At a conference held in London in February 1980 on the theme of "Repression and Resistance in Southern Africa", organised by the SATIS Committee of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, Lucia HAMUTENYA, Swapo Secretary for Legal Affairs, gave a detailed account of the widespread repression and torture experienced by people in Namibia. Through her position in Swapo, Ms HAMUTENYA has gained first hand knowledge of the plight of detainees in Namibia. She visited the north of the country after her release from a four month period of detention in July 1979, and collected evidence about the disappearance of Swapo supporters and affidavits on torture from victims or their relatives. Ms HAMUTENYA left Namibia in August 1979. The following is her personal account of repression in Namibia. Some of the incidents described have been reported in the press and in previous issues of FOCUS; others have not.
"In the course of the year 1979 hundreds of Namibians were arrested under the notorious AG26. Men and women spent their precious time in prisons under difficult and unhealthy conditions. Comrade Freida JIMMY was arrested under this repressive law and gaoled, along with her nine month old baby. This baby was also affected by the hunger strikes that her mother and other inmates underwent. Comrade Freida Jimmy and others had been detained without trial and kept under solitary confinement and prohibited from communicating with their relatives or friends. Only white prison warders could see them.
In addition, Comrade Filemon IILONGA, Christoph HAUHONGO and Jeremia TJIZOO were severely tortured while in the Windhoek prison, before being transferred to the Windabas prison.
Apart from direct torture, political prisoners have been subjected to other forms of maltreatment. One method extensively used for psychological torture is radiation, the purpose of which is to cause mental disorder in the victim. Many people, from various parts of the country, including Swapo leaders, artists and professionals such as teachers and doctors have been subjected to yet another type of torture, which is solitary confinement and indefinite detention without trial, because the racists call them "hard core terrorists".
There is a new horrifying element in the enemy's technique of torture, whereby they arrest staunch supporters and activists of SWAPO secretly and deny having arrested them. Johannes NAKAWA, well-known SWAPO activist in northern Namibia, was seized by a group of eight South African police agents. These gangsters first demanded entry into his house and when this was refused they forced their way in by breaking the door. They seized Nakawa in his pyjamas and without shoes. He has since never been seen again. The police deny having arrested him, although one of the soliders guarding the military camp at Oshakati, northern Namibia, accidentally admitted that Nakawa had been there. Nakawa's brother, Festus NAKAWA, was also arrested in the same way and his whereabouts is also unknown.
Mathias ASHIPEMBE, Matheus NAHANGA and another man whose name could not be ascertained at the time of writing 'disappeared' when they stopped at Oshivello check point, also in northern Namibia. Although several eyewitnesses indicated that they saw the car in which the three men were travelling parked inside the military compound at Oshivello, the police and army deny the arrest or knowledge of the men. Rauha Ashipembe, the wife of Mathias Ashipembe, was arrested at Oshivello when she went to enquire the whereabouts of her husband. The police told her that they knew nothing about her husband. She and her sister who had accompanied her were detained for thirty (30) days without any charge under the emergency proclamation called AG9, which provides for interrogation incommunicado.
In the operational military zones torture has reached astronomical proportions. Thousands of people were rounded up in massive crackdowns carried out by South African fascist soldiers between the months of June-July 1979. Suspected SWAPO supporters were picked up at their homes or arrested at road-blocks put up across the operational areas. Most of these victims of arbitrary arrests were detained under proclamation AG9. Many victims have been identified as SWAPO supporters or activists by black South African puppets who accompanied their masters, the South African fascist troops, wearing masks from head to toe in fear of being recognised by the people.
Trenches have been used for detention purposes because of late regular prisons have been filled to capacity. Detainees held in these trenches have had their legs and hands tied behind their backs for 24 hours. Here, the victims were first soaked in cold water and then subjected to electric torture. They were then given terrible beatings and those who resisted were beaten to death.
