In March, Ivan TOMS (35), a Cape Town doctor, was sentenced under the Defence Act in the Wynberg Regional Court to one year and nine months' imprisonment, for refusing to serve in the South African Defence Force (SADF). His refusal is part of a rising level of opposition to compulsory military service. Recent government tactics against opponents of conscription have included the covert dissemination of propaganda discrediting the main organisation opposed to conscription, the End Conscription Campaign (ECC).
Opposition to conscription was given impetus by the SADF occupation of townships after October 1984. Thousands of conscripts have failed to report for service in each year since 1984, while others have emigrated. In August 1987 a group of 23 conscripts in Cape Town collectively announced that they would refuse service in the SADF because of its role in defending apartheid. Toms is the first of this group to be charged and sentenced. He took the decision not to fight in the SADF after treating victims of police attacks on residents of Crossroads squatter settlement, where he worked in a clinic.
IVAN TOMS
Toms was the second person to be convicted for refusing to serve in the SADF on political grounds since an amendment to the Defence Act in March 1983. The amendment had opened the way for some religious and pacifist objectors to perform alternative service, but increased the maximum penalties for political and non-pacifist objects from two to six years' imprisonment.
Evidence in mitigation of sentence on Toms included details of 690 atrocities carried out by the SADF in Namibia between 1982 and February 1988. Professor John Dugard of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, said that conscripts serving in the SADF were guilty of breaching international law. They were, he said, faced with a choice between obeying domestic or international law.
Tom's sentence was the maximum asked for by the prosecution, calculated (as stipulated in the Defence Act) at one-and-a-half times the 420 days of service he still owed to the SADF in the form of 'camps' - periods of service additional to his basic training which he has already served.
SADF 'DIRTY TRICKS'
Before and during his trial, Toms was the target of an anonymous smear campaign during 1986 and 1987. The ECC has been the target of a similar, longer campaign. In January it was revealed that posters and other anti-ECC materials emanated from a special counter-propaganda unit which had been established within the SADF to discredit the ECC. These revelations followed the arrest in December of three national servicemen based at the Western Province Command of the SADF in Cape Town. The three, Corporal Desmond THOMPSON (20), Private Peter PLUDDEMAN (25) and Scout Heinrich MONNIG (23) appeared before a military court in Cape Town in January charged under the Protection of Information Act read with Section 18 (1) of the Riotous Assemblies Act, and alternatively the Defence Act.
The servicemen were accused of passing to the ECC secret military documents exposing the existence of the counter-propaganda unit, to the detriment of the SADF.
Further details of the charges were not disclosed, because the trial took place in camera, at the request of the SADF. In February the three were found not guilty of disseminating information to unauthorised persons, but guilty of conspiring to do so, and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment in military detention barracks.
In March, on the day they were due to begin their sentences, their lawyers brought an urgent application to the Cape Supreme Court for a stay of sentence, pending their intended application for review of the sentences. From their supporting affidavits, it was revealed that a unit known as the K52 Intelligence Section had been set up within the SADF's information section - Communication Operatives (Comm Ops) - engaged specifically in secret projects to discredit the ECC. The unit manufactured posters, pamphlets and T-shirts discrediting the ECC. It had also arranged for large numbers of anti-ECC smear pamphlets to be dropped from a helicopter over an ECC fete and certain suburbs of Cape Town in 1987.
Lawyers stated that in their application for a review they would argue that the information concerned did not constitute protected information, as contemplated by the Defence Act, nor were the clandestine operations conducted against the ECC authorised by the Defence Act. The court granted a stay of sentence.
