TRC Final Report

Volume 5

Chapter 7

Subsection 21

■ TWO CASE EXAMPLES: TORTURERS AND ‘MOBS’

140 Having considered the array of motives, perspectives and explanations outlined above, let us speculatively apply them in the case of two rather different forms of human rights abuses. Perpetrators’ actions cannot necessarily be understood in terms of the same set of factors.

Torturers

141 Although some torture took place at the hands of liberation movements, the bulk of torturers were members of the security police – paid state officials using state powers, including draconian laws providing for protracted periods of detention for purposes of interrogation²³. In such cases, victims were almost entirely at the mercy of their captors. It was a closed system of state powers, governed by the legal apparatus. As such, it involved forms and paperwork, working shifts, possibilities of job promotion, and lines of hierarchical authority going up, in principle, to ministerial level. Despite the official lines of authority, it was, due to its secrecy, also open to falsification, fabrication of documents, lies and distortions, as evidenced by the operations of Vlakplaas. Senior officials, while ultimately responsible, did not always want to know the details. As Eugene de Kock put it in testimony to the Commission:

They [senior officials] would have a document that, should anything happen, that “this was only a suggestion, we never did it”. In other words by means of [euphemistic] language, they removed themselves from the death, from the attack itself. And I’m not trying to place a burden on people, I’m just telling you how it worked in those days.

142 How to describe the motives of torturers? From testimony to the Commission it is clear that most, deeply informed by the ideologies and discourses of apartheid, total onslaught rhetoric, and the masculine and militarised culture of the Security Branch, believed that they were doing their duty. Clearly they perceived themselves as authorised from above. Such people were praised, promoted and received awards for such activities (Eugene de Kock was, for instance, repeatedly decorated). Compliance with the norms of police culture constituted additional binding practices. Egotism and pride in doing the task added positive emotions. Only a minority would have been ‘true believers’ and only a minority would have learned to become sadists – experiencing joy out of hurting; more would have enjoyed the sense of power in such situations. It was not a job done unwillingly.

143 The perspective of torturers and victims would have been grossly discrepant. For the latter, the situation would be engulfed in fear, helplessness and terror. For the torturer, the situation would have been a means to an end (breaking a ‘bolshie’ victim, extracting information, exerting power, doing the job) and somewhat routinised and banal, done in shifts. A combination of such factors, differing to various extents among individuals, would have been sufficient to lead to repeated atrocities. There was little evidence before the Commission that any such perpetrators were suffering from severe psychological abnormalities. Stress, certainly quite commonly expressed, would have been a consequence rather than a cause. Many may have felt shame, remorse and regret. Under entirely changed circumstances, there would be little likelihood of the recurrence of such actions.

Crowd violence

144 This constituted a very different situation. In the majority of cases of ‘necklace’ murders, for instance, victims were members of the same community. Events were fast-paced, apparently emotionally charged and relatively spontaneous. No legal apparatus, bureaucracy and hierarchical authorisation was involved. Perpetrators were, in the main, young men, aligned to liberation movements and linked to youth organisations, bearing the social identities of ‘comrades’. Targets of attack were repeatedly people seen as linked to the apartheid system (councillors or their families, police, sell-outs) and invariably rumoured to be, or identified – whether justifiably or not – as impimpis (informers).

145 The dominant explanation of such atrocities is that of the ‘crazed mob’; of people who are out of control, irrational, over-emotional; in the formal nomenclature of psychology, in a state of deindividuation. Violence is apparently due to a loss, a lack, a reduction or regression to more ‘primitive’ forms of behaviour. There is however an alternative picture of crowds: the sequence of action was far more patterned, directed and limited than usually depicted. Crowd violence was invariably preceded by a series of violent incidents, mostly at the hands of security forces and often leading to the deaths of community members. Crowd violence was directed only at particular targets: people believed to be impimpis, or places symbolic of apartheid oppression – beer halls, local council buildings, police vehicles. It was not simply random violence.

146 A better explanation comes from social identity theory. While there certainly is a switch that makes people see, think and act in a manner quite different from that of an isolated individual, it is a shift from personal to social identity rather than from individual rationality to a loss of identity or control. Crowd violence is an instance of inter-group action in which particular, local identities (for example, ‘comrades’ versus ‘sell-outs’) become salient. People act violently not because they are out of their minds, but because they are acting in terms of a social frame of reference. Emotions ran high because the struggle against apartheid was seen in strongly emotional terms of taking sides against the ‘enemy’ or against the ‘system’ of oppression. Lives, quite literally, were on the line. Within such situations, perpetrators became bound and ‘sucked in’ by the sequences and meanings of the particular events, but it is the salience of local identities, on different sides, that structure the situation. Again it is not psychological dysfunctions that account for the actions. Social explanations are both more plausible and more coherent. Implications are that with changed circumstances, perpetrators are not likely to commit such offences again.