of us could become to some extent a perpetrator. Aspsychologists, especially we became aware with the years that this need to create a character which is a typical perpetrator is too simple an assumption and we have to think about that ... The testimony of five former security policemen to the Amnesty Committee in the past two weeks as finally opened up a window to the war psychosis that raged in the National Party and its security forces. But as we gained a profile of the people who killed in the name of apartheid the ANC seems to ... ... about the conflict between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress in KwaZulu-Natal. More than 10 000 people have died in this war since the early 1980s. During the past few weeks the Truth Commission has paid special attention to KwaZulu-Natal with two amnesty hearings and a ... There was still a war between them and us. There’s no reconciliation in fact yet, but I hope there would be next time. // People do not have energy of fighting daily. You can’t have that energy. Fighting is not a sweet thing you know, it’s not Bar One, because we lose friends, we lose ... one we need to learn a lot about in our country because the parallels are very dramatic. Some things do seem to make it worse, being in an unpopular war, an unpopular conflict is a problem. Our men had a problem worse even in some ways than Vietnam in that I’ve seen a number of people who talk ... |