South Africa’s long wait for justice over apartheid crimes

Lukhanyo Calata’s earliest memory of his father is his funeral. He remembers the cold, and his mother wracked with grief. It was the winter of 1985, in the small South African town of Cradock in the Eastern Cape.

He recalls feeling as if the ground was moving beneath him as it reverberated with the toyi-toying - stomping and chanting - of thousands of mourners.

They had come from all over the country to pay their respects to Lukhanyo’s father, Fort Calata, and three other young men who would come to be known as the Cradock Four.

Despite being one of the apartheid era’s most notorious crimes, the alleged perpetrators have never been taken to court even though they were not given amnesty by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

But now a push to reopen investigations into this, and hundreds of other crimes from the racist apartheid era, is gathering momentum.

The 1985 murder of the Cradock Four sparked outrage across the country.

The president of the then-banned African National Congress (ANC), Oliver Tambo, addressed the masses attending the political burial through a message sent from exile.

That day, President PW Botha announced a state of emergency in the Eastern Cape, extending it nationwide the following year. The measure gave the police and security forces sweeping powers to crack down on activities demanding an end to whiteminority rule.

As a rural organiser for the United Democratic Front (UDF), a prominent umbrella organisation of hundreds of groups fighting racial segregation, one of the four, Matthew Goniwe would sometimes travel to the city of Port Elizabeth for meetings. For

Fort Calata and his wife, Nomonde, on their wedding day

The four community leaders were known to the police for their anti-apartheid activities. As they made the 200km- (125 mile) drive back to Cradock that night, they were intercepted by a police roadblock.

Their burnt bodies were later found at separate locations.

The government at first denied any involvement in their deaths and a 1987 inquest found that the four men were killed by “unknown persons”.

But a second inquiry was opened at the tail-end of white-minority rule in 1993, after a newspaper reported that a secret military signal had been sent calling for the “permanent removal from society” of Mr Goniwe, his cousin Mbulelo Goniwe and Mr Calata.

It concluded that security forces were responsible for their deaths but did not name any individuals.

Justice pending Lukhanyo Calata was three years old when his father was killed. Thirty-eight years later, the families of the Cradock Four are still waiting for the perpetrators to be held accountable.

The incident was one of thousands of crimes heard by the TRC to ease South Africa’s delicate transition following the end of apartheid.

President Nelson Mandela asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu to lead the commission, which advocated the healing of the country through reconciliation and forgiveness in order to head off the risk of vengeful violence following the decades of brutality.

It brought together perpetrators, witnesses and victims of human rights violations carried out during the apartheid era to testify in public. The TRC offered the chance of amnesty to those who fully confessed to their crimes, which would at least give relatives the comfort of knowing what had happened to their loved ones.

Six of seven former police officers who confessed their involvement in the killing of the Cradock Four to the TRC were denied amnesty on grounds of not making a full disclosure.

The case was one of about 300 that the TRC referred to the prosecuting authority in 2003 for further investigation and prosecution.

But for relatives who had been waiting decades for justice for their loved ones, what followed was yet more waiting as almost all the cases remained untouched.

It is not entirely clear why the authorities have been dragging their feet.

A possible explanation for the delay came to light in 2015, when the sister of Nokuthula Simelane, a young activist who went missing in 1983, filed a court application for a formal inquest into her disappearance.

The case saw former officials from the prosecuting authority come forward to allege that the government had obstructed the investigation and prosecution of the TRC cases, including that of Ms Simelane.

The claims cited fears that investigations into some cases could lead to calls for the prosecution of members of the governing ANC for their possible involvement in human rights violations during the fight against apartheid.

Source: BBC