apartheid-era methods
Khadija Magardie
In July this year at Steelpoort Diesel Garage in Burgersfort, Mpumalanga, a South African Police Service (SAPS) inspector, with five civilians, overpowered Benjamin Mabelane and handcuffed him to a steel door. They switched on a nearby welding machine and turned it on Mabelane’s genitals.
He died from his injuries. In Septembe, Zweli Ndlozi was found hanging in his cell at the Germiston police station. Two days earlier he had allegedly been assaulted at his Soweto home by military police searching for weapons. An official post-mortem concluded that the cause of death was hanging. A second, independent post-mortem revealed that there were extensive abrasions to Ndlozi’s body, as well as lesions “probably caused by cigarette burns”. Shaheed Cajee was arrested in October in connection with possession of stolen goods, and taken to the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit. He was allegedly subjected to electric shocks, and smothered with a wet bag while tied naked and blindfolded to a chair.
Such incidents remain uncomfortably common in South Africa as some SAPS members continue to dispense the “short-cut” justice for which South Africa has become notorious. And despite official SAPS policy outlawing it in any form or shape, torture is still a common feature of police interrogation.
South Africa has signed several international conventions outlawing torture and the SAPS has a non-torture policy, defining it as “any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or any act by which severe pain, suffering or humiliation, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for the purposes of obtaining from him or her or a third person information or a confession”.
Despite this not only are police officers engaging in various forms of torture of suspects but they appear to have resurrected the methods used by their colleagues before 1994.
Inflicting cigarette burns, electric shocks and suffocation torture on suspects are still practices embraced by policemen.
Various specialised units within the SAPS have their own “torture trademarks”. Included in the “bag of tricks” used by the Security Branch in the apartheid years were:
l Isolation in a police cell without food, water or access to toilets; l Mock executions, usually involving pointing an unloaded gun at a suspect’s head, and firing; l Using electric shocks, usually attached to the suspect’s genitals; l The “wet-bag method” where a suspect is made to lie on the ground on his/her stomach, with their hands cuffed behind their back. The policeman will then sit on the small of the suspect’s back and pull a wet cloth bag over his/her head, twisting it tightly around the suspect’s neck, cutting off the air supply; l Suffocation with rubber tubing; and
l Rape. The Wits Law Clinic, which provides legal assistance to the indigent, is involved in a vast array of cases relating to police torture. The police involved nearly always stand accused of employing the “tried and trusted” apartheid-era methods of torture.
The Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit, for instance, is involved in a litany of cases involving the use of electric shock – the last was in 1998.
The country’s various dog units are equally notorious, and have been involved in several cases involving excessive use of police dogs on suspects. “Torture in the police force is the ethos – it was the old, and it is the new,” says Peter Jordi, a professor of law at the University of the Witwatersrand and an expert on police brutality. He says that in an atmosphere of apparent lawlessness, where criminals are often armed and fire on policemen, members of the SAPS may have scant regard for the rights of suspects. “Police are dealing with hardened criminals, and they eventually become case- hardened and cynical – that is when they prefer to take short cuts says Jordi. Experts say police have become adept at administering torture and assault in a way that does not show up in court. Jordi says the enormity of the problem warrants it being addressed urgently.
Referring to the incident when members of the East Rand Dog Unit were filmed torturing a pair of suspected illegal immigrants with their police dogs, Jordi said: “If this is what happens in the public eye, imagine what goes on in private”, adding that such incidents make it little wonder members of the public do not like or trust the police.