Children of Resistence

Statements from the Harare Conference
on Children, Repression and the Law in Apartheid South Africa

Edited by Victoria Brittain and Abdul S Minty

Contents

FOREWORD by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston

PART 1: CHILDREN IN THE FRONTLINE

PART 2: CHILDREN AND REPRESSION

PART 3: ORGANISING AGAINST APARTHEID

PART 4: INTERNATIONAL LAW OF HUMAN RIGHTS

PART 5: ON FROM HARARE

Appendices

FOREWORD

by Archbishop Trevor Huddleston

In this very turbulent world, across the face of the earth there are many struggles for human rights. But I believe that nowhere in the world has this struggle found a clearer focal point than in South Africa. And that focal point has been there ever since the beginning of this century. The Union of South Africa, as it was then called, came into being by the deprivation of the franchise of the African people. One of the founding fathers of the African National Congress, Sol Plaatje, recognised in the Native Land Act of 1913 the reality of apartheid and pleaded with the world community, all those 70 long years ago, to take action. His plea was unheeded.

Again and again in the course of the struggle it has been the children who have themselves recognised that it is their future which apartheid destroys. They have seen its destructiveness against their fellows, and in the life imprisonment of their leaders. They have felt it in their very being, through multiple deprivations and in the break-up of family life.

This basic moral evil can never end until apartheid itself is destroyed, and it was that knowledge which brought the children of Soweto out onto the streets over ten years ago, with no weapons in their hands. The only weapon they had was the moral rightness of their cause. They were met as always by naked force. Children as young as seven years old were shot down for making that protest for their own future. In the last four years since the promulgation of the new constitution in South Africa and since the continuing States of Emergency have been imposed, it has been children who have been a major target of oppression. A state which is prepared to use its military and paramilitary might to destroy children is a state which must be outlawed totally from the world community until its ideological base - apartheid - is destroyed.

Rt. Reverend Bishop Trevor Huddleston C.R, Convenor of the Harare Conference, speaking at the opening ceremony

Many people have tried to speak for us...
We prefer to speak for ourselves.

A South African activist

PART 1: CHILDREN IN THE FRONTLINE

A Child's Experience

Moses Madia, aged 12, from Soweto, recounted his experience to a lawyer who put it into the form of an affidavit for use in legal proceedings

On Friday 17 October 1986 at approximately 12h00 I and three of my friends, Charles, Joel and Zachariah, went to buy some cool drinks at the garage. I and my friends often go to this garage as we buy refreshments there and are friendly with the manager. From time to time the manager, whose name is Alec, gives us odd jobs such as the running of errands or the washing of cars. We proceeded to the Supermarket where we bought vetkoek (doughnuts) and chips for Alec. We did not buy any food for ourselves as we did not have sufficient money.

After we bought the food we walked back to the garage to give the food to Alec. When we were approximately 100 metres from the garage, a white police van came driving down the road. It pulled up next to us and three black policemen climbed out of the front of the van and called us.

I can remember that the driver was the first person to speak and he said to us 'You don't know me, today you are going to know me, my name is Tshabalala. He then told us to climb into the back of the police van otherwise we would be shot. We were completely amazed at what was taking place and I asked the policeman why he was doing this to us, but received no explanation. The other policeman who was standing next to Tshabalala, an older man who was bald and of average height, told us that if we did not listen to them, they would burn us. Zachariah then asked what we had done to deserve this kind of treatment, but again received no explanation. Tshabalala would not listen to us and ordered us to climb into the back of the van. He then opened the door of the van and the four of us climbed into the back. When we were in the van one of the policemen pointed a handgun at us through the door and told us that he would shoot us just now. When he pointed this handgun at me I was so scared that I could only look at him and was unable to speak.

I noticed that there was another youth in the back of the police van with us. I saw that the area of his buttocks was covered in blood. Zachariah asked him what had happened and he told us that he had been shot by the police and that it was causing him great pain. Zachariah asked him why he had been shot, to which he simply shook his head and did not reply.

We were unable to see out of the van as there were canvas strips on the side of the vehicle. We stopped a short while later at a house in Zone 3 Diepkloof. I was unable to see the number of the house and I am therefore unable to properly describe the house.

After a short while the door of the police van was opened and a youth climbed in. He was unknown to me at the time although I later learned that his name was Rocky. He was approximately 20 years old and was crying when he entered the back of the van. There was blood coming from what appeared to be a deep gash behind his ear. When Charles asked him what had happened he told us that the man we had come to know as Tshabalala had hit him with his gun behind his ear. At this point I knew that all of us in the back of the police van were in some kind of trouble and although I did not know why we were being detained I put my head in my hands and started to cry.

We moved off and after a short while stopped again. After approximately five minutes another youth climbed into the back of the van. He was also unknown to me although I later came to know him as Sammy, as he was to spend some time with us in the police cells at Orlando Police Station.

Joel asked Sammy why he had been arrested, to which he replied that he did not know. When he asked us why we were in the police van we replied that we had been walking back from the shops with vetkoek and chips which we had bought when the police van had stopped next to us and we had been told to climb into the van otherwise we would be shot.

A short while later the police van arrived at Orlando Police Station and we were taken into a room at the police station. The room was fairly bare, with only a chair, a bench and a table in it. As soon as Tshabalala and the other two policemen who had detained us brought us into the room, the two policemen that were present in the room immediately went out and arrived back a short while later accompanied by a number of other policemen. The only policeman whose name I know is Tshabalala.

The policemen were quite silent and were standing around the walls. It was then that I noticed that Tshabalala was holding a long piece of hosepipe which was curved, green and quite thick. All of us who had been arrested and placed in the back of the police van were in this room and because I was the smallest I tried to hide myself by standing behind Charles, in the hope that if Tshabalala began to use the long piece of hosepipe I would in some way receive protection from the larger boys with whom I had been arrested.

One of the policemen wrote down our names and addresses. Tshabalala then swung around with the green hosepipe and hit Charles with it across his back. I was standing quite close to Charles and I can remember hearing the blow which plunged Charles forward and he began to scream. Tshabalala seemed to go into a type of frenzy and although Charles begged him to stop, Tshabalala continued to hit out with the green hosepipe so that Charles and all of us received blows from it. As we tried to escape from the green hosepipe we ran into each other, into the walls and occasionally into policemen who would then slap and push us back towards Tshabalala. I was so scared and the pain so extreme that everything seemed to flash before my eyes as I tried to avoid the hosepipe. Most of us were crying and I recall that Tshabalala passed on the hosepipe to other policemen who also used it upon us.

The policemen would hit us in bouts, sometimes lasting a few minutes and longer. During all of this, various policemen would leave the room while others would come in and take part in the assaults upon us. The police asked us no questions and merely shouted at us, calling us 'siyanyova (troublemakers).

At some stage that afternoon we were told to lie down with our stomachs on the floor. When we had done so those policemen present in the room started to kick and stamp on us with their shoes and boots. As we tried to roll and avoid the blows they would swear and shout at us, telling us not to move otherwise it would be worse for us.

My back and shoulders were so painful from the hosepipe that the blows from the boots merely came as shocks upon my body and did not really add to the pain. I do remember, however, that each time the boot came down upon my back it would force my face into the floor and at times I thought that my skull would break. During my time on the floor, one of the policemen whom I was not able to see, kicked me hard on the left elbow joint and it was extremely painful. I still have difficulty moving this elbow freely and there is swelling and a bump on it which is quite visible.

After a while the assaults came to an end and it was then that I noticed that my friend Charles was unconscious. He had rolled over onto his back and he lay there with his eyes closed and very still.

One of the policemen who were present in the room instructed me and certain of the other detainees to carry Charles out of the room and into the back of the police van which was outside. I and Joel took Charles, legs while Sammy and Zachariah held his shoulders and we carried him to the police van and placed him on the floor in the back. Victor had been told while we were in the room that he should also climb into the back of the police van and he then limped to the van.

Soon after we had put Charles in the back of the van, Tshabalala instructed Zachariah to also climb into the back of the van as he had a deep cut over his eye and there was blood on the side of his face. I was then told to return to the room in which we had been assaulted. Sammy, Rocky, Joel and myself were in the room at this point as were a few policemen. I am unable to describe these particular policemen, however they were all dressed in blue uniforms and appeared to me to be very large men. They instructed us to do exercises. Although we were unsure as to what exercises we should do, the policemen demonstrated a type of push-up which was done with clenched fists on the floor. We had to push up with our hands and jump so that one landed on your fists on the downward motion of the push-up.

I am unsure as to how long these exercises continued except to say that they stopped approximately 10 to 15 minutes before the return of Zachariah, Charles and Victor, who had been taken to hospital. They were brought back into the room and told to sit with us in the room. Victor was unable to sit, and lay on the one side of his body.

Thereafter we were all taken into another room where a black policeman in a blue uniform took down our names and addresses. In this room were also two women and a small boy. One of the policemen said to the small boy that he should point out, with reference to the seven of us, which of us had been 'there. The small boy pointed at Victor and said that he was there and that he had had a petrol bomb. At this point the two women who were in the room pointed to the rest of us and said that we had not been 'there, and that we should be taken home to which the policeman replied that we could not be taken home. I had never seen these two women or this small boy who pointed out Victor, before, and I deny that I was part of any incident in which petrol bombs or any violence was involved.

We were led out of the room and placed together in one cell. When we got into the cell, I tried to lie down as I was in a lot of pain. However, my back was too sore for me to lie on it and I consequently lay on my side. A short while later, soon after it had become dark, two black policemen came into our cell. The one was short, squatly built, with short hair and was approximately 30 years of age. I can remember that his head seemed to me to be pointed. The other policeman who had come into the cell was the same one who had locked us into the cell earlier. He carried a bunch of keys and was dressed in a plain navy blue blazer. He was approximately 22 years old and stood to the one side of the cell while the short squat policeman started to approach us. The squat policeman was carrying what appeared to be the same green hosepipe that we had been thrashed with earlier.

I tried to back away from him against the wall of the cell and I was relieved when he stopped and asked us for our names and addresses which he then wrote down. I thought that this was to be the end of the assaults and that he would leave. However, he then advanced upon us and lashed out with the green hosepipe. I realised that we were about to go through what we had gone through earlier that afternoon and I started to scream in the hope that someone, somewhere, in the police station would come to our assistance and stop the assaults.

