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people's warExplanation A former medic in the SA Medical Service this week broke his silence about his involvement in the war. // The first time I ever put a stitch into a person or the first time I ever gave anybody an injection was at Tembisa hospital. As medics we were sent there on Friday and Saturday evenings to ... ‘Vlakplaas’ is a new word in the South African vocabulary symbolizing evil. This week the Truth Commission was told that this former police hit squad also had a hand in a cold blooded execution in Cape Town. We bring you a full background report on the killing of the Gugulethu Seven and on the ... Sipho Hashe, my husband, was in Robben Island. He was arrested 1963 and came back 1973. And they gave him five years banning order, or registration I don’t remember which one is it now, but it was five years. He couldn’t even go out to the near school there. After my husband get through this, ... So I said to him, seeing that there is no South African diplomatic representative here I demand to see British High Commissioner. So, Commissioner looked at me and said, but you got a cheek, you got a cheek. So he calls somebody and says, take him down to the clinic. Then I knew more than ever that ... Stander warned Holomisa about the assassination plot against him. // Riaan Stander was one of the people who we communicated with, because apparently he was close to a number of these big guns in South Africa. // Why did you warn Holomisa? // I learnt during those years that the ultimate aim ... I see that Mrs. Seipei is in the audience here today and the thing that has been most difficult for me is that having heard the allegations I did not remove him from the mission house and get him to a place where he could be safe and I think if I acted in another way he could be alive today. And so ... ... that the house had been burnt down at KwaMashu. Our mother had been burnt down completely, she was in ash. // … and one of the amabutho’s, the warriors, said to us ‘ let me see who’s got an axe’ and I heard they were chopping down our doors and they got inside. I don’t know when ... I think there’s no doubt in my mind that there was a final solution in South Africa and the final solution involved the forced removal of more than three million people from their homes. And I think in terms of what that did to the spirit of a people and what it was designed to do, it had ... The legislation did play a very vital role in hindering the free flow of information during those days, but that is an excuse that is used by people who ran the media at the time ... as an excuse for not having gone further in exposing the atrocities and the injustices that were happening in the ... But what precisely is a witch? And what do they do that people fear them so? // Although we are speaking of one province here each area has got a large number of certain ethnic groups. If you take Northern Sotho speaking people many people were accused of having caused lightning, whereas if you go ... Some of the issues that we would argue that need to be addressed are identifying and documenting past abuses. We would also argue that the same processes that apply to the Truth Commission in general should also apply to the medical profession so we’ve seen that the many witnesses testifying at ... ... fathers of Cradock. Justice to me would certainly not be justice to Cradock as a whole, but I would like the people who have killed them to come forward so that people could know them. An eye for an eye wouldn’t do anyone any good, but at least honesty would be one form of justice. ... De Kock gave instructions that we should go and help Port Elizabeth Police, because there were some chaps that were making Port Elizabeth ungovernable and those people had to be eliminated. By the 1960s the repression that resulted after then after the banning of the ANC and the shooting of people at Sharpeville, you know, covered the whole country. And, at this time they began whole scale arrests of opponents of apartheid, and repression was really all round. One of the dead was policeman Andre Duvenhage. This week his parents told their side of the story to the Truth Commission in Kagiso. // I felt I must do something for him. The least I can do for him is to expose his murderer in this way because people take no notice of a video. People must know who ... Jonathan Shapiro is one of South Africa’s most respected cartoonists ever. Under the name ‘Zapiro,’ his work can be seen every day in newspapers, such as the Sowetan and the Mail & Guardian. Shapiro has produced quite a number of cartoons on the Truth Commission process. // // Some of the ... The beauty of the Karoo’s wide open spaces belies a cruel apartheid past in which Black people were made to survive by passing themselves off as coloureds. During the apartheid years the Karoo became by law an official coloured preference area. For black people it became a hostile place to live ... For Susan van der Merwe knowing how her husband died has not answered the question of why he had to die. // If it was a military operation, for instance if my son who was in the army, if they had told me he had lost his life it would have been different. Because he was a trained soldier fighting ... Many people died in a bloody clash between the Ciskei Defence Force and marching ANC supporters. After testifying to the Kannemeyer Commission about what he’d seen that day Berry fell victim to his own honesty. // What I did then, I’d say it within the next 100 years I did for the sake of justice. And never will I regret that. Yes, I do regret losing my job. // What I’m actually saying ... |