By Mark Cox
South Africa is not a subtle place. On the second day of my work with the South African Prisoners Organisation for Human Rights (SAPOHR) in Johannesburg, a white policeman shot dead one innocent pedestrian and injured another outside our office. He was trying to stop a purse-snatcher. There was neither media coverage nor call for an inquiry into why a policeman fired a gun in the very crowded city centre.
After five years of exile in Australia I was back in South Africa for the first time, with a comrade — Marc Newhouse — who had been out for 13 years. We both still find it difficult to answer questions like, has South Africa changed? It has changed in some ways, but in many ways is the same or worse. There is between 50% and 60% unemployment. Johannesburg boasts the highest chance of being murdered in the world. Violence, abject poverty, persistent exploitation and racism, and disillusionment are the life of the vast majority.
SAPOHR was established by political and "common law" prisoners in Modderbee Prison in 1988. It has survived extreme repression and managed to spread to several prisons throughout South Africa. One of the founders, Golden Miles Bhudu, initiated the office in Johannesburg on his release in 1991 and subsequently became SAPOHR's chief executive. Johannes Mampuru, on his release from "Sun City" (named after the famed lavish hotel because it has beds!), joined him a little later.
While Marc and I were there, Amos Zitha joined us from Pretoria Medium Prison. None of us were salaried. We worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., 10 p.m. or until we fell asleep on the floor.
The office had three desks, one phone and two typewriters, until the African National Congress donated all the desks, filing cabinets etc that we needed. The office still has no computer, fax or photocopier. We were squatting until the South African Council of Churches donated R4000. Rent was R1025 per
month. Postage and stationery were paid out of our own pockets. Recently the telephone was cut off.
SAPOHR was formed because the institutions of the so-called "Department of Correctional Services" of South Africa are overflowing with social, political and economic prisoners of apartheid, many of whom have been maliciously prosecuted and falsely imprisoned. All are victims of apartheid. These are the nearly forgotten people who endure what no human being should have to. Their families and their communities are gravely affected. Indeed theirs is also the affliction of the whole of South Africa.
In its May 1993 report, Violence in South Africa, the Commonwealth Observer Mission to South Africa (COMSouth Africa) said: "Few structures provide more graphic monuments to the era of apartheid than South Africa's police stations, court houses and prisons".
Bullets for the AWB
Despite the post-1989 changes, the country's prisons are bleak, brutally repressive and draconian places whose white employees and officials are overwhelmingly extremely right wing. Many are members of the neo-nazi Afrikaaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB).
SAPOHR learned and exposed the fact that at some prisons, prisoners were being forced to make bullets for the AWB. Prison shooting ranges were used for AWB practice, and AWB flags and uniforms were worn.
SAPOHR receives daily reports of prison authorities perpetrating and orchestrating human rights atrocities. Just last year there were more than 120 deaths in custody.
According to the Human Rights Commission, there were 357 political prisoners in August last year, and SAPOHR acknowledges that this number has probably gone down. However, many of the approximately 110,000 (overwhelmingly non-white) persons in South Africa's 193 prisons (one-fifth awaiting trial), ostensibly for "criminal" offences, are also victims of the political system.
COMSouth Africa cites the enormous wealth gap in South Africa as the root cause of crime and violence. The richest 5% own 88% of the wealth, while over 50% of the population (and 60.5% of the African population) lives below the poverty level. About 9 million people are unemployed, over 2 million young people have no schooling at all, and every year another 300,000 young people are added to the 5-6 million non-literate South Africans.
Crime flourishes in the overcrowded shantytowns and squatter camps that are home for millions of non-whites who have been dispossessed of their land and uprooted as the white minority appropriated the best areas for their use. Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto was described by COMSouth Africa as akin to a casualty ward in a war zone, with patients on the floors and long queues of casualties in the grounds outside awaiting emergency treatment. Cape Flats outside Cape Town is said to be the "most crime-
infested place in the world".
The system imprisons 70,000 people a year, without legal representation, estimated Justice Johan Kriegler of the Transvaal bench in February. The Legal Aid Board puts the number at 100,000. A large proportion of these are under the age of 30. Thousands of juveniles are in adult prisons.
Last year correctional services minister Adrian Vlok admitted that the country's prison population was rising at a rate of 1000 prisoners a month. According to COMSouth Africa, as a result of new sentencing policies there is likely to be an increase in the prison population.
This will push the rate of imprisonment towards 400 per 100,000 of the population or higher. The current rate is said to be 380 per 100,000, already among the highest in the world.
