Tom Lodge teaches politics at the University of Witwatersrand and is author of Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945.

The ANC's Commission of Enquiry into the complaints of its former detainees and prisoners has elicited a surprisingly restrained response in the South African media.

The prevalent sentiment that the ANC's willingness to reveal some of the uglier dimensions of its exile existence contrasts rather favourably with the government's continuing efforts to obscure the extent to which its own officials tortured and murdered political opponents. Newspapers criticized the ANC's refusal to disclose names of people responsible for brutalities but after a week or so following its release in October, public comment on the report virtually ceased.

ANC leaders may well feel that they can now lay to rest the ghosts summoned by their critics from the less heroic chapters of their history. Indeed, several spokesmen for the organization were quick, in the aftermath of Nelson Mandela's assumption of collective leadership responsibility for the abuses, to argue that these should be `contextualized'.

In a recent letter to the Johannesburg Star, Kader Asmal, an ANC executive member and a leading human rights scholar, was bitingly critical of anyone who might suggest that there was any moral equivalency between government torturers and those employed by the ANC. The latter, he argued, worked in the claustrophobic environment "faced with constant apartheid violence." Asmal went on to claim that, unlike the government's, the ANC's human rights violations were "fully declared."

Expand the enquiry?

It would be a pity if such arguments became the official ANC view. Unlike Asmal, Commission members did not believe they had uncovered the full extent of the ANC's mistreatment of its detainees and they recommended that a more impartial-seeming body should be appointed to continue their work. They felt that because two out of the three Commissioners belonged to the ANC, many potential witnesses stayed away. They were also restricted by the terms of their brief which was to establish the conditions in ANC detention centres and the fashion in which inmates were treated.

The Commission was not empowered to investigate the causes or the aftermath of the 1984 Umkhonto we Sizwe mutiny nor was it required to investigate any specific deaths in detention. Finally, it was not asked to identify individuals responsible for any violence or mistreatment.

Despite these limitations, the 74 page report that the Commission released in August represents a fairly damning indictment of the ANC's internal disciplinary procedures.

Of the 17 witnesses who testified to the Commission, 12 were detained without trial, 11 of these for periods of over three years. Some were held as suspected spies and others were confined because of their role in the 1984 mutiny.

Many abuses exposed

Most of the witnesses were imprisoned at the Morris Seabelo Rehabilitation Centre or Quatro camp, an ANC detention centre in Angola. They were kept either in overcrowded, filthy and suffocating communal cells or in solitary confinement. There was no running water, no water for washing, and open plastic containers served as toilets. There was no doctor and medical orderlies participated in assaults on prisoners. The food was vile and sparse despite the camp being situated in an area in which food was readily available.

The prisoners were forced to assume names with humiliating connotations. They were forbidden to use their real names to each other. They had to maintain absolute silence during work. Work itself consisted of extremely hard labour: chopping wood, breaking stones and, worst of all, hauling the camp's cylindrical water tank uphill from the river.

For breaches of discipline, a variety of punishments were inflicted: flogging, being forced to crawl naked through red ants, suffocation, partial burial and solitary confinement. Whether convicted or not, the Commissioners concluded, inmates were "denigrated, humiliated and abused, often with staggering brutality."

Convictions in any case were often the consequence of confessions extracted with the aid of torture. The method of choice among ANC security men was beating on the soles of the feet; the former head of the ANC's security department, Mzwai Piliso, actually admitted using this technique to the Commission.

Summary executions

The Commission found that there were improvements in the treatment of detainees after Piliso's transfer in 1986 and after the implementation of a code of conduct, but that violence against prisoners persisted, continuing at Mbarbara camp in Uganda to which some of the Quatro inmates were transported in 1989. Finally, though it was outside the terms of its reference, the Commissioners were critical of the executions that followed the 1984 mutiny; these, they believe, "may have been carried out summarily."

Aside from Mzwai Piliso, few other members of the ANC's hierarchy are named in the report and those who tend to be are mentioned favourably.

President Oliver Tambo visited the Quatro in 1987 and was "apparently disturbed" by conditions. Chris Hani helped to halt the executions of mutineers and he tried to alleviate the work routine at Quatro by obtaining a tractor to haul the water tank. Though she is not mentioned by the Commissioners, Women's League head, Gertrude Shope also played a decisive role in stopping the post-mutiny tortures and executions. Zola Skweyiya, appointed to the new post of Officer of Justice in 1986, did make strenuous efforts to check the implementation of the Code of Conduct but was prevented from visiting Quatro as late as 1988. Ugandan Chief Representative, Tenjiwe Mthinso, was perceived by prisoners as helpful and sympathetic.

The report included an appendix, not released to the press, which contained a list of the names of those people identified by witnesses as guilty of atrocities.

Unanswered questions

Apart from the identities of the torturers, there are many other questions arising from the accusations made by former ANC prisoners which need answering. Quatro camp existed for nearly ten years, between 1979 and 1988: the Commission interviewed only a fraction of those people who were confined there and none of its administrators.

From the Commission evidence, it is impossible to establish the extent of the violence within the camp or the number of people it affected. Nor do we learn enough about its quality; was the violence merely the product of sadistic impulses by brutalized guards or was it, as ANC critics like Paul Trewhela has suggested in Searchlight South Africa in January, purposive and deliberate, the outcome of the East German training of so many members of the security department.

