Lizeka Mda
`On the available evidence the death cannot be attributed to any act or omission amounting to a criminal offence on the part of any person,” ruled the magistrate in the Steve Biko inquest in November 1977. All he had determined was that the cause of death was indeed brain injury.
Now, 20 years later, five of the eight security police officers in whose custody Biko had been when he suffered brain damage have confessed culpability and applied for amnesty.
Major Harold Snyman, Captain Daantjie Siebert, and warrant officers Ruben Marx and Johan Beneke had testified at the inquest that on the morning of September 7 1977, Steve Biko, with a “wild expression in his eyes”, had suddenly attacked the police officers, and it had taken all five members of the interrogation team to subdue him. The inference, accepted by the magistrate as a probability when he exonerated the police, was that Biko had hurt his head in the scuffle.
They testified that even though Biko had developed slurred speech, could not eat, foamed at the mouth, and urinated in his blankets, they kept him shackled and naked.
Four days later, in the same condition, he was loaded in the back of a Land Rover and sent on a journey to his death in Pretoria the following day. The policemen’s argument was that they believed Biko was shamming.
Yet next Wednesday, these same men, plus former sergeant Gideon Nieuwoudt, who did not testify at the inquest, will appear in front of the amnesty committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). They want amnesty for assault and culpable homicide – not murder. They will argue that Biko’s death was not intentional.
The Biko family has instructed the Legal Resources Centre to oppose the amnesty applications. It is expected that the Biko family’s lawyers will also institute criminal charges against Biko’s interrogators in the next few days to beat the deadline laid down in a high court judgement earlier this year that no one can be charged for any crime more than 20 years after the event. On the other hand, if the five are granted amnesty, they will be exempt from either civil or criminal charges.
But the amnesty committee has to be satisfied that there has been full disclosure. In the Biko case, for full disclosure, one of two things should happen. Either the five applicants will add some meat to the bones of their conflicting accounts of the alleged scuffle, supposedly initiated by a Biko who was “clearly beside himself with fury”, according to Snyman’s evidence, or, they will confess to wholesale perjury.
Earlier this year, the TRC investigative unit head Dumisa Ntsebeza reported that an anonymous source had claimed poison was the cause for Biko’s brain haemorrhaging, and that the allegation was under investigation.
This week, the unit’s director of investigations, Glen Goosen, could only confirm that when the hearings open next week, the amnesty committee will have all the facts.
A keen subject of these investigations is Gideon Nieuwoudt, who is an amnesty applicant in a record five cases. He is the sole applicant in the case of the torture of Mkhuseli Jack, which opens this round of hearings in Port Elizabeth on Monday.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the Motherwell bombing in which three security police and an informer were killed. For this incident, he is one of nine applicants, including Eugene de Kock.
He also features in the 1985 death of “the Pebco Three” – Sipho Hashe, Qaqawuli Godolozi and Champion Galela, as well as the disappearance and death of Siphiwo Mtimkulu and Topsy Madaka in 1982. The TRC has told their families that former security policemen have confessed to dumping their charred remains in the Fish River outside Cradock.
At the memorial held by the families at the site, Mtimkulu’s mother Joyce said they were still looking for the truth.
Nieuwoudt, she said, “must tell us the story from the beginning, where it all started. It did not begin here, with the throwing of the bones in the river. It started far back, from when they tortured my son, to when they poisoned him, then stole him and killed him,” she said.
And here should lie the key to the amnesty applications. Mpumelelo Nyoka, the lawyer for the Pebco Three, Mtimkulu and Jack, says he will be opposing these applications.
Last year Nieuwoudt brought an interdict preventing his being named by witnesses – including Jack and Joyce Mtimkulu – in
their evidence of gross human rights violations.
This meant, said Jack at the time, that he had to leave out 70% of his planned submission. Jack says he is looking forward to Nieuwoudt’s hearing. “Nothing stood in the way of this man’s dedication. At one time he sent his men to arrest me while I was at circumcision school. Just the mention of his name used to subdue detainees.”
After next week the Biko hearings are expected to be postponed until late October.