TUESDAY, 2.00PM
THE SA Medical and Dental Council admitted before the truth commission on Tuesday that it could have done more to ensure the wellbeing of detainees, and that it had displayed “apathy” at the time of the Steve Biko murder, when it decided not to act against doctors implicated in Biko’s death.
Former SAMDC president Dr Len Becker said the apathy was not the result oif state intervention, but could probably be attributed to “the mileu in which it [the council] functioned”.
The council only started to act over Biko’s 1977 death when a group of doctors took the body to court in 1985 to force its hand. The council then instituted a formal inquiry in which Dr Ivor Lang was found guilty of improper conduct and Dr Benjamin Tucker was found guilty of disgraceful conduct.
And in another medical hearing on Tuesday, the truth commission criticised surgeon-general Lieutenant-General Neil Knobel for his submission of the role of the SA Medical Service during apartheid.
In a lengthy submission, Knobel painted a glowing picture of the service, a component of the SA Defence Force, and denied knowledge of human rights abuses involving defence force medics.
Sams had only one concern and that was to provide medical support to anyone who came under its care. Not at any time was any member of Sams involved in such activities,” Knobel said. He made no mention of Sams’s Seventh Medical Battalion, which was allegedly involved in manufacturing poisons and other chemical weapons, noe did he refer to earlier testimony by former military medic Sean Callaghan that SA medics had provided medical support to Unita trrops in Angola.