Special Report Transcript Episode 69, Section 7, Time 46:15

Nonsense, Mr. Chairperson. People were being tortured, thrown out of windows in 1963. 1963. By 1965 at least six people were already dead in detention, political people. I myself was detained in that period. And the methods used were already, to put it mildly, unconventional. Just about everything that became formalized and generalized, electric torture, the helicopter, sleep deprivation, standing on a brick, beatings, they were all there. By the time of Steve Biko we’re talking about number 46. So, all these methods of torture, some culminating in death in detention, were already there in 1963 and it is interesting that some of the generals who appeared here and have appeared in the Truth Commission records were Warrant Officers, Sergeants, Lieutenants. Lieutenant Victor and Van der Merwe, they were Lieutenants in 1963, ‘64 torturing me. They rose to become generals. Lieutenant Victor and Lieutenant Van der Merwe of 1964 had just returned from a training course under the Portuguese PIDE Police and the other one under the French in Algeria; that was their training. Their first experimentation with the Portuguese instrument which has holes in it on a piece of plank, which starts off with a larger diameter on one side to a taper which is used on the soft part of your body, so that when you are hit with that even in the gentlest of slaps sucks your skin into that hole until it is total agony. Colonel Swanepoel, the notorious ‘Rooi roos’ [red rose] was there, Johan Coetzee was there, Van der Berg was there, 1964 … was in the room when I was being tortured. So I’m saying I find it very, very strange that this explanation is given; that it is only roughly somewhere in the eighties when the revolutionary onslaught had reached untenable proportions that they resorted to unconventional methods.

Notes: Mac Maharaj (Former MK Commander)

References: there are no references for this transcript