CHAIRPERSON: I would like to welcome the Premier of this Province, the Honourable Tokyo Sexwale. It's sometimes very difficult to remember that these are now are Premiers when you think of where they come from and where we come from, but he is our Premier and it gives considerable hope that someone as young as himself should be Premier of the premier province of our country and be doing such an outstanding job of work. It gives very great hope for our country and shows the depth of quality leadership that we do have. I will allow you to clap him as he comes up.
MR SEXWALE: We thought we should break out of our schedules. It is correct to come and humble ourselves here, to recognise the work that is being done by this Commission. ...(tape ends) ...with the reality of the pain of the past and of course, in welcoming the Commission here to this province, having seen part of the work done in Eastern Cape and Western Cape last week, we also came therefore to humble ourselves under the tears of the mothers whom we know, the friends, the children, many of the people who felt the brunt of the pain as we were hunted and they had to answer, waar is hy? We thought it should be their turn to speak first and not ourselves, we thought is correct for us to come and hear in silence this time the screams, the begging for mercy as electricity, sjambok, knobkierrie was tearing both the human body and soul. All these things in exile and underground in prison we did experience, but the question is, are we prepared to come to terms with our pain with the past? Are we prepared not just to hear the truth but to forgive, to reconcile?
In many ways I was a victim, physically we went through heavy torture, we saw people falling, we could not pick them up and we had to go. Some are still in unmarked graves. Maybe everything is exemplified by the blood and the pool running from the head of a Chris Hani lying on a pavement, maybe that's the time when you are called upon to come to terms with your country. So we have come here to humble ourselves and to hear other people coming to terms with that horror of the past, so that when you meet it in the future you recognise it and you can say hold, hold, as Macbeth says. I therefore as Premier of the province would like to welcome the Commission here and to say a last word. I was an underground fighter, a soldier for freedom. There was a time we thought that by now we'd be sitting and cutting necks and putting people on the firing line. There was a time when we thought we're going to solve what you are doing here with a lot of gunfire and punishment, in seeking vengeance, in avenging, but we have come here to be disciplined that it's not gunfire, it's not retribution, it's not hatred that will solve it. It is ordinary people coming forward and saying, I am prepared to hear the truth in its full ugliness but nevertheless I am prepared to forgive. Perhaps our country in the next century will go down as a leader because I don't remember anywhere in the world where such a Commission was commissioned.
I therefore want to welcome the effort that has begun and to sit back quietly amongst the people and to listen to the pain. I felt it but I want to see how others felt it. You are welcome and we congratulate you and hope you do a good job out of it and trust and understand that the courage involved here is one that brings you very close to the border sometimes of hopelessness, but we have hope.
Thank you. I hope that was two minutes.
DR BORAINE: Well can we come to order please, there are a number of people that we would like to welcome very specially, we have representatives from a number of embassies that I haven't referred to thus far, that includes the Netherlands Embassy, the Norwegian Embassy and the Swedish Embassy, and I'm quite sure there are others, but as I am alerted to that I will mention you. If you are amongst the ones I have just mentioned plus representatives from the YWCA and the World Conference on Religion and Peace, I think Reverend Mrs Matham, could you just stand for a moment please so that we can identify you and that the cameras can also identify you and the radio service that is covering these commissions. Will you just stand for a moment? Thank you very much indeed, thank you.
I understand also that Mrs Sparks is here, if you could please stand just for a second, upstairs downstairs? There we go, nice to see you, thank you.
Also and this is a particular pleasure to welcome George Bizos here, could he please stand if he's in the audience? There we go, thank you very much.
Chairperson we continue with the work of the Commission and we would like to call Elizabeth Floyd to the witness stand please.
Could I just remind people that are attending the hearing that if you don't require a head set, please hand it on to someone else who may need it more than you. And if I could say to the staff, if there are additional head sets available, would you please make them available as widely as possible so that the maximum number of people can participate in a relaxed way and in an informed way as possible?
