Читать книгу A Just Defiance - Peter Harris - Страница 8

It is April 1987. I’m on the Pretoria highway in the fast lane, ears pinned back, being pulled along in the slipstream of a seventy-seater school bus going like hell, the children clustered up against the large back window, pulling faces at me, smiling and waving. I am not enjoying myself.

This morning the phone rang at five o’clock. Not a good time for me.

I come up from a heavy sleep, grope clumsily for the instrument on the bedside table. Alongside me my wife Caroline turns away from the noise and pulls at the duvet. She’s a journalist. I’m a lawyer. Because of our jobs the phone rings at all hours of the day and night. It’s something we never get used to.

My voice is a croak when I answer.

‘Is that Peter Harris?’ says someone I don’t recognise.

‘I’m afraid so,’ I reply.

‘This call is from Lusaka. Please visit Jabu Masina, Ting Ting Masango, Neo Potsane and Joseph Makhura in Pretoria Central Maximum Security, they need to see you urgently. Please see what you can do to assist them.’

I have notepaper and a pen beside the phone. I scribble down the names. ‘No problem,’ I say, but the caller has cut the connection.

‘What is it?’ mumbles Caroline.

‘That’s what I’ve got to find out,’ I say, heading for the bathroom.

Maximum Security means ‘political’, nothing else. Serial killers, sadistic rapists, wild psychotics, mass murderers never make it close to Maximum Security. Maximum Security is for the ‘politicals’, my clients.

I’ve got the easy job. They get charged, I represent them, and then they go to jail, usually for lengthy periods. Then I visit them. In places like Pretoria Central or the ‘snakepit’ in Kroonstad, on Robben Island or at Diepkloof prison, otherwise known as ‘Sun City’ after the fantasy pleasure dome built by Sol Kerzner in Bop. Bophuthatswana to the apartheid architects.

‘Are they guilty?’

Well, yes, they are . . . mostly. At least the ones who end up in those kinds of places are, if guilty is the right word. Sadly, I suppose, I don’t have that many innocent clients. Not many lawyers do. Worse still, my clients are generally accused of the big things like treason, murder, conspiracy, trying to overthrow the State, sabotage, crimes which carry the death sentence. This is why these people are hard to defend, particularly if they are, in fact, guilty.

Even worse, my clients often don’t want to deny the charges against them; they’re not interested in their own innocence. This is in stark contrast to most people charged with criminal offences. Most people protest their innocence, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Murderers holding a smoking gun proclaim their innocence. Try it for yourself: walk – or run – through your average prison on any day of the week and ask the prisoners convicted of criminal offences which of them are innocent and were wrongly convicted. Every hand will go up.

What distinguishes my clients is that they are politicals. Ask them if they intended to overthrow the State and you will get a strong yes. Unfortunately, though, even if they are separated from the criminals, they still end up in the same place, prison. This is depressing for a lawyer, demoralising.

Since this morning’s phone call I have made some enquiries about Jabu Masina and the Three Others, as we refer to our clients in legal parlance. I’ve found out that they were part of an African National Congress special operations unit that had been on a mission in the country for about ten months before they were caught. This in itself is interesting as a lot of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) operatives are caught a lot sooner. Askaris (captured and turned MK guerrillas), now in the employ of the security police, are deployed at all railway stations, taxi ranks, border posts and potential entry points looking for their ex-colleagues who, once identified, are quickly arrested. The border patrols and perimeter farm commandos take care of those who jump the fence.

The arrest of a unit like this will have been kept a secret so that the police could run their ‘investigation’ without the irritation of lawyers wanting to see their clients. That would have interfered with the careful construction of the State’s case. Depending on the circumstances of their arrest, their families tend to learn of their detention only much later.

There is a pattern in the way the State handles arrested MK soldiers. Generally, once arrested, they refuse to talk. There are threats of torture and then some talk, which, frankly, is precisely what I would do in that position. I would sing an aria if it helped. Others will not talk. So they are tortured according to the creativity and inclination of the security policeman involved. They talk and give a ‘confession’. Most talk in the end. For the brave it’s a matter of how long you can last and how complete your confession is.

