Special Report Transcript Episode 72, Section 1, Time 00:25

Hello. Thanks for joining tonight’s Special Report. The Truth Commission process this past week was dominated by the 1993 APLA attack on a pub in Cape Town and by a special hearing into the past role of the legal profession. Tonight we bring you the full drama of both these hearings as well as the controversy surrounding Truth Commissioner Dumisa Ntsebeza. Later in the programme we also take a good look at the new C Max prison. But we go to Cape Town for our first report. The Amnesty Committee heard the application of three members of the Azananian People’s Liberation Army APLA who killed four people in a brutal attack on the Heidelberg Tavern in Cape Town, a day before New Year’s Eve, 1993. It was a difficult and tense hearing with strong undercurrents of racial tension. This is almost always true of amnesty hearings involving APLA or the right-wing, because the motive was always so overwhelmingly racial. It was also tense because some of the survivors of the attack and family members of the dead victims were right in the front row of the audience facing the killers. The Heidelberg Tavern case was probably the worst case so far of killers saying they merely followed orders.

Notes: Max du Preez

References: there are no references for this transcript