News | Sport | TV | Radio | Education | TV Licenses | Contact Us |
HUMAN, HSAge Description We certainly can expect a greater sense of urgency from the Truth Commission from now on. Perpetrators of human rights violations go to the Truth Commission to ask for amnesty, but what is in it for the victims? Everyone appearing at a human rights violations hearing requests something of the ... ... you know how it feels? Can you imagine how it feels to bury the brain tissue of your own son of eight years old? Can you imagine what it does to a human being? How does one become human again after such an experience? Three days after the explosion my wife died. Jaco did not get better. He died ... The Amnesty Committee and the Human Rights Violations Committee will sit in Cape Town this coming week and there will be human rights violations hearings in Piet Retief, Ermelo and Standerton. We’re also preparing a documentary on child victims of our bitter conflict. So until next Sunday, good ... What did happen? That’s what we don’t really know. What are the sorts of circumstances that’s conducive to human rights violations? What makes a doctor get sucked into the system in such a manner that he finds himself either complicit or actually directly involved in some sort of human rights ... The Truth Commission can, according to the Act of Parliament that governs them, investigate the gross human rights violations perpetrated by Vlakplaas, but there are other apartheid practices that did even more damage to generations of our people that cannot be narrowly defined as individual human ... If prisoners kill each other, stab each other, they’re always on my neck. They’re always fighting and saying we don’t respect the human rights of prisoners. And when we start to restrain and start to develop prisoners so they should stop aggressive behaviour then we don’t respect the human ... ... at the end. Occasionally a stiff whiskey at the end of the day helps as well. So there’s a variety of ways, but …Some of the great themes of human existence are caught up in the life and work of the Commission and it’s something that has been with me since I was a young person trying to ... ... reaction to Debbie that she knew us and they gave us Phoenix. // I want to ask society to redevelop the moral attitude that to kill another human being is a totally and absolutely unacceptable sin. I’d don’t care what they’d been through in their lives or what they’d been taught ... Evil is the power to subvert everything which is good and moral in the life of a human being. It is a force inside the human being which brings you to do what normally you would not wish to do. ... have, they are there, they are symbols, but they represent a particular history and a particular past that has not been associated with respect for human dignity and human rights, they are integrated. What we need are new symbols. // … And I think we should be able to use our tragedies, if we ... ... has respect for justice you would have long been locked up and probably even hanged. // I think Joe Mamasela is an animal. I don’t think he’s a human being. Because to stab a person 45 times as he did; I don’t think he belongs to the world of the human beings, he belongs to one of the ... ... Especially the victims because we are the source of what they’re going through. I hope that they realize that even myself, personally as a human being that thing affected me. And even right now, I still can’t cope with it, that if God created me to be an angel of death that is ... ... incident wouldn’t have happened, I don’t believe, but in their case their command structure was very weak, very loose and they had the normal, human ability to kill. As I had, they had too. // I’ve been thinking all along about their mothers, it must have been very hard have for them their ... ... because in Bonteheuwel there was there was a house and a road, there was one little shop, miles you had to walk to the shop. And, for me the human factor of this thing was very important and that is why even in my work I like working with the human … I can relate to that because I do ... for the pain to stop it is necessary to take leave of the bones and the body, to bid farewell to the only real reminder of a life that is gone. // A human being is not an animal, a beast, to be killed and your bones just lie somewhere in the open. We say we’ll hold a service somewhere. People ... ... happened. I ask the Almighty that I will not forget what happened and that I need to know.’ // I remember pain of a scale that I didn’t think a human being could ever experience. I remember going into darkness. // ‘They left 12 month old Phoenix traumatized and alone with her dead mother in ... Innocent victims of the massacre, like Mrs Francis Joli, and Lindiswa Ngwenya told the Human Rights Violations Committee how they were mistreated after they had been caught in the crossfire. // I heard gunshots and I fell down, due to the gunshots. I don’t know who did this. I tried to ask for ... This is how we build a new culture of respect for human rights and dignity, to expose the evils of the past so that we are vigilant to never allow it again. We don’t seem to be doing all that well on this score. One of Chief Seremane’s torturers is today a senior manager in the National ... ... the overwhelming majority of the actions carried out in the context of that just war of national liberation do not constitute gross violations of human rights within the meaning of the Act establishing and mandating the Commission. ... We have identified about 250 individual cases of gross human rights violations in the region. // By 1980 South Africa was surrounded by unfriendly neighbours. Most of the frontline states played host to the liberation movements who kept personnel bases and transit camps as close to home as they ... |