12 October 1987
In June of this year we sponsored a symposium on children in detention in South Africa, at which 15 South Africans testified about their own personal contact with the problem of children in detention - lawyers who have defended children in gaol, doctors who have treated children who have been tortured in detention, human rights activists, parents and, most importantly, children who have experienced detention and torture.
It is one thing to talk about the statistics, the numbers of nameless and faceless children who have been gaoled in South Africa; it is quite another to hear the names and the stories of individual children, to face the detailed reality of torture. The testimony given at our symposium served as a dramatic documentation of the abuse of children in South Africa.
One of the young people who testified at the symposium, for example, described how he was picked up by police at school along with six of his friends. Patrick Makhoba, who was 16 years old at the time, was kicked and punched by security forces. He was taken to a nearby police station and interrogated. He spent 39 days of a 42-day detention in solitary confinement. He was never charged with a crime; he was never even told why he was picked up.
Pule Nape testified that he was denied a visit from his parents for three months after he was detained. After six months in gaol his physical health had deteriorated and he had to be hospitalized for mental depression. During the third week of his hospitalization his mother died and he was refused permission to attend the funeral.
I think that few people who attended the symposium will forget how Mrs. Sylvia Jele, the mother of a 16-year-old boy who was detained, testified with tears inher eyes about how she searched for days for her son from one police station to another and then from one mortuary to another. It was not until three months later that she discovered where the police were holding her son. It took an additional month before they gave her permission to see him.
We heard the story of 13-year-old Eugene, who was picked up by police as he walked to the store to purchase some items for his mother. The police told him that he must confess to throwing stones at policemen. He said it was not true, so the police took him to a cell and locked him up there for 9 months.
We heard about 17-year-old Daniel who, after 7 and a half months of detention, assault and torture, was assessed by a panel of doctors to be brain damaged. Before he could be treated by a neurosurgeon Daniel was once again detained under the state-of-emergency regulations and that time held for 10 months. The police told his mother he was being held because he was a student leader.
During our symposium we heard testimony about an 11-year-old who had his teeth knocked out; a young girl who had electrodes attached to her nipples and a 14-year-old boy who had the same treatment to his genitals. We heard of children being tear-gassed in their cells, of sexual abuse and of unspeakable conditions.
What emerged from the testimony on that day was a general pattern of mass arrests, indefinite detention and vicious, indiscriminate assaults against child detainees. But, in addition to documenting the stories of individuals who have suffered detention and torture, the testimony at our symposium enabled us to analyse better the entire context in which those detentions are occurring. In that regard I should like to make four brief points.
First, the evidence of torture in detention is clear and convincing. Since 1982 there have been three major studies which document the torture of detainees in South Africa. In the most recent study, for example, which was released in April 1987, the National Medical and Dental Association of South Africa reported on its examination of a sample group of recently released detainees. They concluded that 72 per cent had evidence of physical torture and that 78 per cent experienced mental abuse.
Secondly, the detention and torture of children and other detainees takes place within a legal context, not outside of one. The legal system of South Africa not only fails to protect children against abuses, it provides a legal framework for that abuse. The state-of--emergency regulations under which those children have been held expand the already existing security legislation which allows for indefinite incommunicado detention of individuals without charge or trial when a person is merely suspected of being likely to endanger State security. Ominously, the regulations give a blanket indemnity from prosecution to any policeman or soldier who might abuse children or others. The state-of-emergency regulations make no provision for the detainee ever to be charged with an offence or tried in a court of law, or even brought before a judge or a magistrate. It is detention solely for the sake of detention, to remove a detainee from society arbitrarily through the operation of unjust laws and without recourse to the courts.
Thirdly, the torture and abuse of detainees in South African prisons, police stations and army camps takes place on a scale that is both widespread and systematic. These are not extremist outlaws carrying out clandestine attacks on children and adults. It is the State of South Africa and its agents. If these abuses are not part of official policy - which I believe them to be - then one can only conclude that either the perpetrators are out of control or that those in positions of power in the South African security forces are unwilling to exercise the necessary authority to stop these atrocities.
Finally, the detention of children and its immediate and long-term effects are an integral part of the South African Government's strategy to destroy the democratic opposition to apartheid among youth and, through them, their parents. Rather than quell unrest, the Government has sought to quell the legal opposition to the apartheid system. Within the last few years in South Africa a strong network of local and national organizations has emerged to oppose apartheid - organizations that cut across every sector of the South African society. Those organizations have engaged in tactics of opposition that are lawful even under the web of Draconian security legislation that has existed for many years in South Africa.
Therefore, the South African Government has had to extend the limits of its repressive machinery through the declaration of a state of emergency and the widespread detention of children and others, who represent the leadership and core membership of those opposition organizations. In addition, State action has encouraged and supported the emergence in black townships of extra-institutional and informal violence perpetrated by terror gangs, hit squads, vigilantes and hurriedly trained police. The terrorism of vigilante groups serves to deflect attention away from the State as the primary perpetrator of violence and is offered to justify a continuation of official State repression in the form of the state of emergency.
As was said by one of the South Africans who testified at our symposium - and I should like to quote him in closing:
"The state-of-emergency regulations represent an attempt to enforce order without law, to exercise power in its most naked form and to allow the police a free hand in dealing with the resistance. In South Africa this free hand entails a high degree of official terror virtually unconstrained by legal or public scrutiny."