S. Africa Police Ordered to Stop Torturing Detainees

A South African judge Wednesday ordered police to stop torturing people detained without charge under the country’s two-month-old state of emergency. He acted after hearing detailed accounts of the brutal beatings of political prisoners.

Justice Johannes P. G. Eksteen prohibited police “from assaulting or threatening to assault” both those now held and those who may be detained in the future under emergency regulations in Port Elizabeth and nearby Uitenhage in eastern Cape province.

The ruling was hailed as “history making” by South African civil rights activists because it makes the court the active protector of political prisoners and holds police officers responsible for their actions even under the present emergency rule.

The order was obtained by Dr. Wendy Orr, a 25-year-old government physician, and by 43 relatives of the prisoners.

“The overwhelming evidence presented to me . . . convinced me that detainees were being systematically assaulted and abused after their arrest and before being admitted to prison and also during their incarceration when they were being interrogated by the police,” Orr told Eksteen. She added that the beatings and torture appeared to be “on a vast scale.”

Many prisoners, most of whom are black, have been so badly whipped, Orr said, that she was unable to count the number of welts on their bodies.

Others, seeking treatment for their injuries, told her of being forced to drink gasoline, of having heavy bricks dropped on their bare feet, of having their hair pulled out and being forced to eat it and of heavy blows that punctured their eardrums.

Several said they had been put through “the helicopter,” during which a prisoner’s wrists are handcuffed behind his ankles and he is suspended on a pole, set spinning and beaten.

Orr said she has treated as many as 360 detainees in a day and that half complained that they had been beaten or tortured by police and their injuries appeared to support the charges. Orr said that the police, seeming to believe that under the emergency regulations they could act with impunity, have been “quite unrestrained” in their assaults on detainees.

“This impression of the police must have been enhanced by the fact that, despite the widespread assaults on detainees, no investigation is being done, and they are not called to account,” Orr said.

Could Lose Job

“My conscience told me I could no longer stand by and do nothing,” the young doctor said, explaining an action that could cost her state job. “It ultimately became clear to me that, unless I made a stand and did something about the plight of the detainees, I would be compromising my moral beliefs and my perception of my professional responsibility.”

Government attorneys did not challenge Orr’s abundant, well-documented evidence or oppose the order.

On July 20, South African President Pieter W. Botha proclaimed a state of emergency in and around Johannesburg, the Vaal River region south of here and in eastern Cape province, giving the police authority to detain anyone without charge in solitary confinement. Since then, more than 3,600 persons have been arrested and about 1,400 of them are still being held.

Although Eksteen’s order applies only to Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, areas where police are reputed to be the toughest in the country, similar cases are now certain to be filed elsewhere.

Some judicial orders have been won in the past to protect individual prisoners, but this was the first to protect all detainees, present and future, in the region.

‘History Making’ Ruling

Dr. Max Coleman, a physician who is chairman of the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, which monitors political detentions and the treatment of prisoners, described Eksteen’s order as “history making.” He noted that it was based on the carefully compiled evidence of a government physician, that the court not only applied the ruling to the prisoners whose families joined the legal action but to all detainees and that the judge took the unusual step of ordering the ruling read to present and future detainees.

The ruling by Eksteen in the Port Elizabeth branch of South Africa’s Supreme Court follows widespread complaints that the police were routinely beating most prisoners and torturing many. Researchers at the University of Cape Town’s Institute of Criminology reported earlier this month that a 2 1/2-year study of political detainees found that 83% of them claimed to have been tortured.

The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists wrote to President Botha on Wednesday to protest “the repeated practice of shooting unarmed demonstrators with lethal firearms.” Niall MacDermot, the commission chairman, asked why nonlethal measures, such as water hoses, were not used to halt rioting. “To cause death, especially that of women and children, by the use of disproportionate force is an act of homicide,” MacDermot wrote.

In other developments Wednesday, the government scrapped plans to resettle nearly 140,000 blacks in three tribal homelands in northeastern Transvaal province and to sell their land to white farmers. Instead, the homelands are being enlarged so that they will encompass the black communities that would have been moved.

“Several dozen” black families will still be asked to move, J. Christiaan Heunis, the minister for constitutional development and planning, said in Pretoria. But the moves, he said, will be mostly from one homeland to another so the families will be with members of the same tribe.

The major opposition to the plan, he added, will come from white farmers whose land will be taken by the government to enlarge the homelands of Lebowa, Gazankulu and Kwandebele.

Four more people, all blacks, have died in the country’s continuing unrest, authorities reported Wednesday. Two, a woman near Cape Town and a man outside Queenstown, were found burned to death in what police believe were politically motivated murders. The others were shot to death by police who said they had been attacked by mobs.