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people's warExplanation ... the eighties the small township of Bruntville here outside Mooiriver in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands was a relatively peaceful place, but in 1990 the war that has ripped this province apart came to Bruntville. In November 1990 the first so-called Bruntville massacre took place when 15 people were ... ... 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 ... 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. ... to kill my own people, the people that I devoted my life into liberating. // We believed in what we were doing as killers, we were seeing it as a war situation. // Our job was to hunt cadres, whether PAC or ANC, and we kill them. If we think they are useless, we kill them, but if we think we ... 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 ... 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 ... If people are assisted financially over time with counselling and guidance it gives them an opportunity to improve their lot so to say, in a variety of ways. But I mean as I’ve said to you really we are there as advocates for victims. At the end of the day the government of the day has got to ... Thereafter, what was done with the bodies of the deceased? // The wood was placed in a large pile in the backyard, the people were carried to the wood, put on top of it, // All three of them? // Yes. And it was set alight and diesel was poured over. ... denied everything, calling her accusers ‘ludicrous,’ ‘ridiculous,’ ‘outrageous’ or ‘senile.’ Twice the Truth Commission had to warn her and her supporters not to intimidate witnesses and twice she showed her own racial bias against Indian South Africans. At the end of the ... May God bless our country, may God bless our leaders and its people. Kgotso ayibelilina, [may peace be with you] thank you. The politicians can say we didn”t give that order, because they didn”t give that order. It”s nowhere stated that we said so and so should be killed. We said so and so should be eliminated, but we meant that that person should be detained. And then never having any real knowledge, or real ... We have seen much truth and many deeply touching scenes of reconciliation between victims, survivors and perpetrators the last 22 months. But as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission winds up its work we now have to look to the future and ask what is to become of reconciliation. How do we take ... Our aim was to kill as many people as possible. Samuel Jamile was a well known IFP politician in the eighties. Mrs. Khuswayo believes he’s responsible for her husband’s death. // The true story is that Jamile, myself Samuel Bhikizizwe Jamile, I have never killed anybody, I’ve never instructed anybody. I was an Inkatha man and these people ... I will agree that maybe I summarized the matter wrong, but I’m of the opinion that the whole situation is so emotionally charged that different people will get different messages from what is happening. Since Friday evening South Africans have been asking each other, do you believe Winnie Mandela? What will this do to her public career? Do ordinary people hold her responsible for the death and destruction caused by the people around her in ’87 and ’88? We don’t know. What we do know is that ... And their presence was not necessarily tolerated. // ‘We don’t want those pagans here! They are barbarians and pagans. We can’t have those Zulus here. We even suspect they’re mercenaries those people. They’re mercenaries! Schools have… we are teachers, let me tell you, we are teachers ... fairly late, after nine on the 19th of November 1989 I reported to Brigadier Van der Hofen, who was staying in the official police flats on the C R Swart square police premises, where I reported that the mission has been completed, that Mxenge was killed. ... ... they’ve restructured the events, he showed them the place where the three people were killed and I believe he has made a valuable contribution toward solving that murder. ... What was it in our people or our history that made this ghastly practice possible and so popular? // There’s a whole process that leads finally to the brutality of the necklace as a method of murder. And that for me is actually what we should have recorded in the eighties and it never got ... |