This policeman continued to lash out at us, kick us, hit us and shout and swear for some time. During this period I remember that I crouched up against the wall with my head between my knees, at which point the policeman in coming past me kicked me just below the knee on my left leg. The pain was so severe that I felt it shoot up my leg and down to my toes. I rolled over screaming and tried to bury my head in the point where the wall meets the floor, hoping that the policeman would take pity on me and leave me alone.

The short squat policeman did lay off me for a short while but some time later I heard my name being shouted by him. When I looked around he pointed at me and shouted for me to come to him. I slowly climbed to my feet and walked towards him. I was so scared that I was unable to speak. As I got close to him, he punched me hard in my stomach. The blow smashed me backwards and the pain from the lower area of my stomach was so extreme that I could only scream. The policeman again pointed a finger at me and called me to him. I was still crying and as I walked towards him I knew that he would hit me again. I put my hands down across the lower part of my stomach so that if he hit me my stomach would receive some protection. When I got close to him he moved to the one side and kicked me hard in my stomach with the top of his foot. The blow was so hard that it went through my hands and I again fell to the floor at his feet.

Some time later the same policeman ordered all of us to back up against the wall. I was unable to stand up straight and I therefore hunched forward. The policeman came to each of us and hit our heads against the cell wall.

The same policeman then told us to take off our shoes and to again stand up against the wall. He went from person to person stamping on their feet with his boots. This was terribly painful. After this had taken place the policeman left the cells.

We tried to settle down in the cell with the few materials that were available to us. After approximately 30 minutes, the same squat policeman returned as well as the one with the blazer. The one in the blazer called Victor and told him to come with them as they were going to the hospital.

The squat policeman seemed to pay very little attention to Victor and he pointed to Charles and called him to him. Charles was obviously very frightened to go to him, but he did so all the same. When he was standing in front of the squat policeman, this policeman asked for the bunch of keys from the policeman in the plain navy blue blazer and he then used these large keys to hit Charles behind the head. Charles shouted in shock and pain which had the effect of causing both the policemen to laugh and they then left the cell with Victor. The short squat policeman said he would be back that night.

I then tried to get some sleep, but could not lie on my back on the cell mat as it was still very painful and so I lay on my side with the one thin blanket that each of us had been given over me. I was very cold and kept on shivering, partly with cold and partly with pain and fear.

Since our arrest and detention that afternoon we had received no food of any kind whatsoever. I was very hungry and although we had only received water for the first time when we had been put into this cell, I felt too sick to drink very much at all. There was no toilet paper or any sort of paper which could be used when going to the one toilet that was in the adjoining cell. There was also no hot water in the cells and no soap which meant that we were unable to wash properly. My left knee was still particularly sore and the whole area of my stomach was swollen and felt very tender.

The next day, Saturday 18 October 1986, we were given breakfast early in the morning which consisted of a yellow porridge. We remained in the cell for the rest of that day. We received a mid-day and evening meal which also consisted of the same watery yellow porridge. This porridge was yellow in colour and of a texture close to water. It tasted extremely bad and most of us after eating it experienced nausea. We received no milk, tea, sugar, meat or protein of any kind during that day.

I remember that during the course of that Saturday a number of us asked certain of the policemen who had come to the cell to look at us, if we could be taken to the hospital in order to have our injuries attended to. On one occasion the policeman who was asked was the same short squat policeman who had assaulted us the previous day. He refused our request.

On the following day, Sunday 19 October 1986, before we received our breakfast of yellow porridge we were all taken into another room in the police station. While we were in this room I made a statement to a policeman and told him exactly what had taken place on the day that we had been arrested. This statement was written down by the policeman who asked me to sign it. I signed it in spite of the fact that I did not see what he had written down and that he did not read it back to me.

During the course of making these statements a black policeman in blue uniform came into the room and told all of us (the six detainees) to hold out our hands. When we did this he hit us a number of times across our knuckles with a small chain and also with a small stick which appeared to be part of the handle of a broom. This was very painful and appeared to cause the police who were present in the room much amusement.

After we had given these statements to the police we received the same yellow porridge. At approximately mid-day I saw the mother of Charles along with the brother of Zachariah and the sister of Joel. They had brought clothes for certain of us. However we were not allowed to speak to them. We were consequently unable to tell them of the assaults that we had experienced since our arrest.

The food that we received on Sunday 19 October 1986 was exactly the same as we had received on Saturday, that is to say three bowls of watery yellow porridge. During the day on Sunday Victor was returned to our cell. He informed us that he had received some kind of medical treatment.

On Monday 20 October 1986 I and the six other detainees were taken to the Protea Police Station. While at this police station I made a statement to a white man, and although I did not see what he wrote and it was not read back to me, I signed it.

During the course of Monday 20 October 1986 I and certain of the other detainees were taken from the Protea Police Station to the security police building in the same area. While we were being taken to the security police building we were walking outside on the road which runs next to the police buildings. We were in single file and were led by white policemen. As we approached the security police building, I noticed my mother standing near the gate of the road leading to the security police building. She was not very close to me and although I wanted to shout to her for help, I did not do so as I feared that I would again be assaulted once I was inside the building and out of her sight.

As far as I can remember I saw a doctor on Tuesday at the Protea Police Station. This doctor was white, elderly, and wore glasses. When I saw him I informed him that I had been assaulted at the Orlando Police Station on Friday and Saturday and he told me that he would write this down. I also told him that my left leg below the knee was sore and that my stomach was tender and that my back was still very sore from being hit with a hosepipe.

On Thursday 23 October 1986, I was called out of the cell and my photograph was taken by a photographer.

During the period that I was held in custody at the police cells at the Protea Police Station, I was sharing a cell with my friend Charles who is 14 years old. During this time I was not able to eat properly as each time I tried to eat I felt nauseous and on various occasions dizzy and disorientated. I found it difficult to sleep and consequently I felt very tired with the result that when the nausea occurred I often broke down crying.

I have no idea why I was arrested and detained as I have committed no illegal acts, nor been involved in any unrest or violence of any sort. I am completely bewildered and perplexed as to why I have been assaulted and mistreated by the South African police force while I have been in their custody. The treatment that I received in the Orlando Police Station, including the very poor food and other conditions in the police cells, are things which I will always remember in horror and fear.

Background to the Harare Testimony

Information drawn from Conference papers and other sources.

In September 1984 a nation-wide campaign of protest and resistance to apartheid institutions was triggered. That campaign continues in various forms to this day despite a continuous State of Emergency in South Africa since 1985. It became evident soon after the start of the uprising that the police and army were directing their considerable legal and extra-legal powers at the black children in both urban and rural areas. Between 1984 and 1986:

These statistics do not reveal the loss, the suffering, that the repression of children has brought. Alarmed by the nature and extent of what is now known as 'the war on children the Bishop Ambrose Reeves Trust and the University of Zimbabwe began organising an international conference to be held in Harare in early 1987, so as to focus world attention on the plight of South Africa's youngest victims. The conference eventually took place on 24-27 September, having been postponed in response to fears of South African attacks on Zimbabwe and other Southern African countries.

The conference was remarkable for several reasons, not least being the testimony offered by a large contingent of South Africans, including child victims of brutality, their lawyers, doctors and parents.

The testimony and presentations to the conference constituted much more than a shocking catalogue of cruelty to children. The conference was also moved by the resilience of the children, their courage and defiance. While the attention of the conference remained sharply focused on the current experience of children and on the effects of repression on them, the South African delegates reminded the conference that the source of repression was apartheid. It appeared from their testimony that the children do not regard themselves as 'innocent victims, but that they plead 'guilty to engaging in the protest campaigns in townships and schools to change apartheid. To call for detained children to be 'charged or released is therefore not enough. It may mean only that children are charged under a harsh legal system and sentenced to serve terms of imprisonment for acts of legitimate resistance. It may mean that children would be released only to find themselves in a larger prison, apartheid South Africa, which promises them poverty, discrimination and inferior educational facilities. It may mean that children would be released but their parents would continue to be detained. It may mean that children in South Africa would be released but that the hundreds of thousands of children in neighbouring Angola and Mozambique would continue to suffer violence and starvation as a result of apartheid's policies.

In linking the repression of children in South Africa to the policies of apartheid, the South African delegates asked the conference to consider the kind of society that could so directly brutalise its young, and also the conditions in that society which compelled its children to assume the adult risks of protest and resistance, to forgo their childhood. It is appropriate to give a thumb-nail sketch of the conditions under which children live in South Africa

Apartheid - A Larger Prison

In background papers placed before the conference, facts and figures indicated that black children in South Africa have to contend with structural deprivation throughout their lives: poverty and discrimination in a land of affluence and plenty. Set out below is just a part of the information contained in the conference papers and in other sources, all of them listed in the section on sources at the end of the book.

Against this background of poverty and political frustration, black South Africans have placed a premium on educational advancement, and have channelled much energy into improving the quality of black education. In 1953 the black community greeted with dismay the announcement by Prime Minister HF Verwoerd that he would introduce a separate educational system for African children because 'there is no place for him the bantu in the European community above certain forms of labour. The system of 'bantu' education has meant that:

Children and Repression

When the widespread protests against apartheid erupted in 1984, the government and its repressive forces apparently believed that the backbone of the resistance could be broken by a sustained maximum-force policy directed mainly at children and young adolescents. The range of repressive strategies employed by government agencies between 1984 and 1986 is described in Haysom's presentation. They range from harsh township policing, mass detentions and licensing vigilante squads, to the more sophisticated reconstruction of township politics. Available information indicates that children bore a great part of the effect of the repressive policies, as they had done since 1976 and before.

Between 1984 and the present, children have been in the front-line of a mass sustained and national challenge to apartheid institutions and have had to pay a terrible price for it.

