TIME TO ANSWER CRIES FROM THE GRAVE

THE National Prosecuting Authority has finally admitted this week that it was blocked for all these years from investigating or prosecuting cases referred by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

I am haunted by voices from the grave. The voices of freedom fighters who were tortured and murdered in detention at the hands of the Security Branch. Their cries for justice seem to be getting louder and louder. It is my fervent hope Shamila Batohi will be the voice of conscience that answers their cries and allows them to finally rest in peace.

I have heard that some of these monsters grace the cafes of Pretoria, imagining it is still a bastion of white supremacy where they can hide in comfort, which of course it isn’t. Friends tell me they have spotted many of these former Security

Branch torturers at the bars in George, on the beach in De Kelders near Hermanus, and on the Durban north coast.

These men have no remorse, and they never went to the TRC to ask for amnesty. According to the historic compromise of our transition, if the likes of these men failed to make a full disclosure of their crimes they would be prosecuted. Of the thousands who never came forward to tell the truth, only the cases of 300 were referred by the TRC to the NPA for further investigation and prosecution.

The final TRC report of 2003 said it was imperative to have a bold prosecution policy to avoid impunity for these politically-motivated murders. The 300 cases were of gross human rights abuses, torture and murder where amnesty was either denied or not applied for.

Twenty-five years into a free and democratic South Africa one would have expected those would have been investigated and prosecuted.

What I find more inexplicable is that while we have anxiously waited for justice to take its course, our NPA, SAPS and those at the highest levels of our democratic state have blocked those cases from being prosecuted.

We didn’t want to believe Vusi Pikoli when he claimed there was political interference in his work as the National Director of Public Prosecutions, and that his superiors made it impossible for him to proceed on the TRC cases.

But then, his secret memo to former Justice Minister Brigitte Mabandala was made public last month in court papers where he explicitly states that his superiors had obstructed him from taking these cases forward.

This week, Prosecutor Jacobus Pretorius, who has been working on the TRC files at the NPA all these years, and was put in charge of all the TRC cases of deaths in detention, finally came out and dropped a bombshell. He admitted on behalf of the NPA in court papers that the NPA was subjected to political interference not to pursue the TRC cases.

There is also an affidavit of the former deputy director of the Priority Crimes Litigation Unit Raymond Macadam, that in 2003, the former Scorpions director placed a moratorium on investigating the TRC cases.

This week, TRC commissioners wrote a letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa asking that he apologise to the victims and their families for the state’s failure to fulfill its obligation to pursue the TRC cases.

If we are a nation trying to unravel the truth of state capture, we need to understand how the NPA was captured and ensure these cases are pursued with immediacy.