Amnesty Panel Is Told of Amy Biehl’s Life

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 speech as a high school valedictorian in Newport Beach, from poems she 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 of the murder--members of the Pan-Africanist Congress, a small, black nationalist party--testified at this week’s hearing that they killed Biehl, who was 26, because they believed they had to kill whites to further the campaign to make South Africa “ungovernable.” In contrast, the larger black liberation movement that now governs this nation, the African National Congress, has always favored a multiracial democracy.

Amnesty applicant Vusumzi Samuel 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 their 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 racial hatred and mob vengeance, not a political crime.

The five-member panel took the case under consideration.

*

Biehl--who was stoned and stabbed as she dropped off friends in Guguletu township outside Cape Town--was 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 the proceedings, with the young woman’s father 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.

The four applicants, who had averted their eyes during Tuesday’s proceedings, paid closer and closer attention to the Biehls’ measured, detailed homage to their daughter during the half-hour presentation. Near the end, Mongezi Christopher Manqina, who 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.”

His wife said the men had approached to shake their hands in the hall after the couple spoke.