TRC Final Report

Volume 6

Section 4

Chapter 2

Subsection 4

Evaluation

37. The task team established that the Commission had carried out at least fifty exhumations throughout the country. It also established that a number of exhumations had not been carried out, due to the expiry of the Commission’s operational mandate.

38. The task team also established that the methodology followed differed from region to region. In KwaZulu-Natal, the process included the services of a forensic expert and pathologist, who participated in the exhumations and conducted forensic examinations of the remains.

39. Exhumations carried out in Johannesburg placed a greater emphasis on returning the bodies to the families as quickly as possible. Autopsies were not performed due to resistance from families in some cases.

40. The Johannesburg unit also made greater use of the South African Police Services (SAPS), including the SAPS video and canine sniffer units.

41. The KwaZulu-Natal unit relied to a large extent on the pointing out of grave sites by amnesty applicants. Many of the exhumations were carried out at the ‘safe houses’ of the former Security Branch, where certain activists who had been abducted were interrogated and killed.

42. The sites where bodies were believed to have been buried were cordoned off, and a team for a specialist undertaker’s firm would test the soil for signs of recent disturbance and demarcate an area for excavation. This unit also relied on police sniffer dogs to seek out the presence of lime below the soil surface, as lime was often poured over the bodies to hasten their decomposition.

43. 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 many cases, the flesh had disintegrated. The presence of the pathologist during the exhumation process ensured that the integrity of the site was protected.

44. The Johannesburg unit focussed its attention on a number of disappearance cases that had been reported to the Commission, involving Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) operatives who had disappeared or lost their lives, mainly near the borders of South Africa with Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Botswana.

45. MK operatives in a number of incidents had been intercepted while travelling in and out of the country. Many had been killed in shoot-outs with the police or the army. In a number of cases, operatives were abducted and attempts were made to turn them into askaris. Those who did not co-operate with the police were brutally killed and often buried in secret locations or in unnamed graves in cemeteries.