President F.W. de Klerk announced in April that his government intends to introduce stricter penalties and may reintroduce the death penalty, suspended in 1990. Before then South Africa's use of capital punishment was one of the highest in the world. In August 1992 there were 296 people on death row; blacks are 90% of those sentenced to death. A black South African is
several times more likely to receive the death penalty than whites convicted of the same offence.
Reforms
SAPOHR aims to reform the so-called "Correctional Services" and its partner in crime, the "Justice Department", by:
- acting as a watchdog, exposing the atrocities that take place in police and prison custody, drawing national and international attention through lobbying and direct action to press for reforms;
- providing support, information and advocacy for inmates, suspects and next of kin;
- fighting for the restoration of human rights and dignity to all who come into contact with the police and prison system;
- ending economic exploitation by replacing forced and slave labour with a basic wage for all work done by prisoners;
- fighting for genuine rehabilitation and education programs in prisons.
Working with SAPOHR was an experience with many highs and lows. It seemed that for every step forward we were set back two. We were under-resourced, under-experienced and battling a massive bureaucracy with a lot to hide.
The State President's Office, the Justice Department and the Department of Correctional Services (dubbed by many non-whites the Department of Corruptional Services) proved reluctant to deal with us, slowly and persistently responding to our claims and calls for reform steps with short, polite "go aways".
They issued press releases calling us "irresponsible external forces trying to create tension between prisoners and staff" and accused us of making "unreasonable claims based on far-fetched and ungrounded allegations". They said South Africa's prisons were among the most advanced
and humane in the world and that no abuse of human rights took place.
We had a very different picture. Through letters and visits from prisoners, ex-prisoners, their relatives and black prison warders, we heard of unprovoked beatings, even murders, by prison authorities and gang violence mostly orchestrated by those authorities.
We were told of virtual slave labour as prisoners were forced to work in the homes, gardens and farms of prison authorities. We were told (by warders and prisoners) of paedophilia and prostitution rings run by gangs who would be coopted with privileges, alcohol and sex by the authorities to do their intimidation or killings and to keep prisoners divided and preoccupied.
Prisoners disappeared, or were moved when they filed complaints of abuse or tried to draw attention. Solitary confinement was also extensively used to prevent assaults and murders coming to light.
The current minister for correctional services, Adrian Vlok, was shuffled from his former position as minister for law and order after embarrassing the National Party by being implicated in a political assassination.
Hunger strike
After enormous but futile efforts to get government attention to the plight of prisoners, we decided to take radical action. We organised — with smuggled letters, prison visits, press releases and pamphlets — an indefinite hunger strike by prisoners throughout the country, beginning on February 4, 1993. The SAPOHR office embarked on a solidarity hunger strike at the same time and was visited by many people offering support.
The regime responded in its typically repressive way. All our telephonic and postal communications with prisons were shut. Smuggled letters and hasty calls from supportive warders told us of brutal and extensive suppression of the strike in prisons.
In Pietermaritzburg in Natal, for example, where 564
prisoners were on strike, tear gas, police dogs and baton charges were used. Two hundred black warders who "downed tools" in solidarity with prisoners were instantly dismissed. Hunger strikers were being isolated, assaulted and threatened with revoked parole and privileges.
The regime's public response was a complete denial of our allegations and dismissal of our demands. They said our reports of the prison strike were exaggerated but at the same time ominously vowed to restore "law and order" in the prisons.
However, after 14 days the regime agreed to hear our demands and investigate our allegations. Our formal demands were:
- that a multiparty commission of inquiry be established to investigate all deaths and abuse of human rights in police and prison custody, and to make its findings public;
- the immediate and unconditional release of all remaining political prisoners;
- the establishment of a national release forum committee to investigate individual prisoners' sentences, rehabilitation and release — blanket "general amnesties" often being deceptive;
- admission by the regime of its human rights abuses and immediate steps to stop these;
- immediate dismissal of correctional services minister Vlok and law and order minister Hernus Kriel.
Marc and I went to Cape Town to demonstrate outside parliament and deliver these demands. The army and the police with their heavy yellow Caspir armoured vehicles, outnumbered us 10 to one when we arrived. While we were filmed, filed and our banner slogans copied down, we were told that this was an illegal gathering and that we needed the permission of the local council. We already had the permission of the Justice Department. But this, we were told was subject to local council approval, and they would give it to
us if we restricted the crowd to six people! How little has changed in the new South Africa of 1993!
Golden Miles Bhudu was arrested, imprisoned for a day and still faces charges for distributing pamphlets to people visiting prisoners.