Children throughout the country have died as a result of the police use of lethal firearms including combat rifles. The total number of children killed by police up to the end of 1986 was well over 312. This figures excludes the considerable number who have died in 1987, who have been killed by Bantustan forces, by vigilantes, the South African Defence Force (SADF) or the Municipal Police. Monitoring groups report that many of those killed, are killed by reckless and indiscriminate firing and others in situations such as attending illegal gatherings or stone throwing. When police fired at a funeral procession at Langa in the Eastern Cape on 21 March 1985, 19 out of 20 persons killed were shot in the back or side. Nearly 50 per cent of the victims were juveniles. During 1985 the Empilisweni clinic at Crossroads squatter camp treated 500 persons shot by the police. Over 10 per cent were under the age of 15 - the youngest was only 5 years old. A medical journal report stated that 55 of 93 persons shot dead had been shot in the back; of these 11 were under 15 years of age. A study of 77 children killed by the police in 1985 revealed that 19 victims were under 11 years of age. As noted above over l,000 children were wounded between 1984 and 1986, according to police statistics which reflect only a part of the whole picture.

It is estimated that 10,000 children, 40 per cent of all detainees, have been detained without trial under provisions which deny a legal right of access to parents or lawyers, and do not discriminate between the conditions of detention for adults and children. Children have been held in large communal cells, their education has been disrupted and they have been denied full recreational amenities. At one stage it was reported that male convicted common-law prisoners were sexually abusing child detainees, though it appears that since then most detainees have been segregated from convicts. Parents are not automatically informed of the detention of their children and have to go to considerable lengths to ascertain if their children are being detained, and if so, where they are being held.

The Frontline States

Angola and Mozambique are wracked by war in which locally based forces are receiving direct support from the South African Defence Force and the United States in the case of Angola and in the case of Mozambique are trained, equipped and recruited by South Africans. Regional destabilisation became the key foreign policy strategy of the South African regime precisely because it weakens South Africa's neighbours and paralyses their capacity to forge independent economies and effective government. Destabilisation is a regional policy and extends beyond these two strife-torn countries whose economies have been systematically sabotaged. Zimbabwe, Lesotho, BoTswana, Zambia and Swaziland have all had to contend with both economic pressures and SADF strikes into their capital cities. Many of the raids, supposedly directed at the ANC's military wing, have taken the lives of innocent nationals, non-combatants and refugees. The raids have the character of reprisal attacks, symbolic exercises to threaten neighbouring governments and their subjects. The destabilisation of the region has had a colossal effect on the lives of children in the region.

The Harare Conference

It was against this background that the conference in Zimbabwe took place. The very fact that it took place at all can be regarded as a gesture of defiance. Harare is a short flight from Pretoria, and is vulnerable to economic and military reprisals. The conference had been postponed once after South Africa had made one of its regular threats against the Frontline States, threats which have often been followed by attacks and raids. The challenge to Pretoria in holding such a conference in Southern Africa was sharpened by the presence of two South African groups: the one, a senior and impressive delegation from the African National Congress's headquarters including ANC president Oliver Tambo; the other from inside the country, numbering nearly 150, more than half the total number of South Africans at the conference. For both groups there were risks in attending. ANC personnel have been assassinated in Harare and there have been attacks and bombings of ANC offices in the city. Those who came from South Africa ran the risk of unknown reactions from the South African government upon their return - detention, interrogation, confiscation of passports. Beyers Naude asked the conference to consider especially those who were not as well known as himself, those who were not protected by professional status or international reputation. In fact at least seven delegates were questioned upon their return. More recently a boy whose account of his six months in detention was featured in a television documentary shown in the United States was identified by police, questioned and released. On 26 January 1988, five days after his interrogation, his body was found in a field. He had been shot in the head.

Much of the testimony given at the conference is presented here - some of it is drawn from background documents submitted to the conference, and some of it from edited transcripts of statements. There are also sections containing responses to the conference of people who participated in it.

Harare Days and Nights - Impressions of the Conference

Victoria Brittain

South Africa's townships greeted Oliver Tambo, President of the African National Congress, with, first a stunned silence at the sight of the man, and then an outpouring of emotion in tears, laughter, hugs, song and dance to the legend who has sustained a generation.

Mothers, priests, lawyers, doctors, community organisers who had travelled from all over South Africa to Harare in September 1987 had come there to expose to the world the nightmare of repression and torture that engulfs their children. Oliver Tambo, and half the National Executive Committee of the ANC, were perhaps the last people many of them had expected to find there to listen to the grim stories of the apartheid regime which, to survive, has targeted black youth as one of the mainstays of resistance.

From the spontaneous first moments of welcome as Oliver Tambo was whirled off his feet by the crowd from inside the country, the myths about individuals in the long-exiled ANC leadership began to drop away and were replaced by an open dialogue between the stifled internal and external power centres of South Africa which only days before would have been unimaginable.

It was a dialogue on many levels between people who often knew almost nothing about each other at first hand, but nonetheless reacted as though to bonds of comradeship forged in the frontline of what has become a state of war. Behind this striking phenomenon of trust lies the invisible presence of the outlawed ANC in the townships these delegates came from - where its banned literature is sought out, and its policies known and discussed, its flag and colours sported as a defiant morale-booster at funerals of victims of police violence which are mass political rallies, its leaders, names, Mandela, Tambo, Slovo, woven into the resistance songs of everyday life. But all this had not prepared people for the emotional shock of the freedom of face-to-face meetings.

The skills and knowledge of the internal and external groups are, each knows, complementary. For the first time, for many, in Harare each could measure themselves directly in the eyes of the other. The distorted pictures created by the South African regime's expensive propaganda machine had not only worked internationally, but also had had its effect both on each side's subconscious idea of the other and on the self-images of both. The impact of meeting stripped all that away.

The holding of the Harare Conference was in itself an indictment of the local and, especially, of the international media's failure in reporting the situation in South Africa. The attention of the world beyond South Africa had not been focused on the government's systematic attack on black children as the present (and to the regime, even more frighteningly, the uncontrollable future) challengers of the apartheid state. This major strand of contemporary history lay half-buried. The censorship imposed by Pretoria under the successive States of Emergency had succeeded. Throughout the world, newspapers, radio and television had grown used to blunting reality to conform to the rules of a state long outlawed from most of the international community.

Laying bare the numbed indifference of those who should have told his story long since, and the immense courage of the mother who brought him to Harare, an 11-year-old boy wriggled away from the microphone muttering, 'I don't want to say more, Vlok will get me. The Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, loomed unbearably large in the first day of such children's testimony, which had even someone like the church leader Frank Chikane, who confronts such evidence daily, leaving the hall in tears.

That wary, restless, 11-year-old epitomised Pretoria's attempted destruction of his life-hopes and the very fabric of his society. Pretoria has indelibly marked that child's present and future. He and so many others unveiled at Harare the undreamed-of human resources which, as in every other revolutionary situation in history, these extraordinary South African times had brought out.

The terror of armed police and soldiers, or local vigilante groups acting for the state, breaking into family homes in the middle of the night, of the children taken away to unknown destinations, of the physical and psychological violence which have become a new norm for black children and their families, were burned into the minds of everyone at Harare. The mother of that child had three other children, including a teenage girl, in detention. The quiet desperation of her description of begging at one police station after another to be allowed to see them, and the slanting focus of her anxiety on the one fact that they had not written their exams, was so painful to see that it was hard to meet her eyes.

Sitting attentively to one side throughout the hours of personal testimony of victims and the scarcely less anguished analysis by doctors, lawyers, priests and community organisers, was the ANC's Oliver Tambo. Like their acknowledged leader, head of a popular government in exile, he was the first focus of each speaker. 'Mr President they began. Little of the detail of the pain inflicted on individual children or the brutal crushing of whole communities could have been new to Tambo, but as the days wore on he grew perceptibly graver. As one of the other ANC leaders put it, 'these days it is not easy being a South African leader; the burden of people's expectations gets heavier with every new phase of repression.

The ANC was represented by many of the historic generation who, like President Tambo, Treasurer Thomas Nkobi, Ruth Mompati, Gertrude Shope and Joe Slovo, Secretary-General of the South African Communist Party, had carried the burden of two decades of leadership from exile. These were the people who, in the early 1960s when all seemed lost and the organisation smashed, had inspired the Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella's famous speech to all Africa, 'let us die a little for the liberation of South Africa. In 1963 an ANC office was opened in Algiers and men like Johnstone Makatini began to travel the world on Algerian passports spreading the knowledge which would begin ousting the South African regime from the international community.

The stars of the new generation of ANC leaders were there too, products of a different period and different experiences, many of which were interwoven with those of former comrades re-met in Harare from township organisations. Steve Tshwete, for instance, a senior ANC official, spent 15 years on Robben Island for sabotage and furthering the aims of the ANC and used the time it to give himself the education the likes of which an impoverished black child like him could never have dreamed. Tshwete speaks of Camus, Zola, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Picasso as the intimate friends who peopled his days on the Island, and then strengthened him as an organiser of the United Democratic Front (UDF) two steps ahead of the police until his narrow escape from the country in October 1985.

Younger than him there was another generation meeting again with old friends from old battles started when they were all no more than children. Thousands of young men and women fled South Africa in 1976 in the wake of the Soweto massacre of schoolchildren. Many of their families and friends never even knew whether they were dead or alive after that traumatic period which so fractured their lives. Some of them were in the ANC's delegation of 60 people in Harare now with responsible jobs in the external mission.

The conference illustrated in these young men the triumph of the ANC's long and often bitter battle for their long-time vision and strategy of non-racialism. At Harare it was reaffirmed from many political perspectives as a central principle in the South African struggle. The Muslim Imam Faried Esack of The Call of Islam, a UDF affiliate, for instance, in a tribute to the ANC leadership and Archbishop Trevor Huddleston, convenor of the conference, said 'thank you for preventing our struggle from degenerating into a black versus white confrontation, thank you for standing with us for truth versus falsehood, thank you for standing with us for justice versus injustice.