Other forms which are widely used by the racists against SWAPO supporters include dropping their victims from flying helicopters - some are lucky to break their limbs, others fall to their death. Sometimes dead bodies are dropped and later described as victims of SWAPO fighters. Secondly, other victims of torture have reported that they were kept in snake houses. The snakes are apparently not lethal.
A nurse from Engela in northern Namibia related how the racist soldiers had beaten a theology student until he became unconscious. The nurse, herself later a victim of trench detention, said she did not think the student had a chance of living. This student, who has since fled the country, was released on June 30th. I was requested by the Department of Legal Affairs here abroad to take statements from the victims of torture. These were to be submitted to the International Commission of Inquiry. The theology student was one of the victims of torture from whom I took statements. Besides listing a number of savage and degrading forms of torture inflicted upon him, he related the following:
"I was blindfolded and led into a trench the size of a grave. Later my blindfold was removed by a policeman who asked me whether I was still alive. The night was dark, I could hardly see. After threatening me with death, a policeman told me that I would soon see what was going to happen to me if I did not speak. In a short while, two dark objects were laid in front of me. With a torch the police flashed the light on two bodies of dead men, one was a bearded man of about 28-30 years old. The other man looked a bit younger, about 25 years old. Both corpses had several bullet wounds, apparently inflicted by a machine gun. The bodies were naked and stained with blood on the head, chest, and also legs."
This extract explains how people "disappear" in detention: One man related how a 3/4 ton heavy vehicle was made to stand on his hand for about five minutes, resulting in his arm being paralysed. He said in most cases victims are blind-folded and thus unable to recognise their torturers. A black puppet police-man recently volunteered information to SWAPO to the effect that there are two open graves in Namibia. The bodies, he said, had been beheaded and the heads buried in a separate grave far away. The man explained that this is done to avoid the identification of the victims. A SWAPO activist, Comrade ROOI, was shot dead on his way to a political rally at Keetmanshoop last year. But the racist police-man who shot him was later acquitted of murder in a lower magistrate's court at Marienthal.
A group of 500 men from Onduhaluka, northern Namibia, were rounded up for questioning at Oshakati. On their way back, they met with the "Bantustan" police who opened fire, killing one man and wounding two others. One of the wounded was later identified as Angela KATENDA.
The boers and their local puppets are frequently seen at night dumping bodies in open graves. One day an on-looker told how he had seen three police vans entering the Oshakati cemetery. He approached the occupants of the vans and asked what they were doing. The police in the vans then asked him, sarcastically, whether he had come to attend the funeral of his "friends". The eye-witness said the bodies thrown into an open grave were those of three young men dressed in civilian clothes and wearing high-heel shoes. He was of the opinion that the bodies being dumped into the grave were of the curfew hour victims or innocent people shot by the racist troops after being 'mistaken' for guerillas.
Naino ANGULA, 15, from Onayena, said that his residence was burnt down, crops destroyed and their cattle slaughtered by the boer soldiers when they detonated a mine near his house in August 1979. His father was picked up by the soldiers and taken to Oshakati, but when he came back the same day he had an open wound in his head. That same day Naino was beaten up by the racist soldiers with a palm tree branch. They wanted him to tell them where the SWAPO guerillas were. One day Naino and his sister went to collect caterpillars (a delicacy to some Namibians). The boer soldier approached them and forced his sister, Maria ANGULA, 16, to eat the caterpillars alive. When she refused, telling them she'd rather die, the fascist soldier took an empty beer bottle and forced it several times into her vagina and anus, leaving it there. At Oshakati hospital she was operated on immediately. Nevertheless she died two days later.
On the 11th November 1979, the fascist South African police wounded 14 workers at their compounds in Okahandja. One man died and seven were in a critical condition. In December 1979, Jaapie WAAMWA, SWAPO Regional Treasurer at Swakopmund, was shot to death by police. The policeman who shot him was "tried" secretly, declared innocent and acquitted.
The incidents which are enumerated above are but a few of unaccountable atrocities committed by the South African occupation regime in Namibia against the Namibian people."
