Apartheid prisoners to launch mass action

March 2, 1994
Issue 

By Norm Dixon

JOHANNESBURG — Prisoners will launch a campaign of peaceful mass action to win the right to vote in the April elections, it was announced here on February 22. The campaign, to be spearheaded by members of the South African Prisoners Organisation for Human Rights (SAPOHR) in prisons throughout South Africa, aims to force the multiparty Transitional Executive Council (TEC) to reverse its recent decision not to allow South Africa's 115,000 prisoners to vote in this country's first democratic elections.

SAPOHR chairperson Golden Miles Bhudu told a press conference that prisoners were bitterly disappointed at the TEC's decision. "Prisoners have no choice but to embark on rolling mass action, in and outside prisons, beginning on March 1 to demand their rights", Bhudu announced. He said the campaign would be peaceful and include hunger strikes and the refusal to work.

Prisoners "want the world to understand their plight ... they have had enough of the brutality of apartheid prisons. Now they demand inclusion in the democratisation process", Bhudu explained.

Bhudu said scores of letters sent to SAPOHR's Johannesburg office make it plain that prisoners are very angry and determined to win their rights. A SAPOHR member in Pollsmoor maximum security prison wrote in January: "What makes us 'criminals'? Political leaders please look at ... apartheid laws, no jobs, no houses, no schools, no hospitals. Apartheid still prevails even harder in prisons ... The staff are very, very corrupt. If we do not vote, you will see what a hell is going to take place in South African prisons, that I guarantee you."

Another prisoner wrote: "When we were innocent outside prison we were subjected to discriminatory laws, by-laws and bantu education. We were classified as 'blacks'. Today we are classified as 'criminals' and we are placed back at square one. No vote, no right to choose, no right to influence the future ... We are what we are today, 'criminals', because of the apartheid regime. When blacks were deprived of their rights they embarked on resistance campaigns. This will be our recourse, if need be ..."

Bhudu said that SAPOHR expected prison authorities to respond to this campaign with "typical" intimidation and repression. "Past experience has shown that prisoners who decide democratically to stand up for their rights are met with resistance by the authorities in the hope that news of whatever they do does not get out of the four walls of the prison."

SAPOHR hopes to get international monitors to ensure that the prison authorities do not stifle prisoners' protests with repression.

He described the current Electoral Act, which restricts the vote to a tiny percentage of inmates, as "racist, hypocritical and unconstitutional". SAPOHR submitted a memorandum to the TEC on February 5 demanding that the act be amended to allow prisoners the vote. The move was supported by the ANC and other liberation movements but opposed by the supposedly "new" National Party, the Democratic Party and other conservative forces. On February 16, SAPOHR was informed that its memo had been rejected.

The TEC's decision mirrored the earlier rejection of the right to vote for prisoners by the multiparty negotiation forum which drafted the interim constitution. The majority of parties supported SAPOHR's position, but the right-wing parties refused to budge and threatened to deadlock the whole negotiations over it. To avoid a deadlock that would have put the April 27 elections in jeopardy, the ANC and the other liberation movements were forced to compromise.

Bhudu said that he understood that decision but that "it is now our duty as an organisation for prisoners to embark on this campaign and see to it that this issue is revisited by the TEC ... Now there will be action to ensure the will of the majority is restored and the vote extended to all South African prisoners."

What gives SAPOHR the "creeps" about the TEC's decision, Bhudu added, was that it comes at the time when the TEC is bending over backwards to accommodate the demands of the Freedom Alliance, which is threatening civil war to achieve its ends.

SAPOHR points out that the South African prison and "justice" systems have played a central role in maintaining apartheid and that the exploitative and brutal apartheid state is responsible for the material conditions which have led to the high rate of crime.

At any one time there are almost 120,000 people in South Africa's prisons, and more than 400,000 people go through the prison system every year, including 70,000 who are imprisoned without the benefit of legal representation. Nine thousand juveniles are jailed each year, many in institutions for adult inmates.

The overwhelming majority of prisoners are jailed for non-violent crimes. Marcus Cox, a SAPOHR activist, pointed out that imprisonment "is a brutalising process that sends people out the other end worse than when they entered".

Cox added that his organisation was not painting prisoners as "angels" but that South Africa "had particular circumstances that were very conducive to crime and violence. It is important that we acknowledge that the vast majority of people in prisons in this country are victims of apartheid."

SAPOHR's stand has been supported by the South African National Institute for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of Offenders and Lawyers for Human Rights.

SAPOHR is keen to make contact with human rights and prisoners groups throughout the world. SAPOHR can be contacted at PO Box 61715, Johannesburg, 2000, South Africa. Phone 27 11 833 7871 or fax 27 11 833 7887.

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