Weekly Mail Reporter
THE police file on Mail & Guardian co-editor Anton Harber — the first such security file from the 1980s to be released — consists of three scanty A4 pages of a computer printout, filled with errors.
If the file is anything to go on, the police knew almost nothing about Harber; what they did know was often wrong — and they sometimes knew about things before they happened. They did not even record their own interactions with Harber — such as when they prosecuted or questioned him.
Minister of Safety and Security Sydney Mufamadi delivered a photostat of the file to Harber this week, after the newspaper asked for the file in terms of the new constitutional right to state information.
Harber is recorded as “Number 890554481”. The computer file was created by “Unit L2” on September 22 1989. It has been used twice since then: in October 1990 it was in the hands of “Unit B20” for seven hours, before they sent it to “Unit RSM”; it went back to “Unit B20” in December 1990 for four days before going back to “Unit RSM”.
It has an out-of-date address for Harber’s home and work. Many information categories are blank, such as phone numbers and nationality. It lists him as unmarried, though he has been married since 1984.
The file lists two of his colleagues, co-editor Irwin Manoim and former director Stephen Goldblatt, but provides outdated addresses for them.
It lists just seven items of information about Harber’s activities. It says he joined the Rand Daily Mail as a reporter in 1982 — which is incorrect, as he joined as a sub-editor in 1981. It says he was one of those Rand Daily Mail journalists who started The Weekly Mail — but the date on this information is two months before it happened. It says he was made a director and co-editor in May 1985 — before the paper was started and well before Harber was appointed to this position.
The file records that Harber “attended the Star newspaper conference on Conflict and the Media and was a speaker”. Harber was overseas at the time and did not attend.
The last information available on Harber was that he resigned as an executive member of the Anti-Censorship Action Group in 1988. There is no record in the file of the closure of the newspaper by the government that year, or the extensive campaign the paper ran against the closure.
There is no record of any of the prosecutions of Harber under emergency regulations in this period — although Harber had regular contact with a security policeman who conducted at least 20 investigations.
There is also no record of the occasions in which the police questioned Harber during the state of emergency.