After 1 April, when UN forces moved into Namibia in preparation for independence, South African troops and police intensified a campaign of assault and intimidation against people suspected of supporting SWAPO. Many SWAPO combatants and civilians were summarily executed.
Instead of being confined to base, as the UN plan specifies, South African forces were allowed by the UN to continue operations against SWAPO (see Independence process threatened, p.2). Throughout April and the first half of May, except for a 60-hour period, troops from six South African battalions and police from the notorious Koevoet unit roamed northern Namibia in search of SWAPO fighters, and carried out daily assaults on the civilian population. The dusk-to-dawn curfew, lifted briefly earlier in the year, was reimposed.
South African officials claimed that by the end of April their forces had killed more than 300 SWAPO guerrillas, but local people said that many of the dead were civilians. In one incident, residents of the Omungweleme area positively identified six corpses as those of local villagers, although the police claimed they were dead guerrillas.
Most of the dead were stripped naked and buried in mass graves. Journalists who were able to examine and photograph some of the corpses before burial reported that none had any signs of injury except single bullet holes through the back of the head. Experts in the USA and Britain concluded that the alleged combatants had been executed after capture. 'Whether [they] were kneeling or sitting, evidently they were stationary and they were executed from behind. There are no frontal body wounds below the neck', stated a ballistics expert in the USA.
In the past, there have been repeated allegations that South African troops and police have summarily executed captured SWAPO combatants. In 1981 the International Committee of the Red Cross expressed its concern that in most clashes the South Africans claimed high 'body-counts' but seldom produced captured or injured combatants.
During April and May legal aid and church organisations were 'inundated' with reports of soldiers and police assaulting people wearing clothes in the SWAPO colours, attacking school children and destroying homes and crops. Troops were also reported to have forced people to declare support for the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA), the main South African-backed opposition to SWAPO. Para-military groups have reportedly been set up by parties opposed to SWAPO, including a 200-strong DTA unit, composed of ex-members of 102 Battalion, which has been training at Opuwa in the Kaokoland bantustan.
The Justice and Peace Commission of the Roman Catholic Church called on the South African Administrator-General to explain why 'security force members are beating up people wearing SWAPO colours' and called on him to 'stop the unholy alliance between the security forces and the DTA'.
The Legal Assistance Centre in Windhoek said on 25 April that there had been more than one hundred complaints of intimidation, and on 6 June the UN Representative disclosed that the UN was investigating 120 complaints.
- Residents of Okahenge, where the fighting started on 1 April, told churchmen that South African police shot indiscriminately in the village, destroying homes and killing 33 people, only some of whom were SWAPO combatants.
- Laban SHAFYOHAMBA, a 12-year-old boy, was shot in the side by South African troops looking for SWAPO fighters. His father was hit in the face with a rifle butt when he protested, and the boy's three cousins narrowly escaped death when an armoured vehicle crushed their home.
- On 12 April eight teachers at the Elim Mission near Oshikuku were attacked by soldiers when they refused to return DTA salutes to a passing armoured vehicle. Three students were assaulted the previous day for the same reason.
- Joseph NENGHAMA, 16, was killed on 14 May by gunfire from an armoured vehicle.
In March the Legal Assistance Centre sought an interdict in the Windhoek Supreme Court and obtained an undertaking from the police that intimidation would stop (see FOCUS 82 p.9). Early in May three Namibian bishops and more than 20 other applicants brought another urgent application in the Supreme Court seeking to restrain 101 Battalion, the unit responsible for much of the harassment.
On 16 April church and community leaders, and residents of northern Namibia, met at Ongwediva and drew up a report for submission to the UN. They cited many cases of assault and destruction of homes, and said that an assassination squad was operating in the north. They also stated that soldiers or police were disguising themselves as SWAPO combatants and harassing residents. On 18 May school students in northern Namibia began an indefinite boycott of classes in protest at intimidation.
