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people's warExplanation ... the guerrillas, the booby trapping of portable radios given to black Zimbabweans and brutal executions. More than 55 000 people died in that dirty war. A real pity there wasn’t a truth commission in Zimbabwe after their liberation. This coming week there will be two days of hearings about ... 1990. Ezikhawini outside Empangeni, a war zone. // It was terrible. People were dying like flies. People were dying. It was terrible. We were just sleeping in the passages, not in our beds, not at all. There was the sound of bullets all over. From six o’clock you must close the gate, close the ... 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 ... come you are looking for Glad here? Why don’t you go and look for him at his house? They said we are not here to play. I said, you are coming with war. // Mister Mokgatle came from the bedroom and he had a panga in his hands. It was sharpened on both sides. If I have to give the measurement it ... ... AK47, hand grenades, landmines, anti-personal mines, explosives, different explosives, TNT, plastic explosives? I’m mentioning now weapons of war, not police weapons. It was military training, that’s all I can say. If the Defence Force can say there was no secret, it was an open thing, no ... 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 ... The six young men got life sentences for these gruesome deaths. Phineas spent two years on death row before his sentence was changed to 18 years imprisonment. This week he asked for amnesty in a bid to start a new life. // I’m sorry it ever happened. I can’t sleep ever since, there is something ... Komape Molapo is a survivor of another grenade attack at the hotel in the Namakgale township in the same month. He believes that soldiers from the same unit were responsible. // Three shots were fired and after that hand grenade, hand grenade, hand grenades were thrown in. It got me on the soldier ... Look your position if I understand it correctly is that Vlakplaas is an aberration like a lot of these other things that were debated this morning. And the explanation, as I understand it, that you were proffering was that it must have been an officer or two or whatever, lower down the hierarchy, ... Joe Mamasela was not at the amnesty hearing and he’s not scheduled to appear before the Commission. We asked Amnesty Committee spokesman Cocky Mpshe, why not? // Joe Mamasela is not here and Joe Mamasela may not be here because he is presently what we call a section 204 witness. That simply means ... ... we are going to have to say that people have a sense of responsibility for what happened. Because if we don’t say that, then I think as we go forward there are going to be many who say, well I can do these things because comrade x or comrade y did it and got away with it. And in finalising ... My mom was approached by some people, some Zulu’s and they were telling her that your child who is a comrade has been shot and he’s going to die. And already he has died. It was a truly symbolic moment when these three theologians made their way to the Truth Commission stage this week. Coming from the church seen to have been the theological backbone of the National Party their confession before the people of Paarl and Stellenbosch was a meaningful milestone in the ... I remember that my brother uttered a word to me that I will never forget in my life. I had visited him at the Garangua hospital. That’s where he told me and said ‘my own colleagues are going to kill me,’ so I then asked ‘what do you mean they are going to kill you? There is no way you as ... And this is exactly what many black people did. The passport out of the hardship of being black was trying to be Coloured. Many took on a Coloured identity or an Afrikaans sounding surname, usually both. // Yes, they called it turning your jacket inside out. You put the inside outside and the ... ... of the student representative council of UNIBO, now it’s called University of Northwest. I was also a member of South African Student Congress. Towards the end of January 1993, after we realized together with the student leadership in South African Student Congress, we decided that we should ... The first wave of horror came in May 1986. Over three days the ‘fathers,’ or witdoeke systematically burned three satellite squatter camps around Crossroads to the ground. The security forces then stepped in. They encircled the area with barbed wire to prevent the 30 000 left homeless by the ... They pulled this child by the foot and they hit the child against the wall and she cracked her skull. // After I’ve seen these people I suspected that those were the people who might have killed my brother. They were not alone. They were with some other people from another section at Vusimuzi; it ... Every morning when he found us in the stores he wanted us to say, ‘good morning sir,’ but I wanted to know why doesn’t he greet us first because he found us there as Africans. He should greet first. We used to fight over that because he wanted me to greet him first and say ‘good morning ... Maybe the last words in the harrowing week of testimony belong to Joyce Mtimkulu, a mother whose son was broken by apartheid and then removed from the face of the earth. // I have not forgiven them. Why must I forgive them, when they don’t want to tell the truth? And the beauty part of this, they ... |
