High time for the truth about Timol
The TRC failed to bring some perpetrators to justice and this is the reason why many bereaved families will never find closure, writes Shannon Ebrahim, Group Foreign Editor
IT IS not a stretch to say that there are very few apartheid torturers who have truly shown remorse for their actions and, worse still, many have refused to confess their crimes.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was an important process but, in many ways, it was an “act of forgetting” as French philosopher Jacques Derrida said when he visited South Africa in 1998.
The TRC was a process to keep the peace but, as TRC investigator Piers Pigou has said time and again, it was under-resourced, lacked capacity, and was quite simply unable to properly investigate important cases of torture and murder.
Pigou should know, as he was in the investigative unit charged with looking into the Ahmed Timol case – the inquest which has now been reopened in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria.
“We did not have a full complement of staff and had, at most, 12 investigators for the entire province of the Transvaal. We operated on a shoestring budget, and were simply not capable of undertaking comprehensive investigations to get to the truth,” Pigou has revealed.
After Timol’s mother testified at the TRC, there had been an undertaking by commissioners to look into the case, but it would have necessitated all those involved to have been thoroughly questioned, and the investigations unit was just too overburdened.
“Investigations by the TRC could never have been more than superficial, and we missed thousands of cases,” Pigou has lamented.
At least 800 cases were transferred from the TRC to the National Prosecution Authority (NPA), according to Pigou, but only a list of 200-300 were sent to the Priority Crimes Litigation Unit – which claimed for years that it lacked the resources to even pursue those investigations.
Former NPA head, Vusi Pikoli, later admitted that there was political interference in the NPA, which led them not to move forward on such cases. Surely, if prosecutions were stymied, there should have been some kind of truth recovery process initiated with the power to investigate and subpoena, which would have given victims a chance to confront their perpetrators.
The end result was that the vast majority of those who went to the TRC never got what they wanted, and many to this day have never gotten closure about the deaths of their loved ones. It has also come down to a lack of political will on the part of the post-apartheid administrations to commit the necessary resources to ensure that the truth in so many cases is fully exposed.
Understanding that it was not adequately capacitated to investigate such cases, the TRC had recommended that the government take on this responsibility. But this is where successive post-apartheid governments have failed their ANC comrades who died in detention.
In the Timol case, it was an uphill battle to get the state to re-open the inquest, and it took years of lobbying for the NPA to finally agree that there was enough evidence. In 2003 the Timol family made an application to the NPA asking them to reopen the inquest but it was turned down. A new application was made in January this year. Without the dogged determination of the Timol family, especially Ahmed Timol’s nephew Imtiaz Cajee, Frank Dutton (a retired investigative detective), Yasmin Sooka and the Foundation for Human Rights, and Advocate George Bizos, the historical record of Timol’s death would have never been re-examined.
The current inquest has heard testimony about the gruesome torture exacted on Salim Essop, who had been arrested with Ahmed Timol and both were taken to John Vorster Square. Essop had been tortured almost to the point of death. The court also heard testimony of the vicious torture exacted upon Dilhad Jhetam, who had lived on the same street as Timol in Roodepoort and knew him well. She had heard the relentless screams of Timol as he was tortured for hours and hours over the four days prior to his death.
Jhetam testified that, after particularly agonising screams, everything suddenly went quiet and the security police were moving around hurriedly in the corridors. The inference which can be drawn is that Timol may have been tortured to death. This narrative is a far cry from the claims of the security police that they never laid a finger on Timol.
What is the most striking about the past week’s proceedings in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, is the fact that the witnesses taking the stand should have been subpoenaed during the TRC, and much of what is being exposed today was precisely the job that the TRC was supposed to have done.
One of the key witnesses in the Timol case, Sergeant J A Roderigues, who had been in the room when Timol “fell” from the 10th floor of John Vorster Square, should have been subpoenaed by the TRC to give evidence. Why he was never called to testify exposes the failings of the TRC to deliver truth or justice, and Roderigues never asked for amnesty. By not thoroughly investigating this case in the 1990s, we are now in a situation where there are only three of the 23 policemen involved in Timol’s interrogation 45 years ago who are still alive.
Pigou had tracked Roderigues down at the time of the TRC and gone to see him but, despite having initially been prepared to talk, Roderigues decided he was not prepared to talk voluntarily. It was at this juncture that the TRC should have subpoenaed him in order to set the record straight on the Timol matter, just as they should have brought in experts and relevant witnesses as the inquest has been doing this week. It is 20 years too late; but it still needs to be done, for the sake of history.
Today, Roderigues will finally be forced to take the stand and testify before the nation about what transpired on that fateful day. It is almost a foregone conclusion that he will cover himself and stick to the same story he had given in the 1971 inquest – that Timol had ran past him and made a mad dash for the window.
Roderigues will no doubt have the full support of JP Botha and the Foundation for Equality Before the Law, which have proved to be unreconstructed apartheid hangovers. The raison d’etre of the Foundation is to assist former security police who had been denied amnesty, or had not applied for amnesty, avoid prosecution.
The Foundation has tried to call the 1971 apartheid inquest into Timol’s death credible, and suggested that the state had no motivation to kill him. That argument fails to explain why a total of 89 activists were killed as a result of torture in detention under apartheid. They must of course have “slipped on a bar of soap, hung themselves, or dashed out of the 10th floor window of John Vorster Square”.
As Pigou has written, the Foundation has an “ossified mentality incapable of honestly reflecting on the skewed institutional prejudices of the 1970s”.
The broader tragedy that the current Timol inquest exposes is the numerous other cases of deaths in detention that have yet to be properly investigated. The magistrate in the Timol case in 1971, J J L de Villiers, had said that Timol had committed suicide out of fear of exposing information about the SACP’s underground operations and members, and the prospect of facing a long prison sentence.
This wild claim was effectively countered by the testimony of Essop Pahad this week, who was a close friend of Timol and a senior member of the SACP, who testified that suicide ran contrary to SACP policies and directives, as it did to the prescripts of the Muslim religion which Timol ascribed to.
The very same prosecutor, JJ L de Villiers, became the magistrate who oversaw the inquest into Neil Aggett’s death in custody. Aggett was an organiser of the Food and Canning Workers Union and died in John Vorster Square in 1982 after being detained and tortured for 70 days. In Aggett’s case, the state said he had hung himself.
De Villiers is no longer around to face the grilling he would have gotten from this week’s inquest, which would have once again exposed the moral bankruptcy of the apartheid judicial system. But just as Timol’s inquest is essential to set the historical record straight, so is an inquest into Aggett’s death in custody, as well as a number of other cases. We have to ask the difficult questions – why was Aggett’s torturer Steven Whitehead never subpoenaed by the TRC?
We also need to ask how it was that the only case of a death in custody ever prosecuted is the ongoing case of Nokuthula Simelane? The state was forced to take up its responsibility as the TRC only gave the perpetrators amnesty for her kidnapping and unlawful detention, but not for her death, as the Soweto security branch policemen involved denied killing her. Thirty-four years after her death, Simelane’s family continues to search for her remains, and her death remains a mystery.
As a country, we can no longer afford to sweep these cases under the carpet, particularly not when men such as JP Botha and his Foundation have the audacity to extol the virtues of the security branch of that time. The Timol inquest and the Simelane prosecution must set a precedent for the need to deal with the unresolved issues of the past, and finally do what the TRC had undertaken to resolve, but was unable to.