Among the young ANC generation, as among young delegates from inside the country, were plenty of people who were fired by the black consciousness movement as a rallying point in the darkest days of resistance. Many forces had attempted in the post-1976 upheavals to co-opt its energies and set part of the forces of resistance against the ANC because of its anti-imperialist commitment and its alliance with the South African Communist Party. At Harare so many exchanges of personal histories by people who had been separated by the upheavals of the struggle for years underlined to everyone the extensive attempts at promoting division and how they had misfired. Intellectual struggles of the young self-educated township leaders detained with the ANC leadership, including Nelson Mandela himself on Robben Island, had changed their politics. And for the young exiles, too, the impact of the first face-to-face meetings with the ANC transformed their ideas about the nature of politics. Steve Tshwete expressed clearly their new perspective: 'The politics of colour are a very devastating instrument in the hands of imperialist countries, and all reactionaries.

After the conference's formal sessions in the Harare International Conference Centre, at every meal, every meeting at the bar, every night-time gathering, all these different strands of opposition to Pretoria met in an unfolding political event, part spontaneous, part structured. The success of the white regime's censorship, banning of books, banning of people, banning of meetings over so many years, meant that many of the delegates from inside the country were coming to Harare with only the limited experience of a fragment of their own closed society. Many of them came from provinces and towns separated not only by hundreds of miles, but also by the central factor of their lives apartheid.

The Freedom Charter might be the theoretical foundation of most of their political beliefs since the UDF began its long discussions about formally adopting it, but in the daily consuming struggle for survival there were many who had never had the space or time to imagine life shaped upon it. And there were many individuals there not as part of any organisation, but driven by personal experiences which had triggered a deep rejection of the system. The Harare days became a precious foretaste of a post-apartheid society. Colour, status, power-structure rules were deliberately and joyfully forgotten - for those four days.

The new freedom was electric and its fleeting nature made it all the more poignant. For many it was the first taste of liberation from the abnormal society of South Africa in which they had all learned to survive by making completely abnormal demands on their creativity and courage. No one wanted to sleep, or to lose a moment of the tidal wave of questions, ideas, impressions, mutual exchanges, which stunned every one of the 600 or so delegates.

That a such delicate interplay of mutual respect and mutual trust could mark a meeting of people whose lives had been so deliberately imbued with precisely the opposite experiences is something no outsider can explain.

The strength of the organisation of the ANC, rebuilt since the traumatic toll on the internal network of the Rivonia trial 20 years before, was shown at Harare with an openness the banned organisation has never chosen to display before. But in Harare the ANC was responding, face to face for the first time, to a diverse group of South African exiles and to a cross-section of individuals from many political backgrounds inside the country. The coherence and consistency of the latter was all the more impressive because they were mostly people not from the top leadership but from the secondary leadership level. Many of the best-known names of leaders of legal organisations, such as the UDF, were in prison or underground. And the older internal leaders, towering figures from the Congress in the 1950s who had survived the prison terms, the torture, the bannings, the bereavements, and the escalating state violence of more than two decades, were mostly unable to be there.

Behind the atmosphere of these meetings lay unspoken respect for the different intensities of others, experiences. Years in exile have killed plenty of liberation movements, from internecine plotting, if not from the creeping paralysis of individual despair. Long years of bleak hotel rooms, cramped offices, underfunded diplomatic campaigns seemingly making little impact in an indifferent international context where only power now counts, poor communications, and manifold disappointments, make exiles easy targets for spies and traitors. The ANC has suffered from its share of all this, but has withstood the corrosive effects. UDF leaders have had to cope with a transition to operating in conditions of clandestinity, which have often enough in history been so stressful and short-lived that individuals bring their own exposure either by paranoia or by an over-optimistic carelessness.

On the opening day of the conference, before the welcome speech by Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, long neat lines of Zimbabwean schoolchildren filled the upper galleries of the hall. Their trim uniforms, sturdy bodies and carefree childish whispering bespoke another world from the one of terror and repression their South African contemporaries would unveil to them. Although these Zimbabwean children were mostly too young to know what it had meant to fight a war for their independence from a racist regime, their respectful response to these other children from an even more terrifying war waged on them by the government was a moving display of how deep within the societies of the Front Line States solidarity springs.

The strength and dignity of the South African children showed everyone the calibre of future South African leaders. Their open dedication to their fellow South Africans is the clearest possible demonstration of the utter failure of the apartheid regime's policies of withholding deliberately from them education and a quality of social life which twentieth-century civilisation would call normal. Their demand for 'Freedom or Death' is literal - the expression of the patriotic self-sacrifice these young people have prepared themselves for.

'The child is not dead'

From the statement which Oliver Tambo, President of the African National Congress, made at the opening of the conference

The Afrikaner poet, Ingrid Jonker, died in 1965 at the young age of 32. Consumed by a dark foreboding and overwhelmed by despair, she committed suicide as her creative intellect was coming to its ripening. By her death, she joined herself to the children of our country about whom she had written. Her tragic passing was as powerful an indictment of the apartheid system as were these verses which she has left us, and I quote:

The child is not dead
the child lifts his fists against his mother
who shouts Afrika! shouts the breath
of freedom and the veld
in the locations of the cordoned heart. . .

The child is not dead
not at Langa nor at Nyanga
nor at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police post at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with their rifles, saracens and batons

the child is present at all assemblies and law-giving
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who wanted only to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child is grown to a man and treks on through all Africa
the child grown into a giant journeys over the whole world

Without a pass

We share with Ingrid Jonker that noble vision of the child who wanted only to play in the sun, the child grown into a giant, journeying over the whole world, without a pass. We share with her the knowledge and confidence that the wanton massacre of the children at Langa and at Nyanga, at Orlando and at Sharpeville, at Soweto, Athlone, Maseru, Gaberone, Harare, Maputo, the knowledge that this succession of massacres will not deny us our journey over the whole world - free at last, at last free, perhaps the last to be free but free, at last.

What pain it must have been to her, who, being an Afrikaner, saw these images, the images of those who immolated the child who wanted only to play in the sun at Nyanga, and then told her that they murdered in order to protect her, her kind and her so-called 'civilisation. And what her torment to know that each extra day of her so-called 'way of life, cost the souls of many a black child.

And under that terrible order the children die, with bullets through their heads, welts on their bodies, hearts and brains stopped before they could attain maturity, because a person as ordinary as you and I, has inherited powers that go beyond all that is permissible in the conduct of relations among those we would all count as mortal.

A criminal tyranny that has the audacity to call itself a civilisation lives on across the borders of this country, Zimbabwe. It survives because humanity, and principally ourselves, has not yet said that an extra day of apartheid is an extra day too long. It thrives because it can include within its body count the lives of children whom it describes as opponents that it has vanquished. It persists because without the death of the innocents, it cannot be.

We meet here today because we want to discuss the unspeakable plight of the black children of South Africa. We meet, the children of South Africa and the children of Zimbabwe sitting together in this hall, people from South Africa and people from around the world sitting together in this hall, we meet because there is something that is happening to the hapless and the innocent that should not be allowed to happen. We meet because we recognise that our own lives have meaning only to the extent that they are used to create a social condition which will make the lives of the children happy, full and meaningful. We have gathered ourselves in Harare and on this particular occasion because we know that a grievous injustice is being done to all humanity.

And yet, strange as it might seem, there are some who are opposed to the fact that we meet here, for these purposes. These are convinced that our consultation is of the devil's own making. And yet they are the first to stand unabashed in front of the whole world, projecting themselves as the very representation of all that is good, upright and unconquerable.

Our century has witnessed some of the worst atrocities in all human history, perpetrated by people who considered themselves good, upright and unconquerable. But in the end humanity has itself judged these, regardless of their opinion of themselves. And once more the peoples have judged that those who uphold the apartheid system are committing a crime against humanity itself. And as this conference knows, at the core of this crime is the theory and practice of racism.

What more man-hating ideology can there be than this which defines black people as less than human! And could we expect any consequences from its practice other than the slaughter of black children? The predator feeds on human blood. That fact defines its being.

The endless rows of children's graves, ready, prepared, for the children whose death by disease and starvation is planned according to defined statistical regularities, marks the true essence of this system. The barefoot child - clothed in a sack that should carry produce - planting, hoeing, reaping, is the alter ego of the white farmer who towers above the toddler with a whip in his hand. The orphan is no more than a precise statement that apartheid lives. The mangled remains of the black child who wanted only to play in the sun are the justification for the existence of the largest and most sophisticated machinery of repression that Africa has ever known. The apartheid predator feeds on human blood. That fact defines its being.

This terrible desolation defines for us what our struggle must be about. We cannot be true liberators unless the liberation we will achieve guarantees all children the rights to life, health, happiness and free development, respecting the individuality, the inclinations and capabilities of each child. Our liberation would be untrue to itself if it did not, among its first tasks, attend to the welfare of the millions of children whose lives have been stunted and turned into a terrible misery by the violence of the apartheid system.

Moreover, our concern for the children, the inheritors of our future, cannot be postponed until the day we achieve our emancipation.

The Political Context of the War against Children

Frank Chikane, Secretary-General of the South African Council of Churches and a vice-president of the United Democratic Front (UDF) - he has been detained three times and in 1985 he was acquitted on all charges of high treason of which he and 15 other UDF leaders had been accused.

I bring greetings on behalf of all South Africans (except the white-minority regime) to Comrade President Mugabe, the people of Zimbabwe, and all the leaders and people of the Front Line States. We know how much your stand against this barbaric inhuman system has cost you in terms of human life, economic and political destabilisation. We know the way in which the forces of reaction are using hunger as a political weapon at the expense of hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters in the whole Southern African region.

The oppressed masses of South Africa take your pain, suffering and death for their sakes seriously. Your injury is their injury. Your pain, their pain, and whenever you are attacked they feel more obliged to fight vehemently against the system to speed up its demise.

The apartheid regime has turned this region of Southern Africa into a region of refugees and exiles. It has plunged it into a war which is fought on various fronts: from Luanda to Maputo, from Lusaka to Cape Town. We cannot allow this situation to continue without an end. We need to turn this sub-continent into a united homeland where all will live in peace and prosperity. We need to free the economic potential of this region, not just to benefit the people of Southern Africa, but the whole African continent, even the world.

The war against children in South Africa is taking place within this context of conflict and destabilisation. We have come here to share our pain and suffering, particularly of our children. We just hope that there are still people in the world who have enough moral instinct to be moved by our witness to act decisively and make it impossible for the apartheid regime to live a day longer. We also hope that those who collude with this inhuman regime will be ashamed of their action and withdraw their support for the system.