Then there is the question of how many people died as a consequence of torture and other kinds of ill-treatment. According to surviving leaders of the 1984 mutiny, whose narrative was published in July 1990 in Searchlight South Africa, several people were killed during torture and beatings after two waves of arrests in 1981, the first following the security department's uncovering of a spy ring within Umkhonto we Sizwe and the second occasioned by a campaign against marijuana-smoking in the Angolan camps. The same sources allege that two of their comrades were killed while being interrogated in Luanda prison in the aftermath of the mutiny and that seven were publicly executed after being sentenced by a military tribunal. (In June 1992, Work in Progress quoted Chris Hani as saying he thinks "a big number, about 18 or 19" were executed.)

Apologists for the executions argue that they were in retribution for the cold-blooded killing of loyalists, as was claimed in a letter from Carl Neilhaus to the Weekly Mail on 31 October 1992. Mutiny leaders say that killings during the mutiny occurred as a consequence of fighting. They also say that many other mutineers were tortured in front of their friends for extended periods, tied to trees and treated with burning plastic.

Some former mutineers assert that senior Umkhonto officers Chris Hani and Joe Modise supervised the torture and killings after the mutiny but a mutineer's account, published in the 1990 winter edition of New Era, insists that Hani was not involved and indeed that he later reprimanded those who were. Hani himself denies membership of the tribunal that imposed the sentences; when they began, he says, he "rushed back to Lusaka and said to the leadership: Stop the executions."

There is also controversy about the causes of the mutiny itself: the leading ex-mutineers argue that the mutiny was a reaction to the harsh regime imposed by the security department, as well as the unpopular deployment of Umkhonto soldiers against Unita guerrillas; other participants suggest that the mutiny was primarily the consequence of weak leadership and poor discipline in the Umkhonto bases; while ANC officials, including Oliver Tambo in a speech at the ANC's 1991 conference, have blamed the mutiny on "enemy agents."

An ANC Commission of Enquiry into the mutiny chaired by James Stuart did conclude that the behaviour of the security department was at least one of its causes but the Stuart report was not widely circulated within the ANC and its full contents remain undisclosed.

Torture: policy or error?

Aside from the extent, duration and location of torture, brutality and killing within the ANC's prisons, and the identity of those officials directly responsible, there are additional disturbing questions which will continue to haunt the ANC as long as they remain unresolved. Was the treatment meted out to the inhabitants of Quatro and other detention centres the consequence of policy, or did it represent aberrant lapses from normal ANC conduct.

In 1990, Albie Sachs told an audience in a speech at Pretoria University that "We did do bad things then. We were anxious and untrained and did not know how to respond." In justice to Sachs, former inmates have confirmed that many of their tormentors were very young, even teenagers. It is also the case that the worst excesses occurred during the 1984 mutiny or after the discovery of genuine police infiltrators. But not all the assaults can be attributed to the behaviour of inexperienced youngsters (and who, in any case, was responsible for selecting such unsuitable custodians?).

Moreover, Mzwai Piliso, in a press interview, has implied that the way detainees were treated conformed with the conventions which existed at the time: "If you are convinced in yourself that you carried out instructions as best you can, that is all that matters . . . I have no guilty conscience," the Weekly Mail is quoted him as saying in August.

Sachs and others have pointed to the ANC's code of conduct, adopted at the 1985 Kabwe Conference as evidence of the ANC's efforts to halt the abuses. Why, though, was it so ineffectually enforced? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that conditions at Quatro remained harsh after 1985. Tambo was apparently shaken by what he witnessed at Quatro in 1987 but surely he had the authority to interfere and improve matters? Why did the ANC not punish or demote people who violated its rules? Piliso continued to occupy senior positions even after the ANC's return to South Africa when he headed up the ANC's national campaign committee.

National Commissar Andrew Masondo, whom dissidents identify as a key figure in running Quatro, lost his position on the National Executive in 1985, as well as his post as Commissar, but received instead the directorship of the ANC's Tanzanian educational centre. Masondo was later appointed as Chief Representative in Uganda, replacing the humanely predisposed Tenjiwe Mthinso.

No punishment meted out

Of course, in the mid-1980s, dismissing or punishing highly-placed leaders might have been very difficult - the ANC was fighting a war at the time - but today conditions are different. Yet the security department continues to function, its personnel largely the same, and many of them are likely to assume commanding positions in a post-apartheid police force.

Disciplining those who violated the ANC's code of conduct should not be a discreet internal matter, for the issues is not confined to abstract considerations of justice. It has important implications for the way in which South Africa will be governed in the near future. It is also in the ANC's interest. As long as leaders appear reluctant to effectively punish transgressors, they will find it difficult to counter accusations that they were themselves actively involved in the commission of violations.

Kader Asmal is quite wrong to suggest that there is no moral equivalency between the torture used by ANC officials and that used by South African government functionaries. Torture is torture, uniformly revolting in whatever context it is deployed. It remains up to today's ANC's leaders to demonstrate through full disclosure that despite this repressive history, one can still point to moral distinctions between the overall character of the organization and that of the South African state. Complete candour will surely demonstrate differences in scale, proportion and degree of degeneration. Without it, though, the ANC's enemies will continue to exploit any lingering doubts or uncertainties.

All that said, it is still true that the ANC has gone further than any similar organization in comparable circumstances in voluntarily exposing its more unpleasant internal past to public scrutiny. That in itself is reassuring and merits some measured praise.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer(s) and not do necessarily reflect the views of the AfricaFiles' editors and network members. They are included in our material as a reflection of a diversity of views and a variety of issues. Material written specifically for AfricaFiles may be edited for length, clarity or inaccuracies.

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