Elizabeth Floyd, it's very nice to welcome you here to the Commission. You won't require the headphones, I don't think, so let me say immediately that we know and recognise that this is not an easy matter and that you must have thought very carefully about whether or not you wanted to do this, we are very grateful that your decision was to come. You will be talking to us about someone whose name is a household name in South Africa, Neil Agget, many of us knew him, certainly a number in this audience and a number on the Commission itself and remember in vivid detail his own death. You will know it much better than anyone, so we are extremely grateful and we would invite you to relax as much as you can and to tell us your story.
Before you do so I must ask you if you will stand for the oath please.
ELIZABETH FLOYD: (sworn states)
DR BORAINE: My colleague Russel Ally will take over from me now. Thank you.
DR ALLY: Welcome Liz and thanks for coming. In 1981 trade unions were black members were eventually allowed to be recognised under the Labour Relations Amendment Act. Although they were given this legislative recognition between September of 1981 and 1982 there was an intensive period of repression against Trade Unions and trade unionists for alleged involvement in political activities. A number of them were detained, especially under the Terrorism Act of 1967. Neil Hudson Agget was a medical doctor in Johannesburg and secretary of the Transvaal Branch of the African Food and Canning Workers Union. On the 27th of November 1981, he was detained under the General Law Amendment Act and the Terrorism Act.
After a period in Pretoria Prison Neil Agget was taken to John Vorster Square on the 11th of December where he remained until his death in the early hours of the 5th of February 1981. He was found hanging from the bars of a steel grill in his cell tied by a ...(indistinct) coil. I'm going to ask you now Liz to relate these events to the Commission?
MRS FLOYD: The story that I'll be telling, as you mentioned is a very well known story and for that reason I'll try and be fairly brief about it. However this story was well known to those who wanted to hear it at the time and there were people who didn't want to hear and there's now a younger generation who don't know about it. So I'm going to be fairly brief and then make some comments about what happened in the context of what came afterwards, and also some of my experience in working with detainees extensively through the 80's as part of a team of health workers who cared for detainees on their release.
As you said, Neil was a trade unionist, a medical doctor and he was also a conscientious objector who had been called up for the army and refused to go. The investigation that we were involved with really came out of the union movement's precursor to what is now COSATU. During the 70's the unions were incredibly depleted by repression and towards the end of the 70's unions were building up, not in the way that we know them now and around 1980/81 the concern of the security police was that the unions were identifying themselves with political issues and the political history of our country, and they were fairly paranoid about that. And that was really what the investigation was about, it was trying to link up the broad, more left end of the union movements, in with the ANC and construct a Treason Trial. However when they started with their detentions they had very little information available to them and their strategy was in fact to construct the charges out of interrogation. So it was certainly an investigation where there was very extensive interrogation where they tried to create their case and there were several ways of interrogation. We went in on the second ways. So the case was actually being established on interrogation.
Before detention Neil had received very intensive security police attention and for around six months before he was detained he was being followed a hundred percent of the time, and followed regularly by five cars at a time. So he was well aware of the pressures building up and one of the possibilities at that stage was to leave the country, although that was not really an option for him, and we were well aware of what we were up against. A cruel, a dirty and an unjust system and that is partly we were involved in it.
In terms of what happened, you mentioned the basic outlines. In February Neil was found hanging from his cell and the question really for everyone was, was he killed in interrogation and hung up or did he in fact take his own life? In terms of his death there was very intensive coverage in the news about him as a person, the nature of detention and what were the issues that the security police were trying to tackle there, the union movement as it was then. The investigation involved large numbers of unionists and people involved in the labour movement. When Neil died the investigation kind of came to an end, well not an end but they tried to wind it up and produce a series of trials. Only one person received a lengthy sentence and the others were either minor sentences or most people came out. Of that group of people, people were pretty damaged by the experience, there were few that continued normally after that. Some people subsequently died, Eric Ntongo also died in detention, others died through accidents and the concern out of my experience is how many of the accidents were genuine?
Even before Neil's detention we were exposed to situations where unionists would find one tyre of a union vehicle had been pumped up and the other had been deflated, and the personal damage to people was very extensive.