The children of South Africa, particularly black children, are denied their right to be children. Children in our country are violently forced by the conditions in the country to be adults before their time. They are put in a situation where they have to make decisions which are normally made by adults. They are forced to make choices which they should not make at their age. They are made to fight battles they should not be fighting as children.

They also want to have a chance to be children and develop naturally like other children. They want to play hide and seek. They want to role-play mothers and fathers and play games like other children.

Their normal and natural growth as children has been and is being violently disrupted, forcing them to be adults before their time.

I want to concentrate on the context of war against the voteless majority in South Africa. To understand the form this war is taking today and the nature of the crisis we are facing we need to trace its origin over the last decade of struggle in our country.

There was a change in state strategy in the late seventies. This shift did not help the apartheid regime. Instead it deepened the crisis and the contradictions within the system. The States of Emergency which commenced in 1985 and in which our children have been so badly brutalised, are the culmination of that crisis.

The independence of Mozambique and Angola in 1975 altered the balance of forces in the Southern African region. It broke the so-called 'cordon sanitaire, of white-ruled colonies which gave the regime a feeling of security and confidence. The fall of the Portuguese colonies brought the battle-front against colonial and neo-colonial rule closer to the heartland of white oppression and exploitation.

The international character of participants at this conference is a very clear manifestation of the universality of the feeling of revulsion and concern generated by the dehumanisation to which the majority of the people of South Africa are daily subjected by the apartheid system in that country. I sincerely hope that the deliberations of this conference will enhance international awareness of the terrible plight and situation of the weakest and most vulnerable of the South African population, namely, the children, the black children who are, as we know, the most hapless and helpless victims of the evil monster that is apartheid. It is they who are daily malnourished by apartheid, they who are daily miseducated by apartheid, and they who above all, are daily jailed, maimed and murdered by apartheid.

Yet, international awareness of the suffering of the children in apartheid South Africa is alone not adequate unless it is followed by a resolve, determination and strength to fight and eradicate the heinous system from our civilised world. The pariah state of South Africa has no legitimate claim to being part of the civilised international community as long as the sanctity and respect for the rule of law has not been restored in that country.

The prisons of South Africa are today full of children who, under civilised conditions should be in schools undergoing preparation for their future roles and responsibilities as citizens of their country. Alas, their prescribed lot is that of being murdered, tortured, brutalised and imprisoned.

Most of us from this region know that the rule of law does not exist in apartheid South Africa. The law, such as exists there, is only for the advancement and protection of the privileges of the few. The law and all the related state institutions have been designed and geared to protect and promote the interests of the white minority by systematically trampling upon even the most basic rights of the black masses.

Should any voice of conscience draw attention to the injustice of the system and criticise the so-called law enforcement agents, such criticism is contemptuously ignored. Recently, the Detainees' Parents Support Committee published its informative reports or studies on tortures and detentions in the 1980s. The reaction of the racist Minister of Law and Order was characteristic. He accused the Committee of vilifying the police. Mr Vlok and all the members of his apartheid regime are evidently men to whom conscience and morality are mere trifles.

The Honourable Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Robert G Mugabe, at the opening session

This created a succession of problems for South Africa: the 1976 Soweto uprising followed by the November 1977 UN Security Council resolution on mandatory arms embargo against South Africa; the guerrilla actions of the ANC which were fuelled by the Soweto uprising; the economic decline from 1974 up to 1978; the substantial outflow of foreign capital. All these factors deepened the crisis. White hegemony was clearly under siege.

In response to this crisis the regime produced the 1977 Defence White Paper which laid the basis for PW Botha's concept of a total onslaught from beyond South Africa's borders. This 'total onslaught needed a 'total national strategy. The 'total onslaught which South Africa was said to be facing was presented as a communist conspiracy.

This formulation has two advantages for white South Africa. Firstly, it allows all criticism of apartheid to be dismissed as communist. Secondly, it creates a condition which makes both white South Africans and the West see South Africa as the last bastion against communism, the protector of Western Christian values. It created a serious contradiction for the West, so that any attacks on apartheid by them would be said to be of assistance to the Soviet Union.

The 'total strategy to counter this 'total onslaught had three main elements.

Firstly, there was a need to forge some kind of national unity government to defend white rule. The present tri-cameral system developed from the need of the racist regime to draft sections of the so-called Indian and Coloured populations in South Africa and some middle-class Africans into a junior partnership with the white minority against the black majority. It was an attempt to pit one group of people against the other.

Secondly, 'total strategy involved vigorous repression of all opponents of the system.

Thirdly, South Africa sought hegemony over the whole Southern African region to silence those opposed to apartheid and to neutralise the African National Congress guerrilla warfare against South Africa. This would consist of a combination of diplomatic, political, economic and military strategies.

The total strategy, therefore, was aimed at establishing South Africa's position as a 'regional power and establishing a 'constellation of states under its tutelage. This would require a 'common approach on both the security and economic fronts against what was called expanding communist influence of the region.

The third leg of this total strategy was frustrated by the independence of Zimbabwe and by the formation of the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (SADCC) dashing the hope of forming the Constellation of Southern African States.

To understand the context of the war in South Africa we need therefore to look at the first two legs of the total strategy, that is, reform and repression. It is now a matter of history that the oppressed masses of South Africa saw through the fraud of these reforms. They organised against them and defeated them.

At best, the reform strategies helped the people to mobilise and organise against the subtle attempt to further entrench apartheid and maintain white domination. This campaign, led mainly by the UDF, galvanised the masses and transformed the face of politics in South Africa.

The political complexion of this country was rapidly altered as mass organisation spread like a veldfire. Throughout the country, from the smallest village to the largest cities, the people organised themselves into democratic structures which expressed their needs and aspirations. These structures (street committees, education committees, people's courts, etc.) were declared subversive by the regime because they stood opposed to government apartheid structures.

The arrogance of the system in ignoring the popular rejection of the tri-cameral system and in imposing the new structures of oppression (after the so-called Coloured and Indian elections of August 1984) created an explosive situation which ignited in the Vaal in September 1984. This event sparked off a wave of uprisings around the country, leaving the government-created local authorities in shambles. The police and those perceived as collaborators and informers were forced out of the townships except when they came in on military or security operations.

In short the people simply refused to collaborate or co-operate in their own oppression. They refused to be governed by the apartheid regime.

The state then resorted to the second leg of the total strategy, that is repression. The army and the police occupied the townships. Thousands of our people were killed, many thousands were detained, many of them tortured. And all this was directed mainly against young people under the age of 25. Many of these were children under the age of 18. But the vicious attacks on the people by the state only served to increase the militancy and anger of the people, particularly young people. The government then declared a State of Emergency between July 1985 and March 1986 which was reimposed in June 1986 and continues today. The South African Defence Force, a machine of war, was sent into the townships, the schools, the villages, in every part of the country.

Soldiers and police, now called 'security forces, were indemnified for any act of violence committed against the local population. Soldiers as well as police had unlimited powers to detain, raid and search; break up meetings and funerals; set up road blocks; impose curfews and seal off any township or village to prevent anyone from entering. Even aircraft would be used in security force 'operations for surveillance, or to drop propaganda literature as part of a show of force during evictions of rent boycotters, and for actually diving on demonstrations. Townships were put under spotlights to facilitate operations at night.

During this time we have seen the brutal murders of our people by South Africa's 'security forces, vigilantes and hit-squads. People have been displaced by the terror unleashed by these forces. There has also been a vicious disinformation campaign which has been aggravated by restrictions on the free flow of information.

The mobilisation of the army against the black majority showed most clearly that the regime regarded the entire oppressed people as 'insurgents. They were intent on breaking the spirit of resistance, wiping out the forces of national liberation and creating a political wasteland into which government proxy forces and other co-optable elements would step in. Reports reaching churches and other bodies monitoring repression around the country clearly indicated that after the State of Emergency a wide range of people, regardless of their political involvement, were being terrorised by the forces of so-called law and order.

What emerges clearly from these reports, though, is that the main target of this terror has been the youth and the children. This is not surprising because since 16 June, 1976, the most militant, energetic and courageous fighters against apartheid have been the youth and children. Many are driven by sheer hatred of apartheid to engage daily in a battle with the security forces and all those they regard as enforcing apartheid.

The state therefore concluded that to break the spirit of the community they had to break the spirit of the youth. Not only those formally involved in the organisations of the democratic movement, but all the youth.

Hundreds of reports reached us of apparently random assault harassment and the shooting of youths in the streets, at school, on the way to shops, at funerals and vigils and so on. A pattern emerged which repeated itself in every part of the country. The attacks weren't simply the actions of overzealous security forces but were actually part of a deliberate policy of terrorising the youth. Anyone who thinks that it is an exaggeration to talk of a policy of terror, should consider the testimony of young people. To intimidate and demoralise the youth, particularly school kids, they introduced curfews, door-to-door raids, shows of force at funerals and meetings. Our children came under heavy attack in schools. At one stage in the emergency schools were occupied by the security forces. School children reported that they were terrorised by the security forces. Soldiers and police interfered in the classes, attacked and shot children in the school grounds, whipped them into classes, etc.

On a Friday, after school, I was walking with my friend when I saw a Combi containing policemen coming towards us. My friend was scared so he ran away. Six police, two whites and four blacks, got out of the Combi. The white policeman knocked me down with his gun and then three of them took me to the street corner. The other three had started chasing my friend in a Combi but they did not catch him. The white policeman and two black policemen then assaulted me with rubber truncheons. They threatened me with a knife. One of the policemen told me to run so that they could shoot me. The Combi with the other police then came back and they threw me in the Combi. They drove to a schoolyard where they assaulted me again. They hit me with rubber truncheons and sjamboks. Then they blindfolded me with a greasy cloth and tied my hands behind my back with my belt.

They put me against a wall and said they were going to shoot me. People had come into the schoolyard and when they saw me against the wall, they started screaming. The police then took the blindfold away and showed me a tyre which they said they were going to put on me and then set me alight. A black policeman said that they had been sent from Port Elizabeth to kill people and that I would be an example for them. But the white policeman said they must stop because the other people in the schoolyard had taken the car registration number. Then they took me to a police station and asked the police there to detain me for 'suspected car theft'. Three days later I was released without being charged for anything.

