Inside the ANC's torture camps -- brutal violence, rape, murder, torture...
For decades, members of the ANC have been raised in a culture of violence, as described in the article below. Psychological studies carried out in 2007 among Ugandan refugees by world-reknown psychologists found that those refugees who had been most brutalised and traumatised by that country's ongoing civil war, showed that the more traumatised people were, the much likely they were to choose violence to solve any conflict-situations. Peaceful solutions are not often found in the vocabulary of violence-traumatised people.
Picture: One of the victims of Camp Quatro, the ANC terror-camp. This article below summarising these events was written by Paul Trewhela in "Searchlight South Africa" No.5 in July 1990. The stories of most of the women being raped on a daily basis at these camps as part of their 'training' still have to be told. Most of these ANC-women still are too terrified to come forward...
INSIDE QUADRO
End of an Era The first-hand testimony by former combatants of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) about the cruel ANC prison regime are an event in South African history. Never before has such concentrated factual evidence been presented about the inner nature of the ANC and its eminence grise, the South African Communist Party.
The ANC/SACP did a very good job in preventing public knowledge of its secret history from emerging. Those who survived the Gulag system of the ANC/SACP did so knowing that to reveal what they had been through meant re-arrest, renewed tortures and in all probability, death. They had to sign a form committing them to silence!
KGB-directed torture chambers led to suicides...
These ex-detainces in Nairobi have revealed that other prisoners, including Leon Madakeni, star of the South African film Wanaka, as well as Nomhlanhla Makhuba and another person known as Mark, committed suicide rather than suffer re-arrest at the hands of their KGB-trained guardians. Madakeni drove a tractor up a steep incline in Angola, put it into neutral and died as it somersaulted down the hill ...
- The ex-guerrillas in Nairobi displayed immense courage in speaking out publicly - their courage might have contributed to secure the lives of eight colleagues who had fled Tanzania through Malawi hoping to reach South Africa on the principle that better a South African jail than the ANC 'security.'
- This group, including two leaders of the mutiny in the ANC camps in Angola in 1984, arrived in South Africa in April, were immediately detained at Jan Smuts Airport by the security police for interrogation, and then released three weeks later.
- The day after their release they gave a press conference in Johannesburg, confirming the account of the mutiny published on this page.
This regimen of terror, extending beyond the gates of the ANC/SACP `Buchenwald' of Quadro, was a necessary element in the total practice of repression and deception which made the Anti-Apartheid Movement the most successful Popular Front lobby for Stalinism anywhere in the world.
- No international Stalinist-run public organization has ever had such an influence and shown such stability, reaching into so many major countries, for so long
- Vital to its success has been a practice of open and covert censorship The ANC's prisoners were its necessary sacrificial-victims.
The KGB in Africa
The prison system to which they were subject goes back to the late 1960s. It was the successor and the complement to the prison system on which blacks in South Africa are weaned with their mothers' milk.
- In 1969 one of the editors of this journal met two South Africans in London who said they had fought in the first MK guerrilla operation in mid-1967 - a disastrous fiasco across the Zambezi River into the Wankie area of Rhodesia, along with guerrillas from the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), then led by James Chikerema.
- (The ZAPU president, Joshua Nkomo, was in detention).
- The two men described how they had eventually succeeded in escaping from Rhodesia, and how their criticism of the operation had led to their imprisonment in an ANC camp in Tanzania.
- An article on the theme appeared the same year in the British radical newspaper Black Dwarf then edited by Tariq Ali.
The revelations by the Nairobi five indicate how little has changed. In his book on black politics in South Africa since 1945, Tom Lodge, (Black politics in South Africa Since 1945, Ravan, 1987), writes:
In 1968 a batch of Umkhonto defectors from camps in Tanzania sought asylum in Kenya, alleging that there was widespread dissatisfaction within the camps. They accused their commanders of extravagant living and ethnic favouritism. The first Rhodesian mission, they alleged, was a suicide mission to eliminate dissenters. In political discussions no challenge to a pro-Soviet position was allowed (p300).
- From 1968 to 1990, nothing basic altered in the ANC's internal regime in the camps, except that in the high noon of the Brezhnev era it operated para-statal powers under civil war conditions in Angola, where a large Cuban and Soviet presence permitted the ANC security apparatus to 'bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.'
From the account of the ex-mutineers, ANC administrative bodies ruled over its elected bodies, the security department ruled over the administrative organs, and KGB-trained officials - no doubt members of the SACP - ruled over the security apparatus.
- Umkhonto we Sizwe functioned as an extension in Africa of the KGB.
- Its role in the civil war in Angola was to serve primarily as a surrogate to Soviet foreign policy interests, so that when the ANC rebels proposed that their fight be diverted to South Africa this counted as unpardonable cheek, to be ruthlessly punished.
- Over its own members, the ANC security apparatus ruled with all the arrogance of a totalitarian power.
There is a direct line of connection between the ANC reign of terror in its prisons - which a UN High Commission for Refugees official described as more frightening than Swapo prisons - and the 'necklace' killings exercised by ANC supporters within South Africa, especially during the period of the 1984-86 township revolt, but now once again revived against oppositional groupings such as Azapo.
- (The ANC's' necklace' politics was also a definite contributory element provoking the carnage in Natal). Two former ANC prisoners, Similo Boltina and his wife Nosisana, were in fact necklaced on their return to South Africa in 1986, after having been repatriated by the Red Cross (letter from Bandile Ketelo, 9 April 1990).
This is the significance of the `Winnie issue.' When leaders of the Mass Democratic Movement publicly expressed their 'outrage’ at Winnic Mandela's 'obvious complicity’ in the abduction and assault on 14 year-old Stompie Mocketsi Seipe, leading to his murder, this was in response to very widespread and very well-founded revulsion among Soweto residents - especially ANC supporters such as members of the Federation of Transvaal Women (Fetraw). They were enraged by the jackboot politics of the so-called Mandela United Football Team, whose 'coach` - to the satisfaction of Fetraw members - has been convicted of Stompie's murder. This squad of thugs, based in Mrs Mandela’s house, acted within Soweto in the same way that the ANC/SACP security acted abroad, in Angola, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Uganda. The welcome of Captain Dirk Coetzee, head of the regime's assassination squad, into the arms of the ANC is an indication of the future course of development, as is the decision by the new Swapo government in Namibia to appoint a number of top South African security policemen, including the former chief of police in the Ovambo region, Derek Brune, to head its secret organs of coercion.
The South African prison system was replicated in the ANC prisons even into everyday terminology, above all at Quadro. This is a name that requires to become common currency in political discourse: it is the Portuguese for `No.4' the name used throughout South Africa for the notorious black section of the prison at the Fort.
Sneers by warders at soft conditions in 'Five Star Hotels', the common description of punishment cells as 'kulukudu' and the whole atmosphere of brutal crassness is quintessentially South African, spiced with the added sadism of the Gulag. The ANC prison system combined the worst of South African and of Russian conditions fused together, and it is this new social type - as a refinement and augmentation of each - that is now offered to the people of South Africa as the symbol of freedom.
Read the entire terrifying tale here:
http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/supplem/Hirson/Quadro.html
READ one of the original ANC reports on:
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/misc/skweyiya.html
http://www.revolutionary-history.co.uk/supplem/Hirson/Quadro.html