I think with Neil's death, peoples' worst fears about detention were confirmed. Everyone knew this could happen but I think it still very shattering when it does happen, and what was a little bit unusual about Neil was that he was the first white person to die in detention.
For the black people involved in our struggle, that was particularly significant, that there was a white person who had not held back when things got really tough and has payed the ultimate price. And the response from people was quite dramatic specifically on that issue. And I think for me it demonstrates how deep racism in our country goes, that when a white person demonstrates that level of commitment, how much it means to people.
When I was released from detention two months later, I found the people around us quite shattered by the experience, it was really a watershed for the community that we lived in and people were never quite the same again. I think with David Webster's death there was another watershed, and yet the events of that period now for me are part of history because they so much has happened since then.
The inquest then followed and brought to light quite a lot of what had happened in detention. Now obviously the nature of detention means you don't know exactly what happened. In a way Neil went into detention and never came out and it was difficult to piece together what had happened, but a lot was actually presented to the inquest.
More than five detainees out of the same investigation in parallel detention talked about torture and the kind of torture that people were exposed to was solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, electric shock and suffocation with electric shock and I'm going to comment on that sort briefly, partly from our experience beyond that. Firstly when it comes to solitary confinement combined with interrogation, and particularly combined with the hard torture method when you're in solitary confinement and you have either no or extremely limited contact with other people, when you do come in contact with people you have very few defences left. If I come up to you here and now and start swearing at you and threatening you, you can ignore it and it can kind of run off your back, you might be a bit disturbed. But when you've come out of solitary you can't keep it out because you're so desperate for that human stimulation and certainly our experience in the detainee service, that combination of solitary and electric shock really was noticeably devastating to people.
We know that sleep deprivation completely disorganises people and if it continues for long enough it produces a really psychologically deranged person.
The people who have been through torture with electric shocks and particularly with the wet bag, as somebody described earlier, what you get is suffocation as you are shocked. In the description of those people and one of those people did give evidence at the inquest, is it basically makes you feel like you're dying, so it takes you very much to the brink of death and I think that is a lot of what detention is about in all its kinds of form, whether you're threatened with death or whether you experience that torture. The fine line between life and death in those situations becomes a very fine line and death is clearly behind the detention system and it's not by chance that we regularly have death in detention.
In terms of the inquest, a lot of evidence was brought the torture of other detainees, and in addition at one stage I think he would have been visited by a magistrate and reported his torture of receiving electric shock. A statement was then taken by a policewoman and from what we see it was then given back to the security police and it was shortly after that he in fact was found dead.
He also indicated to one of his co-detainees that he had received electric shocks. So at the end of the day, while we don't know that he was killed in detention, or whether he actually took his own life, I think for myself the difference is not particularly substantial. What we do know is that if he hadn't been detained he wouldn't have died, and in inquest the lawyers said that it was induced suicide, but the conditions of the interrogation and the detention pushed him to that stage, and I think that the experience with Neil really taught the public that the psychological effects of torture are very very significant and I think that over the years the security police would find their methods to become more strongly focused on the psychological effects and not just the physical beating up and the dramatic physical assaults.
In the inquest the outcome of the inquest was that no one was found to be blamed for Neil's death. What we saw was the security police under tremendous pressure and they had quite a strong legal team, funded by government and out of our taxpayers' money, and in my own view in patching together the lives of the security police. Really it's very difficult for a detainee to prove that they were tortured when the witnesses are the security police and they consistently denied that there was any such thing.
If you look at the outcome of that inquest in terms of the legal system, that was the outcome, that nobody was to blame. For the public the inquest was a fairly successful situation, normally accounts of torture in detention do not get into the press because of the legal system, but because the evidence was presented in court it was extensively reported in the press and the public who wanted to hear, the view was that in fact there was detention in torture, and that the people that were subjected to it were in fact people who they themselves respected and could identify with, and that the system was rotten.
