Sheree Bega speaks to Dr Marjorie Jobson, national director of the Khulumani Support Group, an organisation that fights for justice for victims of atrocities of apartheid.
Johannesburg - As an assassin for the apartheid regime, Ferdi Barnard would study the targets on his hit list intensely. Their photographs, movements and distinctive characteristics. Then, on the orders of the Civil Co-operation Bureau, he would strike.
But more than 20 years after his sinister crimes, most infamous among them the shooting of anti-apartheid activist David Webster, the tormented Barnard tells Dr Marjorie Jobson how his victims haunt him. “Every night, in his dreams, he sees candles floating on Florida Lake, near where he grew up,” reveals Jobson, national director of the Khulumani Support Group, an organisation that fights for justice for victims of atrocities of apartheid.
“He can focus on each flame and see the face of a person he assassinated. Every flame is someone whose life he has taken… When you do these terrible things to people, you suffer the same after-effects. Often the victims don’t realise these guys (the perpetrators) have permanently damaged themselves.”
But for the feisty, though softly spoken, Jobson, the quest for justice and answers for the broken, traumatised victims of apartheid’s atrocities remains paramount.
“I’d really like to see the huge focus shift from the handful of perpetrators to the thousands of victims whose lives have been destroyed,” she says.
“For us, that’s the terrible attitude of the post-apartheid government, which bends over backwards for a handful of white perpetrators, but has turned its back on those who sacrificed so much to bring them to power.”
Eugene de Kock, the notorious Vlakplaas commander, used to phone Jobson regularly, promising to help provide answers for victims of his unit’s atrocities.
But those calls stopped in 2009 after, Jobson says, President Jacob Zuma spent an hour with De Kock a week before his inauguration.
Last month, Correctional Services Minister Michael Masutha paroled De Kock, but turned down a parole bid by Chris Hani’s killer Clive Derby-Lewis, stating that more time was needed to reflect on his application for parole.
“The minister (Masutha) says he released De Kock in the interest of contributing to reconciliation, but he has no idea. It doesn’t take the release of one white man to do that. We cannot go on without repairing those whose lives were destroyed.”
A case in point is Meshack Morotolo, who shuffled into Jobson’s office, his arm hanging limp and useless at his side; who told Jobson how a group of his white employers at the railroad shunting yards in Germiston switched off the lights and hunted him and his colleagues down with guns in the early 1980s.
Even now, 30 years later, he cannot sleep. The memories of those brutal assaults plunge him into the grip of fear.
“It was a very terrible time,” says Morotolo, painfully.
Jobson is a tiny woman with a big fight on her hands. The 63-year-old has spent 20 years at the helm of Khulumani, a victim’s movement for human rights and social justice, founded by victims themselves.
Always, she is driven by a fierce passion for justice for those left broken by the apartheid regime.
“I’ve always been a person with a deep sense of what is just and unjust. I think it is a question of honouring the commitments you give to the people who made all the sacrifices… who carried the cost of our entire transition.”
Her political activism grew as a prominent member of the Black Sash – of which her mother was a founding member – and Jobson was part of the group’s campaign that ultimately ended the death penalty.
Now, as she sits in an unlit room at the meagre Khulumani offices in the Joburg CBD – darkened by load shedding – the faces on posters of the mothers of those who disappeared during apartheid surround her, almost seem to implore her.
Khulumani says more than 6 000 people went missing during apartheid, yet the National Prosecuting Authority’s Missing Person’s Task Team has only about 400 on its books. A similar contrast rings true for claimants to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It recognised 18 000 people as victims of apartheid, but Khulumani has more than 100 000 claimants for reparations on its database.
And like Morotolo, they don’t stop pounding on Khulumani’s door for help.
A medical doctor for most of her life, Jobson approaches her work as she did while working as an anaesthesiologist.
“As a doctor, I used to run wards from 2am and had 200 people waiting at my door to see me. How do you give people a good service,” she asks.
“For me, it was a relief to focus on only one person in the theatre. And I think I apply that now, just one person at a time. You solve one person’s case and you find out how it applies to so many others. Then you get hundreds applying to Khulumani to file their cases.”
Last year, Alex Boraine, vice-chairman of the TRC, told a panel discussion that it had lost its momentum when the government “took forever” to implement some recommendations and ignored others. Most victims eligible for compensation have not received a cent, says Jobson.
The TRC gave 16 000 of its recognised victims a once-off payment of R30 000 in 2003 and 2004.
Jobson cites a similar failure with the President’s Fund, which was set up in 2003 to help rehabilitate and repair the lives of victims, but the money has remained unspent. Now, at R1.3 billion, Jobson says the interest alone every year tallies up to R50 million. The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, the fund’s custodian, plans to divert half to municipal infrastructure projects.
“It was put aside for victims of atrocities. It’s local government elections next year and the ANC is rightly worried. The plan is to take the victims’ money, package it into R30m and give it to municipalities. You are likely to secure the next local election, because government brought us money. But this is victims’ money and has to have victims at the centre of any use.”
The department, though it did not respond to enquiries, has maintained that no funds are being plundered. But Jobson says only a handful of the nearly 130 communities identified for community reparations will benefit.
Online petitions have been circulated by Amandla.mobi to save the compensation fund and place the money into a trust fund for victims’ rehabilitation and reparation, which allows for eligible victims to apply for funds for their needs and projects.
“When you check the political histories of the local municipalities to which the department wants to give money, in some places you can’t find any trace of political activism,” she said.
But there are victories, such as in GaMatlala in Limpopo.
“There, 300 homes were burnt down and everybody’s livestock was wiped out because they sheltered people going into exile in Botswana.
“That’s a genuinely severely harmed community and an extraordinary one. Some of their chiefs were banished and these were women who stood against the apartheid regime,” Jobson says.
Now the village is apparently one of the local municipalities earmarked to receive money from the President’s Fund.
The department also recently published notices calling for those declared victims of apartheid by the TRC to apply for educational support. However, Khulumani plans to challenge the regulations because they exclude some TRC-identified victims.
“The people who waited basically 16 years for that recommendation to become a possibility… most are saying, ‘I’m 57 now, I’m not going to go to university but maybe my child can benefit’.
“It really has left out the generation it was meant to help. It’s such an ongoing struggle with bureaucracy… that has got a sense they can turn their backs on poor people.
“We’ve been proactive about engaging them (the government) since 2003 about all of the recommendations of the TRC and how to do what is needed so we don’t end up creating the generation of very angry, aggrieved people, which is what’s happening anyway.”
Former president Thabo Mbeki and Zuma have not championed the TRC recommendations “because they don’t feel what people in this country went through”, because they served the ANC in exile, she believes.
“They don’t recognise the sacrifices people made in this country. It’s shocking… how they just don’t care… The government wins praise for the TRC, but doesn’t reveal that it has failed to fulfil its promises.”
And despite the “insults”, Khulumani serves as a model for other countries running their own TRC processes, Jobson says.
“They can see that the work we do brings the solutions.”
The TRC, she says, never gave Khulumani a cent.
“For me that symbolises what Khulumani is about: people taking their own power and agency to make things happen. And that is what they are continuing to do.
“There’s a collective violence of apartheid that can be traced back generations and we haven’t dealt with this massive trauma. That’s why I can’t give up. I can’t.”
The Star