Statement of a 15-year-old boy who had never been a political activist, cited by Frank Chikane

Besides being terrorised at school, on the streets and in their houses, many of them were detained and tortured in ways that have been documented by the Detainees, Parents Support Committee. Many detained children have reported that they were terrorised and assaulted in detention until they 'confessed to crimes they had not committed. Even the courts have been used as a weapon to terrorise the children. Children themselves who have been victims of security violence are often charged for 'public violence. If you have been shot, for instance, you are assumed to have been committing a crime. According to the Minister of Law and Order, over 1,100 people were charged with public violence in 1986 alone. What the Minister's figures do not show, however, are the vast numbers of the children who were convicted on false evidence and those who were acquitted or had their charges dropped for lack of evidence. Occasionally the gross injustice of the whole process is exposed, as in the case this month of the 12-year-old boy who had charges of public violence dropped against him. The boy, a standard two pupil from Parys, had spent 11 months in detention under the Emergency Regulations. The State alleged that he had confessed to throwing stones at the car of a township superintendent in June 1986. But the defence lawyer discovered that the said 'confession, had been written in Afrikaans, a language that the boy did not understand. Charges against him and three others were dropped.

It is clear, then, that the use of the state repressive apparatus was built into the 'total strategy approach. It was meant to silence and suppress those who refused to collaborate with the efforts of the system to maintain white domination in the country. The goal of this strategy of repression therefore is to beat our people into submission, create a political wasteland to enable them to continue with their reforms. In South Africa one does not need to have been violent to face the brutal hand of this system. One just needs to differ with the system, or expose the intention behind these reforms, detect that they are meant to retrench apartheid and retain power in the hands of the white racist minority, to qualify to be brutalised by this system.

For instance, many leaders of the UDF have been in detention under the State of Emergency Regulations for more than a year without any charges proferred against them, but they have not raised their hands or picked up a stone against anyone. What have 'Terror, Lekota, Popo Molefe, Moss Chikane and others in the Delmas Treason trial done except be lamentably peaceful in their struggle to end apartheid in South Africa?

Members of the National Education Crisis Committee (NECC) are now languishing in prison. What have they done except to negotiate with the government to try and resolve the education crisis? The same applies to Eric Molobi, who is the only remaining member of the NECC executive not in detention at present, and has had to be in hiding for almost a year now to avoid being detained by the apartheid security forces. Did they not talk to government ministers to resolve the education crisis? The only reason I can see in this case is that they did not readily agree with the strategies of the regime and therefore had to be removed from the scene to leave only those black 'faces which will agree with them in their strategies.

Since the reopening of the school term on 14 July 1986, members of the South African Police and council police have been on the school premises at all times. For me, as a teacher, the very presence of security forces disrupts the teaching programme. My students often ask me why these police are always around, but because of the warnings from the principal I was unable to discuss even these problems with the students in my class . . . During breaktime the security forces bar the gate leading onto the school premises so as to stop anybody leaving the school grounds. As soon as the siren sounds to end break, they immediately proceed to start whipping people into the classrooms. They do not even allow a reasonable time for people to get from the school yard to classes, but they sjambok them to hasten their route to the classroom . . . I have subsequently seen bruises and cuts by these actions on many of my students . . . Pupils are being unlawfully assaulted and abused in an arbitrary fashion without reason. Cases of mass arrests of schoolchildren were reported. In one instance a whole school of 1,200 Soweto schoolchildren were arrested apparently for having left the school ground at a time when the Emergency Restrictions did not allow. The Supreme Court secured their release. I personally had an experience of battling with other ministers to secure the release of primary school children detained with their teachers because they broke the curfew regulations.

From a sworn affidavit by a teacher from the Orange Free State

So I am convinced that the regime's demand for the ANC to abandon violence before they can negotiate with them is just a bluff. It is a smokescreen to avoid facing the reality of genuine negotiations which will interfere with the dominant position of whites in this country. Violence is not the issue here - white power is the issue.

I cannot but reject the latest constitutional plan for a powerless advisory council for Africans. The proposed National Statutory Council aims to suppress all democratic patriots of South Africa, leaving the co-optable elements of the black community to participate. If they were genuine about negotiations they would unban the liberation movements, release Mandela and other political prisoners, and let those in exile come back home to all participate in this process.

The regime's strategy of counter-revolution, as articulated lately by Vlok, Malan and others, is, firstly, to engage in generalised terror against our people in the name of crushing revolutionaries and radicals, beat them into submission or remove them from the scene; secondly, to engage in limited economic and political reforms to pacify the people and try to win their 'hearts and minds'; and thirdly, to introduce the so-called new dispensation, in a political vacuum to enable them to secure white power domination. This is the so-called three-phase strategy of counterrevolution the system is committed to and this sequence can be repeated from time to time as it becomes necessary.

This, therefore, is the context and basis for the repression against the children of South Africa. There is very little that can be done to save and protect the brutalised children of South Africa without necessarily removing the apartheid system. The racist apartheid regime is evil and can only survive by murdering hundreds of thousands of defenceless people in South Africa. The determination of the people to be free will force this system to unleash all its powers at the expense of countless lives. If nothing is done we shall soon be talking about millions dead.

Apartheid must be stopped!

I wish to take this opportunity to represent the views and feelings of the majority of the peace-loving South Africans by calling on the international community to put pressure on South Africa to force them to abandon the apartheid system and allow all the people of South Africa to set up a new government based on a new constitution to establish a united, just and non-racial democratic South Africa.

PART 2: CHILDREN AND REPRESSION

Testimony of the Children

One after another children and youths stepped on to the dais to speak to the conference about personal experiences so painful and terrifying that the listening adults could barely meet each other's eyes to read the impact of what they had heard. Each child spoke to a lawyer who slowly took them through their stories. Only William Modibedi, even though he was accompanied by his mother and a young priest from the DPSC, found himself unable to speak, overcome by fear of what might happen to him when he went back to South Africa.

On the platform the youths were composed, dignified, as they told their stories, their psychological scarring well hidden. The horrifying testimonies of Buras NhLabathi Mzimkulu Ngamlana and Naude Moitse printed here, like the earlier one of Moses Madia, are very far from exceptional. In two months of 1985, in just two prisons, Dr Wendy Orr cited prison documents listing 706 detainees who complained of assault or who showed injuries consistent with assault. The four days of Harare could have been filled over and over by personal testimony equally unbearable to hear and record.

William Modibedi

Although William Modibedi, age 12, found it difficult to speak at the conference of his experience, he had previously told it to a lawyer who recorded it in an affidavit. What follows is drawn from a report published in the Johannesburg Star on 11 December 1986.

'William Modibedi is a Kagiso schoolboy of eleven just released from detention. He has few words to describe what it is like inside the cells: when asked to recount his experiences over the two months when he was away from home, he indifferently relates what happened to him. But pressed to be specific, he cries.

'William alleges that he was forced to stand for lengthy periods during interrogation at Roodepoort Police Station, and that the same happened at Krugersdorp Police Station where he was interrogated again.

'He says that in Roodepoort four of his teeth were knocked out by a black policeman during interrogation.

I was later led to a darkened room where a light bulb was switched on and I was forced to stare at its glare. I stared at it until I felt dizzy. Even with the light on, the room somehow remained dim.

On 27 October I was transferred to Krugersdorp Prison, called 'Berg, and two days later I was taken to Krugersdorp Police Station for further interrogation. When I arrived there I was handcuffed and put in leg-irons, and then subjected to electric shocks.

They put a dummy into my mouth, and the dummy had wires connected to it. The wires were connected to a socket in the wall, and when a policeman turned on the switch I experienced a jarring effect. I also felt excruciating pains in my head.

'He said the reason he was being tortured was to force him to sign statements admitting he had attacked three delivery trucks with petrol bombs. He was also forced to incriminate himself concerning an incident of "necklacing.

"'Because of the pain, I signed the statement he said.

'Some days later he was taken by the police to a mortuary where he was forced to look at dead bodies. This happened on two occasions, once in the morning and the other at night.

'William says that a policeman also pushed him down a flight of stairs.

'His two sisters Elsie (18) and Sophie (15) and brother John (16) are still in detention.

'Elsie was the first to be detained in July, John was picked up some weeks later and William and Sophie were detained together in a dawn raid on their home in October.

'Elsie and John are being held in the Diepkloof Prison, Johannesburg, and Sophie is in Roodepoort.

'A psychiatrist who saw the child said he would not say yet that William's condition was post-traumatic stress syndrome.

'The doctor said, however, that the kind of experiences William had allegedly undergone in prison could have a lasting effect on him. The boy would probably readjust to home life at a faster pace if his detained brother and sisters were released to be with him.

'But there was a possibility William's condition could be adversely affected by the stories he and his siblings exchanged of their experiences in the cells.

Mzimkulu Ngamlana

Mzimkulu Ngamlana was 18 years old and a member of the Port Elizabeth Youth Congress when he was detained. He left South Africa in August 1986 and now lives in Tanzania.

I went to the funerals of two of my mates - one was shot in the head by police and one in the stomach. They died. The police were at the funeral, taking photos and checking people there. I went home afterwards and stayed inside for three days. Then police came in the house, kicked the door and got in. I was sleeping, with my mother and my sister and my sister's children aged seven and four. It was 5 am. My mother asked them why they had come, but they didn't answer her, they didn't tell us anything. They pushed my mother although she is old. There were more than five men in uniform, they kicked me with their boots. They have my photos. I was afraid.

They kicked me and punched me on the legs and chest. In the police station two of those holding me connected an electric tube on to my leg and switched it on. It was bad, I was shaking. They were asking me questions about my friends. My mother brought me food but they ate it. In the prison I was in solitary confinement. I was crying and just sitting. After three weeks I was released. My ears were bleeding and my head hurt.

After my release I could not stand it. Every night I would hear gun shots, you cannot learn or do anything.

Naude Moitse

Naude Moitse now lives in Tanzania. He was brought up in Alexandra and attended Minerva High School where he was in form 5 in 1 984. His testimony to the conference covered two years from the time he was 19 years old. As well as being involved in COSAS, he was active in community organisation, and in organising funerals of people killed by police.