If you look at the reaction of the security police under those circumstances, their reaction was not so much to kind of feel bad about what they had done but to being very angry at being caught out on it and what we've seen since then is that deaths in detention have been consistently hidden, they couldn't have pulled another Neil Agget. So one of the people who knew him, Eric Ntongo subsequently died. It was made to look as if he had been assaulted but his interrogator admitted that he had died in detention and they then stabbed him to make it look like a murder. Certainly from my own point of view like Stanza Bopape, where you had a disappearance out of detention, that's what is behind it because you'll notice that we didn't have another Neil Agget.
Just to come to the people involved and in terms of perhaps why I'm here or what the Commission can do, I think firstly there is an enormous difference that was certainly obvious in detention between security police and the SAP, the uniformed police and the SAP frequently indicated that they were uncomfortable being associated with the security police and sometimes did it quite blatantly in front of them. I think the SAP have been entangled and I think they have been discredited. The woman who took Neil's statement about being tortured was an ordinary SAP policewoman and she was obviously disturbed by the situation she had been put in.
When it comes to the interrogation team, we had the same interrogation team, and there were a range of people on that team, I think within those security police circles there is some room for some of those people to feel unhappy either at that time or at a later stage about what they were involved with and I've recently been exposed to one of them who is now in quite a severe state of distress over that and I think would be coming forward to the Truth Commission.
But there are also some extraordinary peculiar people in that system, people who in general society would be regarded as psychopaths, who are professional interrogators and so on and it would be extremely difficult, I think for those people to be rehabilitated and I think society needs protection from them. They are professionals, they haven't disappeared, some of them have gone into other jobs, there are some other dirty units in the police that collect them.
The head of our interrogation team, Lieutenant Whitehead, had been part of the murder and robbery unit and they certainly shared their technology, so I think that there are different groups within the police with different kinds of functions, and certainly in terms of the responsibility it was very clear that there was a major responsibility particularly from Whitehead who had driven the interrogation team as had Senior Major Conwright. And then there are professional interrogators and torturers and then because the investigation was huge, they'd pulled in a whole lot of recruits to learn how it was done, who were the less comfortable members of the team.
I think with the legal team, they were also issues. That legal team was paid for by government, it was quite a high powered team. One of the senior members of that team is now a judge and he presided over a new, I can't even remember specifically what it was, but one of the functions of the new government last year.
Obviously with a magistrate, the security police could be fairly confident that they had support within the legal system, to look after them under those circumstances.
And just in terms of those people, well, kind of what these stories I think can achieve, is that firstly I think there were people who genuinely did not know what had happened and there were also people who didn't want to know. I think it's critical that at this stage of our society in terms of our transition that people do know what happened and get a feel what was happening to people, and I'm not just talking about '81/'82 but right throughout the '80's, the very very large numbers of people who were detained, thousands upon thousands but not just those people, the other people who were affected in so many many ways, and I hope that your Commission will be hearing more and more about that.
In some ways a civil war was fought over peoples' personal lives. There are those people who implicated. who have very specific responsibilities and there's a range of ways that I think you need to deal with them, but there certainly are those institutions in society where I think there are questions about their history, for example the judiciary, and the magistrates and those sorts of systems.
I think it's particularly important that people who currently behave as if there was no problem, and I'm thinking particularly of quite a lot of white people in this country, who have taken on into the new political period as if there was no problem, those people need to understand that there is a problem and while they may not have taken specific responsibility, they can't pretend that it didn't happen.
One of the things that I notice is that there's a lack of acknowledgement from exiles about what happened in the country. There has been quite an effort to deal with the problems of exiles dealt with but there hasn't been a joining of history, of acknowledgement that everyone had problems and maybe they were different, but they're equivalent.
And then lastly, I think the detainees themselves and those affected, We don't easily talk about these issues. There's almost a culture of silence, we weren't allowed to talk about them, if you talked about them you got hammered. You got brought into court and kind of charged for making those kinds of statements. The legislation didn't allow it, the press weren't allowed to publish things, but in addition to that, I think a lot of us took these things on as part of the struggle and felt we must take it upon our shoulders, it's part of what we committed ourselves to. And that's why you also find that in some ways the damage to families is more dramatic. So for example for Neil's parents and his sister, they bear this full personal impact of that loss without having made a personal commitment to what he was involved in.
