Couple Will Face Child’s Killers at Amnesty Hearing

Nearly four years after a black mob crushed their daughter’s life, Peter and Linda Biehl have found solace in seeing signs of vibrant health in the young democracy for which Amy Biehl died.

The Orange County couple will themselves take part this week in one of the most contentious processes of the system born in South Africa’s first all-race election in April 1994. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is scheduled to hear a pardon plea Tuesday from the four men convicted of killing Amy Biehl in August 1993--one of whom later boasted he was “proud to have killed a white person.”

Peter Biehl said in an interview Sunday that while he and his wife, Linda, support the commission process, his presentation to the amnesty panel will not take a view on whether the four men should be pardoned.

Instead, he will confine his statement to the impact the death of his daughter, a 26-year-old Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach, has had on her family.

“Our attitude is that the TRC process was a prenegotiated backdrop to free elections in April 1994,” he said. “Since it led to democratic elections, of course we support it. Amy would have supported any legitimate process that would have contributed to the possibility of those elections taking place.”

“But we distinguish our support for the amnesty process from the reality that it is for the community of South Africans to forgive and grant amnesty. It’s not our decision,” he added.

He said, however, that the panel of judges and lawyers hearing the pardon application will bear a heavy responsibility in deciding whether the killers were acting on instruction from a bona fide political organization, and whether the means were consistent with the desired end.

Such considerations are the criteria determining whether amnesty should be granted.

Amy Biehl spent 10 months in South Africa working on voter education and women’s rights projects during the height of preelection violence in black townships throughout the country in 1992 and 1993.

Just two days before she was scheduled to return home, she was attacked as she drove friends home to Cape Town’s Gugulethu township.

A crowd of men returning from a rally of a small black-nationalist party smashed the car windows, wounding Biehl gravely, and, as she staggered out of the car, she was battered with stones and stabbed in the heart.

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Even in a climate of widespread violence in which hundreds of people were dying each month, the murder of a young American woman doing volunteer work on behalf of the transition to democracy captured the nation’s attention.

Three suspects, Mongezi Manquina, now 25, Mzikhona Nofemela, 22, and Vusumzi Ntamo, 24, were convicted in October 1994 and sentenced to 18 years in prison. A fourth suspect, Ntombeko Peni, was convicted separately in 1995. The prosecution’s case was saved at the last minute when three young female witnesses defied threats and came forward to testify.

Biehl’s parents, both 54, established a foundation to support pro-democracy and women’s projects in Amy’s memory and have returned to South Africa a few times to further its work.

During this trip, they have visited squatter camps, schools and community groups and have been surprised by the strength of sentiment toward Amy nearly four years after her death.

“When people come up to you and thank you for coming back to their country because it means something to them in a healing sense, that in turn heals you as well,” Linda Biehl said.

One South African family wrote to the Biehls that “the country had been heading into an abyss [in 1993], and Amy’s death caused the whole country to step back and take a look,” her husband recalled. “A lot of people said at the time that Amy’s killing was senseless, but it wasn’t senseless. Amy’s death actually brought a clamor for peace in the land.”

Peter Biehl said the pain of Amy’s death was eased by the knowledge that the elections for which she worked had been a success and democratic institutions were gaining strength. “I would have been terribly disappointed if this had failed.”

More than 7,000 applications for amnesty were submitted before the deadline in May, including more than 370 members of the African National Congress, among them Deputy President Thabo Mbeki. Most of the amnesty applications were brought on behalf of the former white-minority government’s security forces for human rights crimes against black activists.

To be eligible for indemnity from prosecution or pardon for a previous conviction, applicants must confess to the crimes.

Peter Biehl said he would watch during the hearing for expressions of remorse from the four men.

“In the end, a person has to live with himself. These men have to remember the expression on Amy’s face, the pain she was in when they killed her,” Biehl said. “Maybe they can live with that comfortably, maybe they can’t. In the end, that’s the final punishment that these fellows have to face.”