Around March or April I was involved in COSAS in the school boycotts. We used to hold meetings at school during the boycott, which had been going for some days. On our way home a group of us - about five - were stopped by plainclothes police in private cars. They came from John Vorster Square. They told us they were from Security Branch. They wanted our names and where we lived. We gave them the information. They forced us into the cars, took us to Wynberg police station. They took photographs, and hung them round our necks. They did not hit us. They only held us for a few hours. They said they knew we were involved in boycotts. They took us home.

We continued with the boycott. I was detained again around September 1984. There was a parents, meeting organised by the puppet Town Council. It was to discuss the boycott, but they didn't consult the students. We went to the meeting place at Nobuhle Hall. We distributed a COSAS pamphlet explaining the boycott and what we thought parents should do. The police charged us with batons and whips. They fired birdshot. They caught some of us. They kicked me in the genitals. It was very painful. They handcuffed me and took me to Wynberg Police Station.

The SAP interrogated us. They accused us of stone-throwing and public violence. One policeman came and said he knew persons who threw stones and said it wasn't me. We were distributing pamphlets which were quite legal. We were kept for the whole day. Security Branch came to interrogate us. I was alone in a cell with a security policeman. He threatened me. Late in the evening I was released.

After the Emergency in July 1985, police kept coming in large numbers turning our home upside down at 3 or 4 in the morning. They told my parents they would kill me if they found me. When the Emergency was declared I had left home. I was active in COSAS.

I had an appointment with a comrade who was just released. We wanted to discuss reviving structures. He turned out to be an informer who had police with him. Police pointed a gun and said if I move they will shoot. They handcuffed me to my leg and bundled me in a car. Also there were plainclothes police. I knew them before, Chauke (a black man) and Kees (a white) from John Vorster Square. They said that they were aware of my activities and they know that I have a link with the ANC.

They took me to the office in Wynberg. It was a Friday. They took particulars and photos. They threatened me they would either kill me or keep me in jail for a long time. They accused me of links with ANC. I said I was only involved in student activities.

Well, they wanted me to tell them about my links with the ANC. They suspected that I had been outside for training. I told them that I've never been involved in such a thing. And they were worried that they were looking for quite a long time, they couldn't find me. So I might have been a trained person, knowing how to go about fooling the police and all that - they were worried about such things. So I just told them I've been around the township. I was aware they were looking for me, but I had to run away, because of the way they behaved, the way that I understand that they came in large numbers with rifles, gave me the impression that I might be killed. That's why I wouldn't appear, I mean, on the scene. So I had to go into hiding.

At 2pm they took me to John Vorster Square. I was made to stand up for more than 12 hours by Mike Fortuin, a well-known police officer. When I fell they picked me up, kicked me on my body. They didn't want to leave marks. They gave me no food. I had only water to drink. At 2am they took me to a cell. I had to sleep on a concrete floor wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

At around 8 they gave me soft porridge and bread. It was the first I'd had to eat since they arrested me.

I kept on telling the same things. The interrogator came again after breakfast. He told me I must be ready for a long detention. He said they'd keep me until they were satisfied. He left me. It was Saturday. He said he'd see me on Monday. I was kept in the cell. There was a TV monitor on the ceiling. The food was very little but edible. Monday a policeman came at around 2. I was taken to another floor. Another 12 hours standing upright. There was no food, only water. I was exhausted. I was kicked again. I still said no more.

There were five policemen, one of them I remember well because he was the one interrogating me. They were asking me questions about when was I outside the country, to see if I was a trained person. I had the impression I might be killed, - they would say, 'you see this window . . . '

After that interrogation, there was another the following day, just the same. He said he'd give me a whole month. There was a Bible in the cell. They came and took the Bible away. I was in solitary confinement for three months. The light was always on, the window was very, very far up, there was no privacy, they were always watching me. They told me they had all the time. I was kept alone. I did not know what would happen to me. But the thing always tormenting me during my detention was the cries of kids, kids in other cells I could only hear. After three to four weeks they resumed the interrogation. I went four to five days without bathing. Warders would open and bang door at night to wake me up. They released me on 21 March 1986, when the Emergency had been lifted.

Afterwards they kept harassing my parents at home, coming with hippos, army trucks, armoured cars.

I was detained again for 14 days in May 1986. I was stopped by soldiers in the township. They searched the car- there were four of us. They checked the car registration. They were in army trucks. They left us, then they came again. There were two hippos and trucks. They pointed guns, and bundled us into hippos. Then they beat us with gun barrels - calling us terrorists.

At Morningside Prison, Sandton, Fortuin again interrogated me. This time they threatened to hand us to vigilantes. They took a tyre and threatened to necklace one of us. I was in isolation for 14 days. The food was bad- plain pap. Some fruit was brought in from outside. My parents were not allowed to visit me. My parents told me that they came several times with food parcels, with money, but they were told that I was okay, that there was nothing wrong with me, they shouldn't worry. So they were not allowed to see me or to give me anything.

I was charged with breach of restrictions on a funeral and taken to court. The lawyer told us the charge was dropped. I was released. But the harassment continued. After the Emergency came into force they put out a pamphlet with our photos - wanted by security police. They were distributed all over townships, offering reward. I left the country.

Buras NhLabathi

Buras NhLabathi was 17 when he was detained. He was President of the Tembisa Youth Congress, as well as active on residents' committees in the area in which he lived (sectional committee and street committee). When he was detained in October 1986 residents in the area were refusing to pay rents they could not afford to the councils imposed by the government. Students were engaged in a school boycott. Buras is now at the ANC's Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College in Tanzania.

I was president of the local student congress and secretary of the Sectional Committee. We were politicising people - explaining why they should not pay rent, for instance, and issuing pamphlets. We called for the enemy to be ignored and this means that people's local problems and matters are brought to the sectional committee and we, the street committee, have to deal with them. We tried to form a people's court.

I had not been living at home because I had actually been running away from the police. I had been staying with four others in a house about half a kilometre from my home.

I was arrested at 3.30 in the morning on 8 October 1986. There were four whites and two blacks and South African Defence Force personnel surrounding the house.

And then when they entered the house - actually we were sleeping being four in that house, because all the members of the executive were highly wanted by that time. So we used to sleep together so that we can trust each other, I mean if we are sleeping together we know that nobody would come and point at you because you are all together in the one house.

So then, when they came inside the house they asked me my name firstly, and then I told them my name and then they said I'm the right person whom they are looking for. Then from there I was beaten up for something like 45 minutes inside the house. I was beaten with fists, kicked and hit with the butt of a gun for about 45 minutes. They were seeking information about the four comrades I studied with.

They wanted to take me from the house naked, but I took a shirt, trousers and shoes.

I was thrown in a van. I thought I was being taken to a police station, but I was taken to my home. I saw the whole section where I was living was surrounded. They left me in the van and came out with my older brother. Altogether they arrested 12 others from my committee. We were all taken to Tembisa Police Station. It was raining and we were left outside. We were then separated. At about 5 am I was taken into an interrogation room.

And then they started interrogating me, beating me up for something like 5 hours because, I remember very well, they started at 5 am, until 10 am in the morning. They asked me if I know something about the African National Congress, and about the campaign which maybe the Student Congress is planning and again about other members whom they can't find. Posters of banned organisations were shown to me that had been displayed in schools and around the community. I was questioned about them- who put them up, where they were printed. When I refused to answer, I was beaten. They said as I was president I was influencing other students in the boycott.

I was at Tembisa Police Station for one day. I was beaten and given electric shocks from handcuffs. Then I was also taken to a room where there are bright search lights and by the time I came out of that room I couldn't see nothing and I felt like my mind was tired and they started beating me up and then the only thing I remember is that when I started being normal, you know, I mean my mind now working normally, I realised that I was injured in my body. All my comrades were released. I stood firm, preferring to die.

During the first day at Tembisa Police Station, even my mother was refused permission to see me and actually didn't have any confirmation that I was detained. She got the information after my brother was released because he was released the same day and then he told my mother that I am also there.

On the second day, I was taken to Kempton Park Police Station, I was given electric shocks. I was stripped and put in a rubber suit from head to foot. A dummy was put in my mouth so I could not scream. There was no air. They switched the plug on. My muscles pumping hard, no signs on my body. I couldn't see anything.

When they switched the plug off they took the dummy out and said I should speak. When I refused, they put the dummy back and switched on again. After a long time they stopped. I was stripped and put into a refrigerated room naked. I was left there. In the fridge it was also something like 30 minutes. Then they brought me out again and put me back in the electric shock suit. I was then taken into another interrogation room. My hands, feet and head were tied around a pole and bright search lights turned on. I could not remove my head from those search lights. And then they brightened them straight into my face. I felt my mind go dead. I couldn't see. I cannot even read at this present juncture. I was dizzy. I was beaten again for the whole day. I have scars on my right hip, in my head and on my back.

I was then taken to Modderbee Prison. I was given no medical treatment on arrival. I was given ice cubes for my swollen face. I was in prison for three months. I spent two weeks in solitary confinement. Sometimes I would be there for two weeks and then they took me out again. They were changing. It depends, because if they've detained somebody from the membership of the organisation and maybe if that somebody has revealed certain information about me to them, then they came to my cell telling me, 'So-and-so has told us about you. And then, 'It seems you were telling us the wrong information and you are not prepared to say the right information. So then they took me back to the solitary confinement.

Maybe after two weeks then they would take me out again and if they detain somebody I would go back again. I was beaten in prison, but only with fists. After my release I was to report at 7 am and 7 pm at the police station. I didn't. I spent five months in hiding after my release before leaving. I could not attend school. My family do not know where I am.

'Kids who never made Harare'

Shortly after the Harare Conference the weekly newspaper South published reports on 22 October of what had happened to four children in the Western Cape during the previous two years. The reports are reproduced here.

Themba Ivan Nkalashe

When Themba Ivan Nkalashe left home on 18 November 1985 he thought it would be just another day on the beach with his friends. Little did he know that he would end up at Victor Verster Prison in Paarl under the Emergency Regulations. Themba, then 13, was one of a group of youths arrested near Philippi when they returned from Mnandi Beach. He was one of the youngest children to be detained under the 1985 State of Emergency.