The other thing that happens with a lot of the detainees is they say it's part of the struggle. Part of the struggle was to destroy you and admitting that the struggle had damaged you or admitting that the security police had got the better of you, so one tends not to talk about those problems. And part of the struggle really was to survive, and we have a lot of survivors, we also have .....(end of side A of tape 14)
(side B starts after some gap in the recording)
DR ALLY: ... although it might have been well known to certain people I think this is an opportunity to become well known to the country as a whole and part of the task of the Truth Commission, a very important task is to try and establish as detailed a picture as possible, as comprehensive a picture as possible of what happened in the past, and it's testimony like this which I think will greatly assist us in achieving that particular objective, so I think it was a very important testimony.
Just a few questions, the first is, could you just tell us a bit about Neil, the type of person he was and about his involvement?
MRS FLOYD: Neil actually grew up in Kenya and his parents left Kenya at the time when the new government came into place and came to South Africa, and he went through a fairly standard middle class upbringing. I think when he came to university initially he was not exposed to explicitly a political environment, but certainly was a kind of young intellectual who was looking at other realities than the ones that he had been brought up in.
He was at medical school in Cape Town but it was when he came to Jo'burg that he met up with people who were more directly involved in issues, particularly the Labour Movement. Initially in Johannesburg he was a doctor working at Tembisa Hospital. He then had the problems with the Army. His initial plan was to leave the country when he faced a call-up but by the time that that came he was involved enough to decide to stay, but it was quite difficult because as a draft dodger, he couldn't take a conventional job.
He then was involved in setting up the Johannesburg Branch of the Food and Canning Worker's Union. In the '60's food and canning had been very extensive, it had then kind of lost ground under the repression and they were reexpanding. Food and Canning was part of a range of unions at that time which were going in similar directions. SAWU people came up here and he assisted them in getting going, and he linked up with people like CAWUSA and The Municipal Workers Union. Through that experience he became more and more exposed to the realities that people faced and more responsive to that kind of organisation, and very committed to the union movement. And when the pressures and the dangers built up, I think felt so involved in that that he didn't really think about extricating himself from it.
But the dual problems of being in the union movement at that particular point and being a draft dodger, put him under tremendous pressure, and his life really was completely involved in the union.
DR ALLY: Thank you, in your statement you say, and I'm quoting,
"We do not know whether he was killed or was driven to a situation where he saw no option but to take his life".
what do you feel about that particular statement and how do you think the Commission can assist in perhaps clarifying that situation?
MRS FLOYD: I think for some people that's an enormous issue and particularly if you hear some of the evidence given today and the history of people who were quite obviously extremely badly physically assaulted and were alleged to have committed suicide. Everyone's very sceptical about the so-called suicides out in detention. I think with Neil I don't rule it out but I'm saying that that's a huge issue for debate, I think it's a technicality. For me it's fifteen years ago, it's not really an unresolved issue for myself. I don't know if that answers your question. It may be more so for his family and my feeling is, if there are interrogators on the team who know about it and they want to come forward, let them do so willingly, and I think the issue there is that those people should be protected from intimidation by their peer group, if that's what they want to do.
DR ALLY: Thanks that does help. In your testimony you actually spoke quite a bit about the methods which were used, the alleged torture methods by the Security Police. In Neil's case there was a particular period according to the inquest in which there was allegedly an intensive period of interrogation referred to as the so-called Long Weekend which stretched from the 28th of January until the 31st of January where Neil allegedly never left the 10th floor, never changed his clothing, never washed or never had any exercise, for 62 hours he had no contact with anyone save his interrogators. Do you want to tell the Commission a little bit about that so-called long weekend.
MRS FLOYD: Given the situation where Neil was in detention and people didn't have contact, it's quite difficult for me really to comment on that, but I think when people are exposed to that, you really get a disintegration, everyone has their limits, and that came after a two month period of solitary. Everyone has their limits, and the descriptions of people who've been through that deprivation is that they disintegrate and certainly that kind of interrogation is accompanied by extensive threats, and as I mentioned, when you've been in solitary, you don't have the mechanisms to defend yourself against that onslaught. I don't know if I can give any more kinds of insight.
