TRC Final Report

Volume 2

Chapter 6

Part Part5

Subsection 1

Volume TWO Chapter SIX

Special Investigation intothe Secret Burial of Activists and Report on Exhumations

■ INTRODUCTION

1 The exhumation of the remains of Ms Phila Portia Ndwandwe took place in KwaZulu-Natal on 12 March 1997. Commissioner Richard Lyster noted that this was one of "the most poignant and saddest" of the exhumations. The remains were found buried in a remote part of the province. According to Lyster:

She was held in a small concrete chamber on the edge of the small forest in which she was buried. According to information from those that killed her, she was held naked and interrogated in this chamber, for some time before her death. When we exhumed her, she was on her back in a foetal position, because the grave had not been dug long enough, and had a single bullet wound to the top of her head, indicating that she had been kneeling or squatting when she was killed. Her pelvis was clothed in a plastic packet, fashioned into a pair of panties indicating an attempt to protect her modesty.

2 The Commission was requested by political parties and individuals to establish the whereabouts of those who had disappeared during the period of the Commission’s mandate. The Investigation Unit of the Commission investigated many cases of reported disappearances. In the process, secret burial sites were exposed and perpetrators involved in the killings and secret burials identified. In most cases, it was found that the perpetrators had covered up the identity of the victims and their final burial places.

3 Most of the secret graves are located in the former Transvaal, KwaZulu/Natal and the Orange Free State, near the borders of Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique.

4 Fifty bodies were exhumed, but almost 200 cases have not been finalised. The lengthy procedures necessitated by each exhumation made it impossible for the Commission to complete this task.

■ METHODOLOGY

5 Cases of disappearances came to the attention of the Investigation Unit largely through statements made to the Commission by deponents who believed their relatives had disappeared as a consequence of their political activities. These statements were cross-referenced to applications for amnesty, yielding some positive results. The Investigation Unit also referred to a list supplied by the African National Congress (ANC) of members who had been kidnapped by South African security forces, or who had disappeared after infiltrating the country. Mortuary registers, cemetery registers and undertakers were consulted in the process of locating bodies.

6 An undertaker in Louis Trichardt, Transvaal told a Commission investigator that his father, who had owned the business before him, had been visited by the police in 1987/1988 and asked to come to a farm in the mountains where they "were going to shoot blacks". His father was to collect the bodies, accompanied by his son.

7 The undertaker pointed out approximately seventy graves in that area. Of the twenty bodies exhumed by the Commission, all were found to be ANC members from exile who were tortured before they were killed. Some of the bodies were headless; some without arms or legs; some had burn marks from a cutting torch.

8 It was found that members of the Nylstroom, Pietersburg, Messina, Louis Trichardt and Tzaneen security police in the Transvaal joined with local farmers to form a group that ‘specialised’ in capturing, torturing and then killing ANC members who infiltrated the country.

■ EXHUMATION PROCESS

9 Methods of exhumation differed from region to region. In KwaZulu-Natal, exhumations were performed in the presence of a pathologist. The graves were opened, the remains sealed and the body taken for autopsy. After this, the family was able to rebury the remains. The Investigation Unit in the regional office based in Johannesburg placed more emphasis on getting the bodies to the families as quickly as possible; autopsies were not performed as a matter of procedure.

10 The Commission made extensive use of the services of the South African Police Services’ (SAPS) video unit, and particularly their canine (sniffer-dog) unit.

11 In KwaZulu-Natal, many of the exhumations were carried out at former Security Branch ‘safe houses’ – places where police held informers and where, in the late 1980s, they allegedly took activists who had been abducted in order to interrogate and then kill them. The sites where the bodies were believed to have been buried were cordoned off, and a team from a specialist undertaker’s firm would test the soil for signs of recent disturbance and demarcate an area for excavation.

12 Police sniffer-dogs were used to seek out the presence of lime below the soil surface, as lime was almost invariably poured onto the bodies in order to hasten their decomposition. Once the correct spot had been located, a pathologist would supervise the removal of soil until the body was located. The pathologist would enter the grave and remove the body – bone by bone, in the many cases where the flesh had completely disintegrated – in order to preserve the forensic integrity of the site.

■ DISAPPEARANCE OF MK OPERATIVES

13 Investigations into the disappearances and killings of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) cadres showed that incidents in which they lost their lives occurred mainly near the borders of South Africa with Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Botswana. MK operatives who were intercepted while travelling in and out of the country were often killed in shoot-outs with the police or the army. In other cases, operatives were abducted and attempts were made to turn them into askaris. When they did not co-operate with the police, they were brutally killed and often buried in secret locations or in unnamed graves in cemeteries.