MS CRICHTON: Mr Chairperson, I would like to introduce to you and to the panel and the witnesses and to the Cradock community, Mrs Celeste Barker. She is a lecturer at the Russel Rhodes Technical College in Port Elizabeth and for some years, a member of the Black Sash organisation and she is here today, representing the Democratic Party.
She has come to submit documents concerning events in Cradock, Port Alfred and Uitenhage communities. Documents that were compiled at the height of the resistance by Errol Moorecraft and John Malcomess as PFP members of Parliament.
They include affidavits taken by Molly Blackburn and Di Bishop. Mrs Barker would like to speak to this submission for a few moments. Thank you Mr Chairperson.
REVD FINCA: Thank you June, we welcome Mrs Barker and we invite you to take the podium and address us briefly.
MRS BARKER: Good morning everybody. Thank you very much firstly to the panel sitting here and secondly to the people of Cradock for allowing us the opportunity to present these, to bring them back to you.
I am enormously humbled by the opportunity to bring to the Commission and to the people of Cradock, these statements. They were taken during the school boycotts in 1984 and the beginning of 1985 here in Cradock, in Port Alfred and in kwaNOBUHLE in Uitenhage.
The statements were taken by the grannies and grandpa's
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of the DP - our PFP leaders who were members of Parliament and members of the then Provincial Councils.
Statement takers include Errol Moorecraft, who was then a PFP MP and who is now a DP Senator, Molly Blackburn and Di Bishop, who at the time were both PFP members of Provincial Councils and John Malcomess, who then was a PFP MP.
There is a regular pattern to the bullying and assaults in Port Alfred, kwaNOBUHLE and here in Cradock. The pattern suggests that the police's lawless behaviour, their abusive power and their thuggery was not planned by them alone, but took some help.
The behaviour of the police is much the same in each township. Innocent scholars and young adults were shot haphazardly with live ammunition. Their parents and grandparents were intimidated in their homes, tear gas was used freely on them. Children who received medical assistance to remove birdshot and repair the damaged caused by rubber bullets, were taken to local police stations where they were detained and harassed.
This intimidation was both physical and emotional. Some victims were physically beaten and then forced to sign documents which the police would not allow them to read.
Others were bribed and a very moving example of an innocent child being abused by the police is the story of a young, 16 year old teenage girl in Uitenhage who was told by a policeman that he would marry her, take her to Lesotho and give her pretty dresses if she would become an informer.
That sounds like child abuse.
Some perpetrators in police stations and police vehicles, which are described as vans and City Golf's in the affidavits as well as those who forced their way into homes,
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are named in these affidavits. However, no Commanders or politicians are implicated in these statements.
Altogether, there are 57 statements here. 14 from kwaNobuhle, 30 from Port Alfred and 13 from Cradock. Because this is a Cradock hearing in Cradock, I want to just summarise the contents of the 13 Cradock affidavits.
According to John Malcomess' document, school boycotts in Cradock were the result of Matthew Goniwe's dismissal and his ill-treatment by the Department of Education and Training.
In the incidents described in the 13 affidavits, the police arrived in hippo's, they threw stones at young people in Sekhulu Street. When the children ran away, they were shot. Tsozi Skewiwa who was 15, was murdered by the police while trying to run away from them.
Three witnesses testified to this. Two witnesses saw the police stone children and one child testifies to being stoned by the police.
Four more people were shot by the police. One in his own home, he was subsequently detained and while in detention, was unable to use his left leg. A witness testifies to seeing him shot by the police.
Two witnesses saw Madoda Jacobs who was arrested and transferred to the notorious SANLAM building in Port Elizabeth. Both said that he seemed to have been assaulted. There were patches of dry blood on his tracksuit. A lump on his upper jaw, his right eye had been hit and his mouth.
The Democratic Party hopes that these affidavits will help to establish the full truth behind the unspeakable abuse and atrocities of our past.
We are proud to have helped victims in the past and
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hope that this, our present contribution, will enable the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to put the jigsaw puzzle of our hidden and sometime, voiceless history, together.
If South Africa is to move ahead, all our citizens need to know who did what to whom and who gave the orders. Without this accountability and without heartfelt apologies, reconciliation is going to remain difficult.
I hope that these affidavits will help to reveal the truth. We thank Cradock by telling these stories as the DP and we thank the Commission for what it has done for us in South Africa. The DP supports you.
REVD FINCA: Thank you. Let's have an opportunity to say thank you. I know you don't expect to be thanked, but we would plead that you would allow us an opportunity to very briefly acknowledge with gratitude, what your party has done.
MRS BARKER: Thank you.
REVD FINCA: I am going to avoid turning this into a party hearing, your party is still coming to the TRC for the second round of questions. But I would like to acknowledge the fact that what you have done is very profound for the work of the Commission and indeed for the work of reconciliation and nation building in our land.
We have lived in a country that has been divided and a family that has been torn apart. Many people in South Africa are saying that the stories, the testimonies that are coming before the Truth Commission, they have never heard about.
They have been living in this country, we have been sharing this land together, but they have never heard of the CRADOCK HEARING TRC/EASTERN CAPE
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kinds of things that are being shared by the witnesses in our hearings.
And I believe that they are right. They have really not heard about it, because they were living on a different part of South Africa, in a country which can be called even physically separated from the country in which the majority of our people have lived.
The pain is that some even want to deny that those things happened, they call these stories exaggerations. They call them imaginations, when in fact people are telling about the reality of their experiences which some of our citizens decided to close their eyes on.
We are indeed grateful and glad that in such a divided society, there were people who were prepared to cross the dividing line. There were people who were prepared to go and experience what is contained in the testimonies that you are going to be sharing with us through these submissions.
The tragedy though is that they are very few and far between, the majority of our fellow South Africans, continue even after the transition to where we are, continue to close themselves up and to shut their ears and their eyes to the suffering that continues to take place in our land.
We are hoping that what you are saying by this submission is that unless we can be able to share the pain of our past together, face it, acknowledge it and say that ugly past is ours together, unless that happens, we are not going to be able to dance the dance of liberation together. We are going to continue to lose each other at a time when we should be finding each other.
The testimonies that you are sharing with us, and I have read through one, I've read through the story that
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happened in Port Alfred, I think, where a person was asked to carry the body of a colleague who have been killed, it is amazing, it is a very touching story. All these stories are going to go into our data base and indeed they are going to help the Commission paint a picture of the ugly past that we have come from with the view of putting a sign post saying, never again must we travel that road again.
Thank you very much for this submission and please convey our gratitude to all the people who have contributed to this.
MRS BARKER: Thank you. I shall do so.