DR ALLY: Thanks that was very helpful, I'm done.
MEMBER OF PANEL: Thanks very much. You've spoken at great length about the situation in the '80's through your own personal experience and also studies that you've done subsequently also on conditions in detention. I wondered you could comment on an earlier stage which in fact comes within the brief of the Commission. We begin in March 1960, now through my own experience and what we heard from Charlie just this morning, there seems to have been a quantitative leap in what you call the professional interrogation, between say the time of Sharpeville when it seemed that quite a number of the people who were taken in detention that time had a fairly bumbling experience of how they were handled. There was a quantitative leap between 1960 and certainly by the end of '63, beginning of '64 that would suggest as well that the sophistication of interrogation, of handling, the sophistication from the police and particularly the Special Branch side, came from a period of training, a very rapid period of training that must have taken place in those few years. Do you have any comment or in fact any suggestions for the Commission about where the South African Police would have got that training from, they obviously went out of the country?
MRS FLOYD: I don't, but what I think what we do know is that, if you talk about the systems of organised violence and interrogation and detention is one of them, is that there are international patterns and that that expertise is shared internationally. There's no question about that. I can't shed any more light, I was quite young then.
MS MKHIZE: Liz I would also like to thank you for sharing openly about your understanding of our victims' experiences in detention, partly as you are aware, as a Commission, we are expected to assist in making sure what people like Neil went through doesn't happen again. I would like to hear from you, and I know on the basis of what you've been saying, you might have some ideas as to what needs to be put in place. A related question is about possible reparations, you have mentioned that there are quite a number of people who went through a similar experience that you have worked with and as a Commission we have to come out with a policy guide line pertaining to reparations. I don't know whether you can share with us just briefly on those two points.
MRS FLOYD: Can you just remind me of the first point?
MS MKHIZE: The first one was really as to how or what do we need to think about as a Commission or what advise can we give to policy makers to make sure that what you are describing to us doesn't happen again?
MRS FLOYD: If you look at the system of detention as it existed then compared with 1990, in fact the system as they used it then had been destroyed and it had been destroyed by an organisation or process. Now our period of detention was a period that sparked off the whole detainee support movement, DPSC, DESCOM, a range of legal support, the health-care component of it, and we went through many many phases in that and in the end it was really detainees themselves who took over and through the hunger strike brought that system of detention to an end. So I think with Steve Biko's trial, the issue of beating up prisoners became something where, even if you did do it, you better not let anyone find the results of it.
I think with Neil there was the issue of torture with electric shocks and also the psychological effects. In fact what happened is the mechanisms have shifted, so there was a period when people came out of detention and were under extensive house arrests and a risk for assassination. Now they shifted the system into another form, because the one form lost its effect, so they used another one, and certainly I think that the Third Force violence is in fact our last stage, and I believe that some of the same individuals are involved in that. I mean if you look at some of the professionals, some of them have technically come out of security or CCB or whatever and they're employed elsewhere, but there is suggestion that they are utilised on that system. So I think it's a shifting system and if you look at the key component that was really political organisation that brought that about.
So I'm not sure exactly what you put in the future, obviously democracy is the key safe guard and I think in terms of reparations i would suggest that you need to talk to people individually, I think there are different meanings for different people, and it's probably per the individual and again I think people like ourselves, the political stage that we've reached now, means quit a lot in terms of what we were there for, but that's really different for a mother or a child, it's a different kind of loss.
DR RANDERA: Liz earlier on when the Chairperson was introducing the Premier of our region he made a point of noting what remarkable people have come out of the struggle and where they are today, and I note that you are now a director in the Gauteng Health Department and I congratulate you on that position. My question is more related to what you said earlier on in terms of looking after people who were in detention as a doctor and as a health worker, and the question I'd like to ask is, are those files available, is the information available that will have or add meaning to the work that the Commission is doing?
