Let soldiers do the right thing…

Dear Editor

Your story in DN of Thursday 25 January 2018 "Soldiers Violated Journalist's Rights" (page 23) and "ZAF officers probed" refers and appears to have received wide coverage in your newspaper, rightly so, because it was your journalist who was involved.

The focus should not just be on the DN journalist, rather on the expected conduct of men and women in uniform when they deal with civilians. Many unknown men and women did receive unfair and unequal brute force from the uniformed forces.

There is a recent widely circulated video of a 16 year old Palestinian girl slapping an Israeli soldier. The same girl previously bit another soldier. What shocked me was the soldier's response. He did not hit back or even physically threaten the girl. What lessons can our men and women in uniform learn from this? I recently overheard one uniformed woman cautioning: "If you do not obey my orders, I will man-handle you". This culture of easily and at any given opportunity 'man-handling' civilians should really be looked at the same way that corporal punishment has been dealt with in public schools. It has been widely abused.

Our police and army in particular are very well known to unleash brute force on civilians and dress in war-like combat and are very physical and seem to adequately prepare to inflict maximum pain and fear in civilians as they go about their operations. We appreciate the fearsome look, attire and well choreographed tactics but public funds are not meant to train the police and army to use such skills on unarmed, untrained, innocent and harmless civilians. Uniformed men and women should realise that while they may draw comfort that they have used their war-like training skills and maximum brute force on civilians, this is not what will make them stronger, braver, or even earn respect among their peers. We will be more proud of them if they used such against marauding armies and militias that torment our brothers and sisters in borderline districts, more so the DRC border lines. Reckless, rampant and thrilling use of tear gas by the police for instance is not a mark of excellence, rather a mark of great weakness and judgment, if not a mark of poor training.

All in all, our men and women in uniform need to learn from the Israeli forces on how to deal with unarmed civilians. The case of the DN journalist should perhaps be used as a basis to advocate for better training of our uniformed forces on how they ought to intervene/behave when dealing with civilians.

Sincerely

Thula Kaira