Rehana Rossouw THE failure of some magistrates and members of the medical profession to assist victims of human rights abuses emerged as a theme in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Western Cape hearings this week. The family of Looksmart Ngudle, a journalist and Umkhonto weSizwe operative who died in detention in September 1963, testified that […]

Simon Segal The government has finally moved to smooth the path of foreign aid, after years of difficulties and frustrations encountered by foreign donors. It has closed the interdepartmental International Development Co-operation Committee chaired by Elty Links, who has been appointed South Africa’s ambassador to the European Union. Instead, all official development assistance now falls […]

CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale POSSIBLY the greatest action director in the world, John Woo is relatively unknown in South Africa. The only one of his films to have played on the main circuit is Hard Target, his first US feature, with local boy Arnold Vosloo as a dinkum Afrikaans mercenary, and Jean-Claude Van Damme intent on […]

co-operate with truth body Mungo Soggot JOHN Lloyd, the former activist who gave evidence which led to the hanging of the 1964 station bomber John Harris and which prompted the British Labour Party to scupper his political career, has apologised “unreservedly” and agreed to co-operate with the truth commission. Fellow Armed Resistance Movement (ARM) member […]

exploitation In advertising one ‘must use whatever one can to make whatever point one needs’. But are children abused by this system? A decision by the Olympic Bid to use the photograph of an impoverished child in its ad campaign has sparked a debate on the ethics of using children in marketing. Jacquie Golding- Duffy […]

peace A new optimism has arisen out of arrests in politically related crimes on the South Coast, reports Ann Eveleth The work of the police Special Investigation Team probing political violence on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast has brought relative peace to a region once soaked by the blood of internecine strife. Hailed as a “breakthrough” […]

‘Advertisements’ like the one below are popping up in publications around the world. Now the M&G joins in The Fear Project Hazel Friedman ADAM BROOMBERG knows what it is like to be shit-scared. Literally. Or, rather, he has a mediated understanding of it from reading articles on experiments in which white mice were exposed to […]

to more violence’ Ann Eveleth KwaZulu-Natal human rights groups delivered a stiff blow this week to the African National Congress’s bid to stall local government elections in the province, warning a postponement would escalate tensions. In a submission tabled to the task group investigating the feasibility of the May 29 poll date, the Human Rights […]

South Africa continues to support the manufacture of ‘smart mines’ despite foreign opposition, writes Justin Pearce South Africa has again refused to support an outright ban on landmines, in defiance of the wishes of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Foreign Affairs This week South Africa went to the Review Conference on the United Nations Convention on […]

The truth commission hearings in the Western Cape might have missed the full picture of human rights abuses committed there, Rehana Rossouw reports UNITED Democratic Front (UDF) activists, who bore the brunt of the state’s iron fist in the Western Cape, did not show up at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings in Cape Town […]