I was returning home with some of my friends when we saw some boys throwing stones at the trains near Kapteinsklip Station in Mitchells Plain. We decided to go to the next station. We saw some boys stoning a truck. They were all running but we were walking. The police came and arrested us. At the Mitchells Plain Police Station they asked me why the boys attacked shops, cars and trains.

Themba was kept at the police station for three days before he was taken to Victor Verster Prison where he was held for another five days.

I was not questioned once at Victor Verster even though some of the other boys arrested at the same time were questioned. We were about eight or nine in the cell and had to sleep on mats on the floor. On the day of my release I was taken to the Athlone Police Station and told to walk home to Guguletu.

He said his family was not officially informed of his detention.

Someone who saw me being arrested told them. They tried to visit me at Mitchells Plain but were refused permission. I still feel angry at being detained. I did not do anything. Even today I am still scared to go to Mnandi Beach.

He was not charged on his release.

Mongesi Gwabeni

Mongesi Gwabeni is still suffering from the effects of his two weeks in detention in November 1985. He missed his Standard Three final examination at Lehlohonolo Combined Primary School in Section 3, Guguletu, that year because of his detention. He is now trying to catch up by attending evening classes at X3 High School in New Crossroads where he is doing Standard Four. He has also developed chest problems and spent six weeks in hospital. He said he had never had chest problems before his detention.

Mongesi, who was 17 at the time, was one of the boys detained on their way home after a day at Mnandi Beach.

My friends and I wanted to take a train from Kapteinsklip station to Guguletu but were chased away by the police. We decided to walk home. On the way we saw some other boys throwing stones.

At Philippi station the police came and we ran away because we had heard that they took children. I ran into an auntie's garden and started to water the garden with a hosepipe. Unfortunately, I did not see that a policeman had followed me so I was arrested.

When we arrived at Mitchells Plain police station there were about 50 children. After three days, they took us to Victor Verster Prison in Paarl. I stayed there for 14 days. I was called in for questioning every day. On the day of my release, I was dropped in Bellville and had to take a taxi home. I was not charged with any offence.

His mother, Mrs Joyce Gwabeni, said she was refused permission to see her son at Mitchells Plain:

They told me I could not see him because he had thrown stones. I did not see him until he was released. He was sick when he came home. He was only home for three days when we took him to Brooklyn Chest Hospital where he spent six weeks.

'Because of my detention and the time I spent in hospital, I was unable to write exams and had to repeat the year, Mongesi said. He said he had to sleep on thin mats on the floor at Victor Verster.

We had many complaints, like the food which was not nice. The food was even worse at the Mitchells Plain Police Station where we received only bread and soup.

Ben Makhenkwe

Ben Makhenkwe Sono has not slept on a bed since his detention in December last year. Ben, 19 at the time of his detention, claimed he has had severe headaches and backache problems.

I am now unable to sleep on a soft bed because it might damage my back more. I have to sleep on a mat on the floor. I never had these kind of problems before.

Ben said he was arrested at KTC at the beginning of December. He did not know of any fighting or unrest in the area at the time.

I was taken to Manenberg Police Station where the police accused me of being a qabane (comrade). I told them I'm a rastaman and I stand for peace. I was held at Manenberg for two weeks and released shortly before Christmas.

I was not allowed visitors at the police station. I was given a mat and two blankets and had to sleep on a concrete floor. For the two weeks I only drank water because as a rastaman I do not eat bread and meat. I had no clean clothes and had to wear the clothes in which I was arrested throughout my period in detention.

Ben said he was arrested again in June: 'The police drove around with me and dropped me at Old Crossroads. They again accused me of being a comrade.

He has a certificate from Dr R Thompson, the Medical officer at Conradie Hospital, confirming that he had been treated for head injuries on 26 June.

Ashraf Abrahams

The small body of Ashraf Abrahams is covered by marks left by birdshot and bullet wounds. The marks serve as a grim reminder of 15 October 1985 - the day police, hidden in crates on the back of a truck, shot and killed three youths in what has become known as the 'Trojan Horse, shootings.

Ashraf, then 7 years old, and about 20 of his relatives, mainly children, were at a house in Thornton Road, Belgravia, opposite the scene of the shootings. One of the boys killed that day, Shaun Magmoet, ran into the house and fell dead on a bed. The other boys killed that day were Michael Miranda and Jonathan Claasen. Almost all the children in the house had to be treated in hospital after heavily-armed police stormed and kicked down the door of the house. 'It was like Blood River. It still sends shivers down my spine every time I think of what happened, said Ashraf's mother, Mrs Amiena Abrahams.

There was an air of expectation and nervousness in the busy house on the eve of the second anniversary of the shootings last week. As children streamed in and out of the house, the adults seemed visibly concerned that what happened two years ago could be repeated. 'Last year this time, we became very nervous every time the police drove past. We expected them to come in and harass us, said Mrs Abrahams.

Ashraf seemed nervous and hesitant to speak about what happened two years ago, when street battles between youths and the police took place daily. 'My mother had come to fetch me at the madressa. I was sitting on the bed, talking to the other children. He paused and his mother continued:

I went to look through the kitchen window to see what was going on outside. Suddenly I heard shots.

There was compete chaos after that as the police stormed into the house. The children were screaming and there was blood everywhere.

Ashraf had to be rushed to hospital. I could not see how much he was bleeding because he wore a maroon and black jersey. I only realised how serious it was when the doctor told me he was very lucky to be alive.

Ashraf stayed in hospital for a month. He missed his Sub A examinations and had to repeat the year at Heatherdale Primary School, in Belgravia Road. He is now in Sub B. 'Since that time Ashraf has not been as active. He developed asthma and gets tired very quickly. He is still on medication, his mother said.

Ashraf's cousin, Ismaiel Ryklief, who was 12 at the time of the shootings, said he was the last person 'Trojan Horse, victim Shaun Magmoet spoke to before he died:

He was lying on the bed and tried to mumble something to me. And then he died. I will never forget that day. We were watching videos with some friends. They wanted to go home so we went outside. We saw this truck going past and the police jumping out of boxes on the back. We ran inside and my aunt locked the door. The police first stood at the windows, and then kicked down the door and came inside. Shaun ran into the house with us and fell dead on the bed.

The police wanted to arrest me, but they left me after the others protested. I had wounds on my one finger on my right hand, my right thigh, and my back. I was treated at Groote Schuur Hospital and the Red Cross before being discharged that same night. It feels like I still have birdshot inside me. I used to run for the school, but I can't anymore. I have also given up soccer and cricket.

Ismaiel was in Standard Three at the time of the shootings. He is now in Standard Five at Sunnyside Primary School. The parents of the boys who died refused to speak to the press.

Law And Order Without Law

The story of Moses Madia comes to the outside world only in an affidavit to his lawyer. Thousands of such affidavits in which repression's victims have told their own stories in the most direct indictment of the South African state have been taken by South African lawyers and publicised by them rather than by journalists who have been generally less prepared to push against the state's increasing powers under the State of Emergency. The few in the legal profession who have chosen to mount challenges to the apartheid regime on behalf of the otherwise powerless have been an important resource to the democratic movement's resistance for years. They have become even more important as the state's powers of repression have grown and as one lawyer put it, 'the judiciary has chosen sides with the executive.

A glimpse of the conditions in which 'law, is practised in South Africa came, for instance, when one of the Harare participants told of sitting in a car with his client, taking down a statement, while three truck loads of soldiers drove back and forth past them, using loud hailers to shout, 'we'll come and get you when your lawyers have gone.

South African Legal Framework and the Child

Conference background papers and the presentations of various lawyers, particularly Advocate Langa and Professor David McQuoid-Mason, gave an exhaustive review of the position of children under South African law. Those contributions form the basis of this overview of how the law forms an integral part of the repression of children, sanctioning arbitrary detention and independent monitoring of the treatment of children by the courts themselves.

South African law recognises the special needs of children at a number of points. The common law presumes that children under 14 are not capable of criminal intent unless the opposite can be proved. The Child Care Act of 1983 prohibits the ill-treatment and neglect of children. The Prisons Act of 1959 provides that children should be held separately from adults. The Criminal Procedure Act of 1977 requires that the trials of children (persons under 18 years of age) be held in camera, that children may be assisted in their defence by their parents and that the court may use various alternatives to imprisonment or whipping (reformatories, places of safety, probation). However, studies by academics and lawyers, including conference background papers by Pius Langa and David McQuoid Mason, have pointed out that, apart from the fact that 'security legislation, overrides these protections, they are anyway rendered illusory in practice.

Security Legislation and Children

The worst allegations of abuse of children, torture and assault concern their treatment while being held under powers allowing detention without trial. The most prominent feature of such detention, whether under the legal regime established by the Public Safety Act of 1953 (the 'Emergency Regulations') or the Internal Security Act of 1982, is that it is within a framework of laws which prevent access to information about a detainee. At the same time they grant wide, almost unconstrained powers to police officials, notably interrogators. Since the introduction in 1963 of the detention without trial provisions over 60 persons have died in detention. Furthermore, countless persons have made confessions, or been convicted on the basis of confessions made in indefinite solitary confinement in terms of Section 29 of the Internal Security Act or its predecessor Section 6 of the Terrorism Act. For this reason detention without trial has been referred to as the 'confession factory. The laws which allow for detention are as follows:

· Internal Security Act of 1982 This allows the detention - of adults or children - under various circumstances: Section 29 allows indefinite detention in solitary confinement for the purposes of interrogation; Section 31 allows detention of potential state witnesses. In each of these cases people can be held incommunicado and no-one has the right to publish their names without official authorisation. Sections 50 and 50a allow detention 'in situations of unrest, the former for up to 14 days, the latter after the State President has declared an area to be an unrest area, for 180 days. These clauses do not authorise interrogation. Children are not granted any special protection in terms of this legislation, either physically, mentally or legally. Similar laws and powers exist in the bantustans declared 'independent, through the BophuthaTswana Internal Security Act, the Transkei Public Security Act, the Ciskei National Security