| Time | Summary | |
| 17:57 | The South African medical profession was ashamed when it was found that two district surgeons helped the security police cover up the murder of black consciousness leader, Steve Biko, in 1977. The shame was shared by the medical and dental council, the regulatory body, and the medical association. Practices similar to those of the Biko doctors and worse continued right into the 1990s. The Truth Commission has repeatedly in the last three months heard evidence of doctors who helped cover up police torture and in some cases lied about the causes of death of victims. The medical association last year issued a vague apology, but it did not satisfy a strong lobby inside the profession who wants a separate Truth Commission for doctors. The issue was debated at a meeting at the University of Cape Town this week, organized by the trauma centre for victims of violence and torture. Our cameras were there. | Full Transcript and References |
| 18:50 | I just want to make sure that I understand exactly what was going on here. The police thought you were dying or nearly dead and they called the doctor and the doctor said you must make it look as if he’s suffocated on this porridge. Put porridge in his mouth and nose so that it looks as if that’s the cause of death, is that correct? // Yes it was like that. Their first mistake was that they thought I was dead, that’s why they were making all these tricks and take all these decisions. | Full Transcript and References |
| 19:27 | Doctors who were involved and work with survivors, with ex-detainees, with ex-political prisoners felt that we really needed to do something about our past because South Africa has an extraordinary past, a past that we’re not all proud of, a past that has made us in many cases a pariah of the medical profession around the world and which has been very painful. Yet at the same time we’re going through a process of national reconciliation. We see the Truth and Reconciliation Commission constituted on a political level to try to address some of the painful experiences, the abuses of the past. And for us it seemed quite obvious that the medical profession needed to do something similar, something in parallel or something analogous. | Full Transcript |
| 20:16 | There is a whole range of complicity we’re dealing with. Various countries such as Chile and Uruguay, which went through authoritarian regimes, have documented quite flagrant participation in torture. But they’ve also documented, as have other countries, that quite often what happened is very banal acts of participation, such as refusing to stand up for the right of the patient to have a medical examination or medical intervention away from the security police. The issue of accurate recording of the injuries observed; the issue of insisting on appropriate medical care; the issue of post mortem reports and accurate reflection of what was observed in the post mortem examination; the issue of giving evidence in medical legal contexts. It can be because they accept the ideology, the motivations of the security force personal who are involved in interrogating somebody. It can be that they are part of a social milieu in which they mix in daily life with these people. It can be a sense ...more | Full Transcript |
| 22:17 | Until there is a clear message being sent to them that we are now, as the medical profession, taking the responsibility of running these investigations ourselves, there is no clear message going to come forward and we will go into the future with all the problems that we have experienced in the past. | Full Transcript |
| 22:38 | We as nurses in the department of correctional services, we’d like to support any form of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee because till today inside the prison walls there are gross violations of human rights taking place. I can just think about doctors covering up certain things, there’s fraud in death certificates, those are things we know of and we can substantiate it at a given time. | Full Transcript |
| 23:11 | We need to look at the patient contact in closed institutions and the ethical norms and codes that are practiced there. | Full Transcript |
| 23:19 | Some of the issues that we would argue that need to be addressed are identifying and documenting past abuses. We would also argue that the same processes that apply to the Truth Commission in general should also apply to the medical profession so we’ve seen that the many witnesses testifying at the Commission raising issues of medical complicity and we wouldn’t expect doctors to be exempt from the same processes that other people applying for amnesty to the Commission need to go through. So in a sense we would see a Truth Commission for doctors occupying a parallel process to the current Truth Commission, certainly with an emphasis on disclosure and documentation, but also having some form of Amnesty Committee in equivalent that would certainly send a very strong message to the profession that transgression of human rights, unethical abuses in that regard are not tolerated. | Full Transcript |
| 24:18 | If there are doctors out there who are busy recognizing the injustices that they have committed and they now go to the Truth Commission and confess and ask for amnesty etcetera, that’s great, that is useful. If there are doctors out there, and I’m sure there must be some, who are very hardened and are not prepared to admit that they’ve actually done anything wrong from their own particular point of view, what more can be done? The Truth Commission is going to uncover particular issues and those doctors, if those doctors are found guilty and haven’t come forward for amnesty, I expect that the next step is that they are going to be hauled before the Truth Commission and then amnesty is not going to be an option anymore. So what more would a medical truth commission do to accomplish that purpose? | Full Transcript |
| 25:08 | What the Truth Commission is doing is not really looking at the questions which are being discussed tonight in the sense that those particular issues are not at the forefront of the attention of the Commission. The Commission is looking really at perpetrators who have committed human rights violations and particularly gross human rights violations and also victims who are coming forward to tell stories about how those impacted on them and what happened to them. But really the doctors and the role of particularly district surgeons and their particular role in those particular abuses are not really the focus or the attention of the Commission. | Full Transcript |
| 25:40 | The debate lies in making an honest attempt at saying, look we’ve got a multi million rand Truth Commission, they are doing a fantastic function, a function we all support and why do we need to have something separate, duplicating the same functions as the existing Truth Commission. | Full Transcript |
