Biehl’s Parents Bring Killer to Tears at Hearing

The parents of Orange County student Amy Biehl told her killers’ amnesty hearing Wednesday about the young Fulbright scholar’s life and her tireless work here for democracy, causing the man who stabbed her to slump forward with shame and rub tears from his eyes.

Peter and Linda Biehl read from their daughter’s high school valedictory speech in Newport Beach, from poems she had loved and from letters written by mourners after she was fatally stoned and stabbed by a frenzied mob in a black township outside Cape Town in August 1993.

The four black men convicted for the murder--members of the Pan-Africanist Congress, a small, black nationalist party--had testified that they murdered the 26-year-old Biehl because they believed they had to kill whites to further the campaign to make South Africa “ungovernable.” In contrast, the larger black liberation movement, which now governs this nation, the African National Congress, has always favored a multiracial democracy.

Applicant Vusumzi Ntamo said Wednesday that he had joined the attack on Biehl, throwing stones at her head from a yard away, “because the land was taken by whites through struggle and we had to take our land back through struggle.”

The two-day hearing concluded with the applicants’ lawyers pleading for the South African government to grant amnesty, pardoning the four men and freeing them from 18-year prison terms.

Attorney Norman Arendse said that, while Biehl’s killing was tragic and misguided, it was clearly committed in the context of political conflict as part of a “militant student uprising” that fed on the slogan, “one settler, one bullet.”

But Robin Brink, a lawyer for the amnesty committee, disagreed, saying the murder was an act of race hatred and mob vengeance, not a political crime.

The five-member panel took the case under consideration and did not rule on it immediately.

Biehl was stoned and stabbed as she dropped off friends in Guguletu township outside Cape Town--one of thousands who died in unrest in the decade before South Africa conducted its first all-race elections in April 1994. Like the killing itself, this amnesty hearing has attracted national attention as a symbol of the vexing process of reconciliation.

The Biehls sought to widen and personalize this proceeding with their presentation, declaring: “We come to South Africa as Amy came, in a spirit of committed friendship. And make no mistake about it, extending a hand of friendship in a society which has been systematically polarized for decades is hard work at times.”

As each parent took a turn addressing Wednesday’s hearing, the other held up large color photographs of their daughter working in townships, teaching in voter education projects and finishing an ultra-marathon.

Peter Biehl made a point of holding the photos toward the four applicants, seated a few feet away at a separate table.

The young men, who had averted their eyes during Tuesday’s proceedings, paid closer attention to the Biehls’ measured, detailed homage to their daughter during the half-hour presentation. Near the end, Mongezi Christopher Manqina, who had admitted Tuesday to fatally stabbing Biehl in the heart, briefly dropped his head to the table, then raised it, rubbing his damp eyes and sighing heavily.

At a later news conference, the Biehls said they had not noticed Manqina’s move. But Peter Biehl said, “At some points, I purposely made eye contact with them because certain things I wanted to communicate to them and make sure they were hearing me. And I felt some reaching out, through eye contact, today that I didn’t feel yesterday. So there was progress.”

Linda Biehl said the men had approached to shake their hands in the hall after the couple had spoken.

Her husband added: “What I kept looking for in my own mind was how close to the truth were we really getting, in the sense that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process begins with the truth. I could imagine these four young men must have been scared to death, and under these circumstances would be careful and retreat to their coaching.

“But I felt that . . . we began to get close to truth--and I felt good about that,” he said.

Constitutional negotiations here produced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The panel is responsible for gathering testimony about human rights abuses in South Africa from 1960 to 1994, considering applications for amnesty from perpetrators, and recommending reparations for victims.

More than 7,000 amnesty applications were submitted before the May deadline, mostly from former members of the security force, which was notorious for its repression of black South Africans.

The commission, in deciding each case, must consider whether applicants truly had acted with political motive, whether their conduct was proportionate to a political goal and whether they were carrying out orders from a political organization. Roughly half of the applicants, thus far, have been granted immunity.

The Biehls stressed that, while they endorse the reconciliation process, they are neither supporting nor opposing amnesty for their daughter’s killers, saying that should be a matter for South Africans to decide.

They began their presentation Wednesday with a painfully apt passage--which their daughter had included in her high school speech--from biologist Lewis Thomas, quoting him as saying: “The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of nature.

“But if we keep at it and keep alive, we are in for one surprise after another,” the passage continued. “We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never heard before, music never heard before.”

Under questioning, Peter Biehl drew a distinction between his personal views and the public amnesty process for his daughter’s killers, saying, “I think forgiveness is for me and not for the public. We’re here dealing with a very public process.” But he did say that the remorse expressed by the four men, while not a prerequisite for amnesty, suggested they were willing to “go the extra mile.”