MRS FLOYD: There is some collated information for '95 and '96. After December '96 we find it extremely difficult to publish any information because of the legislation and even the '96 one we had to go to great length, we used legal advice in the study design and we destroyed files afterwards to protect ourselves against subpoenas to people who'd given those statements being taken into a court and being charged with statements that they couldn't prove. A lot of the information is supposed to be somewhere, I think we had to do like our records without names and I think they were archives to protect them, and the people involved are beginning to discuss looking at those, but it would be quite a big task. The study from '95 is Paul Davis'es and the '96 one is from Nando and those could be easily submitted to the Truth Commission. With the latest stuff, it's a question of finding the files and collating them or getting the people involved to actually verbally report on what they saw.
DR BORAINE: Liz I want to take you back to the inquest if I may, I just want some clarity so that we have the fullest information possible. First, the police woman who took the statement from Neil concerning electrical torture that he relayed to her, did she appear at the inquest when she gave that information?
MRS FLOYD: Yes she did appear in inquest and the statement was presented to the inquest. I think in terms of the inquest there's very extensive documentation.
DR BORAINE: Thank you ,notwithstanding that statement and many others, the decision was that no one could be blamed for ...(indistinct) under duress?
MRS FLOYD: That's true.
DR BORAINE: Following that same line, the fact that she also gave a statement of alleged torture to a visiting magistrate which was only investigated three weeks later, was that information also given at the inquest?
MRS FLOYD: I believe so, I can't remember everything that happened in the inquest, it would be useful for you to review the record.
DR BORAINE: But we will obviously be able to find out the name of that magistrate from the inquest records. A final question, was it also made clear in the inquest that Neil Agget was subjected to 60 hours of interrogation between the 28th and the 31st of January?
MRS FLOYD: That's my understanding, I'm sure that's right.
DR BORAINE: Thank you that's all.
Ms SOOKA: Liz it seems quite clear from what you've said that you've got quite a few strong opinions on the role of different professions in this whole saga, and one of the things that we're becoming increasingly aware of is the fact that both the medical and the legal professions have come under quite strong scrutiny. You've in fact said that the legal system was in support, and I would like you to clarify that firstly, because on the other side you also have people who were actively supporting detainees and people who were in that situation, but in addition to that you made mention of the fact that one of the persons in the legal team is now a judge. This Commission has to make recommendations about future human rights abuses can be avoided, have you given any thought to the role of the different professions in the whole exercise, and how if they do their job properly, things like this can be avoided in the future?
MRS FLOYD: Off the cuff I'm don't think I can give you anything very well thought out. Now obviously in the legal profession people defend people, you would know more about that. In terms of the health profession I would say we've made enormous steps towards a situation where on the whole the legal profession understands that if it deals with a detainee by about 1998 even, when a detainee went in to aprovincial hospital they were treated quite well as a detainee. We then had the problem of the people with gunshot wounds who were being reported through the administration to the police and being arrested. So I think we have made progress and professional ethics are difficult, they're not apolitical.
Ms SOOKA: You also sounded quite upset about this fact that the legal team for the security police was paid by in fact, what is our tax money. Do you want to express an opinion about that because it's become quite a sore issue today given the huge amounts that were used to defend people who have committed violations?
MRS FLOYD: I think it's really in that context that the security police could rely on a wide range of support systems, they were not operating in complete isolation and that included a range of the institutions.
ARCHBISHOP TUTU: Any other? Thank you very much for the succinct testimony. One comment that I want to make which relates a little bit to what I said after Mr Jassat, I remember the funeral which you referred to and what struck me as giving such great hope for this country was that the overwhelming majority of those who attended the funeral which was at St Mary's Cathedral were what were called actually young blacks from the townships, that the cockles of your heart were warmed even at that time to see that there was a commitment, it seemed, which went beyond sloganeering to non-racialism, because here was a white doctor and you referred to the depth of racism but may be taking it more positively, I mean here were many of these young people who had often had unfortunate experiences with their compatriots who were not black coming out in quite huge numbers and doing the salute for him, which was the toytoy. Even in those dark days you felt there was this tremendous light that it was going to be alright, that people really didn't want to look at skin colour, they would say, were you for or against the struggle and that determined whether you were accepted or not accepted.
So thank you very much, and God bless you!