Once there’s a confession, they are taken before a magistrate who, in all seriousness, asks the battered and exhausted accused if they have been tortured or if they have given the confession ‘freely and voluntarily’. The accused, avoiding the eye of the security policeman who has tortured them, reply that the confession was freely and voluntarily given. The magistrate attests to this and, hey presto, the primary building block of the State’s case slots into place. ‘Investigative technique?’ you ask. ‘Tip-offs and torture.’ Not too subtle, but effective. Betrayed by their bodies, the accused are dragged back to their separate cells in a mist of pain, shock and regret.

Now accomplices are arrested, the interrogation process is repeated and the investigation completed. Only when the case is virtually ready for trial are the accused brought to court for their first appearance. Of course, if there are decent channels of communication with other MK units or with headquarters in Lusaka, then word would have got out about their misfortune, particularly if a reporting date was missed. In Lusaka’s books, if a unit goes quiet for too long they are assumed arrested and the appropriate steps are taken to protect other groups. In most cases, however, MK guerrillas operate in small, discrete groups with little or no contact between them, particularly on special missions. Generally, the first court appearance is the first time that the outside world knows of their arrest.

Often, this appearance coincides with a front-page exposé in the Sunday papers. The story will have been leaked by the police to the newspaper’s friendly crime reporter who has no problem firing the opening salvo for the security police in the impending battle.

By 1987, the government’s use of ‘unofficial’ methods has become accepted practice and the use of torture in interrogation is not the worst of it. We’re ten months into the second state of emergency and the townships are literally under military occupation, many cordoned off by barbed wire and patrolled by soldiers and dogs.

South Africa, I believe, is not in a good place. In fact, black people contend that it has been in a shocking place for some three hundred and thirty-five years.

The figures of the mass detentions vary. Depending on whom you talk to they are as high as thirty thousand and as low as ten thousand. If ten thousand is low! Each day resistance by the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) gathers force in every corner of society, from the workplace to the schools. Increasingly, anti-apartheid activists are assassinated, disappear, or are booby-trapped and bombed. This is not official policy, but we know it’s happening. We just can’t prove it. And a lot of people don’t want to know for fear of what they might hear and the personal consequences of that truth.

This is all below the surface. Above it, there is a legal and judicial order that provides, within the narrow confines of the security laws, for the representation of political organisations and political prisoners. The government, caught between its urge to deal violently with all opposition and its strange, desperate pursuit of international credibility and legitimacy, has left the legal door ajar. It’s a door into a small room. But people use the opportunity. As you do when you have nothing else.

It is in this context that political trials have become public contests between the government and the resistance organisations. A courtroom battle for the moral high ground, legitimacy and credibility. This is ‘hearts and minds’ stuff, and exposure is key.

I am one of those defence lawyers who get called in, purveyors of the meagre legal meals. I have been doing this for some years now, and, at the age of thirty-three, I alternate between spikes of energetic commitment to my clients, anger, exhaustion and a laconic cynicism that I try to disguise. Alarmingly, I sometimes experience a number of these states simultaneously. I see my clients at their weakest and most vulnerable. They speak to me of their fears and frailties, their relationships, childhoods, prejudices and insecurities.

Try visiting detainees who are in solitary confinement once every two weeks for years and you end up discussing very little law – not much point when they are detained under draconian security legislation that allows little room for legal movement. We spend the time talking about politics, family, how they feel, their conditions. I give them some idea of what’s happening outside and verbal information gets relayed. I understand it from their point of view. I know how I would behave: with double their vulnerabilities and half their courage.

When they are finally released, there is often a sense of embarrassment when we meet ‘outside’. Is it me or my client who becomes distant? Or do we both withdraw to our secret places, neither of us digging too deep, the revelations never mentioned? Perhaps it interferes with their reconstruction. You never want your therapist at your party.

Uncomfortable thoughts as I hunch over the steering wheel at high speed driving to Pretoria Central to meet four new clients, worrying that I might not have the energy to stay the course.