Jason Angola, SWAPO Secretary for Labour and an official of the Council of Churches in Namibia, was detained for over a year under Proclamation AG9 and the Terrorism Act. He was released after international protests, without any charges being laid. FOCUS asked him about conditions facing detainees.
My detention dates back to 7 October 1987. I was taken to a place called Osire, north-east of Okahandja. I was kept alone in a cell from the day of my arrest until my release on 5 December 1988. Osire is basically a camp with small cells. The cells are made of corrugated iron, even the ceiling. Corrugated iron is a good conductor of heat and by midday you are sweating terribly. I think that the location of the place itself has been purposely chosen because that part of the country gets severely hot in summer and in winter it gets very, very cold. I had two very small mats and four thin blankets and during the evening those blankets felt like ice on my body. I got so cold that I felt I was going to die.
There were many cells and people kept being brought in at intervals. Sometimes a batch of between six and fourteen people would be brought in at a time. They stayed sometimes for a month or two or three, and I believe that these were people who had been taken from their homesteads in the north for interrogation. This was an on-going process all the time I was there.
Initially they said that I was detained because I aided a trained guerrilla with food and clothes and money. They seem to have dropped this later and then they came with allegations that I masterminded the bomb blast at the Gustav Voigts Centre during July 1987, that I gave transport to the men who did it, that I went to Angola during 1986 and that on several occasions I received explosives which I hid. But the Attorney-General went back to my files and found that I was in detention on the date that I was supposed to be doing these things.
*Did you hear any evidence of people being physically tortured while you were there?*
Yes, I can recall on several occasions during the evening I heard people screaming and, you know, whack! as if somebody was being beaten up. After my release one such prisoner who was also there came to me and told me that they beat him up for two weeks. He said that he heard that there were others that were also tortured and he was told that in the cell where he was one man died.
*Osire. seems to be the main place where the Security Branch hold people. Presumably when the army interrogates people they hold them at separate army camps?*
Yes, take for example the case of Johannes Nakawa who was detained during 1978. The authorities kept on denying holding him and at some stage they said he crossed the border into Angola. But as from 1984/5 fresh information came that Nakawa was seen in an underground detention cell in Kavango. People are saying that Nakawa is alive today but the authorities reject the story and say they do not have him. There are many, many other places where people can be kept. In each town, each village there are cells where they keep people.
I must also mention that there were people still at Osire. On my release I asked one of the guards who told me that there were still fourteen people there.