The government responded to each one of our demands with claims that they were either unreasonable or were sufficiently taken care of already. The repeated claim was that prisons were already advanced and humane, no abuses took place, and international organisations were being taken to visit prisons. The problem was that these visitors were taken and shown only certain areas of certain prisons. Letters from prisoners express their deep frustration with claims of visits because so few of them have seen these international "inspectors".
Working to help individual prisoners and to bring the plight of non-white prisoners generally to public attention was very difficult, especially because of the pervasive attitude that those in prison were criminals and prison wasn't meant to be nice. There were many times I wanted to catch the first flight back to the tranquillity of Australia, far away from the madness and intense, mammoth injustice and hopelessness of the situation. The strength of the others in the office, who had been on the inside of the beast, was humbling and encouraging.
Letters from inside
For the SAPOHR workers, there was no alternative but to keep on struggling. What else could one do after reading a letter from Joe Ramodike (not his real name) in Pretoria Medium Prison, dated February 10, 1993, telling you his friend Rampele had been beaten to near death by a warden who then locked him naked in solitary confinement for three days with no mattress, no food and no medical attention.
Some of these letters are long. They usually begin formally with "Dear Sir", usually followed by gratitude and relief for your existence, then continue in laboured writing. Sometimes the letters are written by someone else on the prisoner's behalf. All were painful to read.
These people desperately rely on us to get their case re-heard, to get them a lawyer, to stop a gang or a warden threatening their life, to move them closer to their family, to return their study privileges which they scraped up R60 for, to get medical attention for a friend, to stop a prison authority sexually harassing his wife when she visited, to have returned some money stolen from them, to get them proper food, to get them out because their proper release date has passed...
Every day letters poured in with a multitude of stories, a mountain of pleas for help. Every day family members, who often made long journeys to see us, came shy, quiet, fatigued but hopeful. Their son was taken, their family was starving and couldn't get to school because the breadwinning husband/father had been locked up, mother was dead, daughter was awaiting trial for ...
It seemed the more we worked, the more we uncovered, the more resistant and denying the government became. The uglier the picture became, the more helpless we felt. The voice of the prisoners seemed hard to convey. But the energy and hope in this humble, under-resourced little office were powerful.
We were not completely unassisted. Despite SAPOHR being a politically non-aligned organisation, the African National Congress is enormously supportive, morally and materially. It donated all our office furniture and allows us to use its office for faxing and photocopying. The ANC Youth League is enthusiastically supportive.
The South African Council of Churches also responded to calls for help by paying our overdue rent, and to requests for prisoner monitoring task groups. The Lawyer for Human Rights, the Human Rights Commission and the former state forensic pathologist, Dr Jonathan Gluckman, also expressed support. As did the Council of South African Trade Unions, the Christian Students Union, the Pan Africanist Congress and other liberation organisations.
The new weekly paper New Nation and Radio Metro (both with a predominantly black staff and audience) were among a few sympathetic media outlets. It goes
without saying that all of these organisations experience resource and money problems of their own.
We put a volunteer project proposal to the Dutch embassy, and just as the office was in great danger of closing the embassy gave us R20,000 (A$9000). The funds were spent on rent, phone bills, postage, stationery, five salaries of R150 (A$70) per week for permanent staff and transport costs for volunteers. Needless to say, this money ran out. The office did well to last until June.
Marc and I had also made applications for funding to business and industry in South Africa. They all declined the invitation to help.
Prisoner franchise
At the moment SAPOHR is in the middle of one of our more important campaigns. We are pressing for the question of the prisoners vote to be placed on the agenda of CODESA. We are strongly urging this multiparty negotiation forum not to forget those South Africans most afflicted by apartheid — the system's prisoners. South Africa cannot achieve the promised new democracy without recognising them as members of the community who suffer the injustice of apartheid.
Far from being a radical call, the demand for prisoner franchise is not only justified but necessary because:
1. The overwhelmingly non-white prison population is drawn from the hardest hit victims of apartheid.
2. Much of South Africa's criminality is rooted in apartheid.
3. White prisoners have voted in the past, including the last elections. This was established by SAPOHR through communication with the Department of Correctional Services headquarters in Pretoria.
4. The democratic rights of prisoners are receiving increasing attention internationally, including in Australia and Canada where prisoners have the right to vote.
5. Because of the central role of the prison and "justice" systems in maintaining apartheid, a new South Africa cannot be achieved without hearing the voices of the victims of those systems.
For more information about SAPOHR's campaign, in Australia contact: Mark Cox (03) 347 6029 or Marc Newhouse (09) 360 2158.