Victimization by the Police and State Officials
An African Traffic cop assaulted a European woman outside the hospital in Potchefstroom when she was on her way to see her father who was dying – and who actually died while she was being manhandled outside the building.
In recent years, police brutality in South Africa has been highlighted by various human rights organizations. In July 2011, the South African Human Rights Commission hosted a workshop on police brutality.
According to Amnesty International, South Africa has still not ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and at the end of 2011 and torture by police had still not been outlawed. Incidents of torture reported to and corroborated by Amnesty International include severe beatings, electric shocks and suffocation torture while the person was shackled or hooded as well as death threats.
Alzheimer sufferer James Brown, 98, was arrested after forgetting to pay for a chocolate bar at a shop, taken to the Kriel police station and found dead with a fresh-head wound in his cell the next day.
The police oversight body, the Independent Complaints Directorate (ICD), reported that from April 2009 to March 2010 that it had received five direct complaints of torture. The ICD also received 920 complaints of assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, some of which were being investigated for evidence of torture.
Seven of the 294 deaths in custody were linked to torture and 90 others to “injuries sustained in custody”. The ICD also investigated 24 complaints of rape by police officers. In many cases the police have targeted European minorities with their acts of sheer brutality. It has to be emphasized that this is merely the tip of the iceberg, intimidation deters people from laying charges.
1. Police involvement in child prostitution
Members of police have also been identified as owners of brothels responsible for the trafficking of children, especially European children and women in partnership with Nigerians in the South Africa. The Child protection Unit was an extremely effective crime fighting unit but was disbanded by Nelson Mandela’s ANC shortly after uncovering a large Nigerian child prostitution ring. Ironically, it was disbanded shortly after an announcement was made that they would be strengthened by a special task team. Similarly to the Commandos who were protecting farmers and the task team that were supposed to investigate the police gang mentioned in point 2, the promised law enforcement never materialized while the current effective anti-crime units were disbanded.
Needless to say, this is now a very lucrative and flourishing business in South Africa where human trafficking is not not illegal.
In January 2005, Police in South Africa have infiltrated a major child sex syndicate. Girls as young as ten were fed drugs to force them into a life of prostitution. Priscilla, after which the operation was named, is only 16 but already she’s a hardened prostitute. “I don’t know if I’ll see 21 if it goes on like this,” she confides. She’s a victim of a nation-wide Nigerian sex syndicate, which rotates girls between brothels in four cities. Her 14 year old sister, Candice, is also being held captive. “Child exploitation attracts a lot of attention — it becomes more dangerous, it becomes more lucrative,” explains one expert. There’s even a website where pimps can advertise their girls. Most girls were enslaved after being force-fed drugs but more sinister methods were also used.
One mother’s three year old son was abducted by her pimps to force her onto the street. Another child was brutally gang raped after she tried to run away. This video of operation Pricilla gives some insight into the problem.
The volunteers trying to address this problem face life threatening situations every day. They cannot go public in fear of intimidation and if they do, they will no longer be able to assist these girls. Most of the time when some of these girls were able to escape with the help of volunteers, they go back because of intimidation or their now established drug dependency. Because the prostitution rings are nationwide, they also constantly in fear of being located by the pimps or police involved.
Affirmative action also bars them from the job market, so there are very limited alternative job opportunities.
Without professional help and places of safety, there is no escape for them. Government policies dictate that NGO’s may only use 9% of their funding for these girls from the European minority, which means they are often unable to obtain lifesaving assistance from established resources. This will however change, the ANC government published new legislation that will tie the hands of any charity to help these white girls.
Recently a group of girls were discovered in Cape Town, all their teeth were extracted to ensure they do not bite the clients.
A spokes person from PSARU (People Search And Rescue Unit) explains why it is so important to find a displaced or missing child within 48 hours.
People disappear for different reasons but human trafficking is affecting the world! Let me explain how some of these girls are abducted and then “prepared” to work as sex slaves till they eventually die.
They “prepare” the girls in 21 days – this is how they do it!
They are locked up in a room with a bed and the bare minimum.
1.The first 7 days they beat the girls, very severely and every day
2.The 2nd 7 days they gang rape them, every day
3.The 3rd 7 days they force-feed them drugs
After the 21 day breakdown ritual they own these girls. They will NOT run away but become like robots and do the work they are forced into until they eventually die. They are completely brain washed.
The world does nothing. Human trafficking is the fastest growing industry in the world. It can happen to anyone.
2. Gang of policemen
Several affluent people have been carjacked and brutally assaulted by members of the police and one of the victims had formed an anti-crime group, Enough. In March of this year, the Police Department launched a task force to investigate the Gang of policemen that were perpetrating these brutal crimes. The task force was summarily shut down amid accusations that top police officials are involved with this gang.
Several European men have reported cases of being arrested on frivolous as well as trumped up charges, such as minor traffic offences and placed in cells with multiple prisoners, sometimes only for a few hours. In some cases the police have instructed the prisoners to rape and assault these European men and ‘teach them a lesson’. During the rapes, most of which endured for several hours, the police did not check on the cells every hour as per protocol and deliberately ignored the desperate screams for help.
■In April, 2012, British publication, the Metro reported the heinous repeated gang rape of Sean Smith, a citizen of Wales who was arrested on charges of fraud and jailed while awaiting trial in St Alban’s Prison just outside of Port Elizabeth. He was the only European left in a prison cell with 90 inmates. He was gang raped up to 8 times a day over a period of nineteen months “because he was White”. After nine months of incarceration, he tested positive for HIV Aids. Amazingly, was still left in the same conditions for a further ten months until hewas finally granted bail and escaped South Africa.
■“Wimpie, a White boy who was dabbling with dagga, is put in our cell. I don’t know how old he really is, perhaps 16 or more, but he looks no older than 14, with skinny arms and short, spiky-crowned, brown hair. He tries to fight, and so they hit him. His resistance stops abruptly when one grabs the back of his head and smashes his face into the steel bars …The 20 men take it in turns to rape him. It goes on for more than eight hours, almost the whole night. The boy does everything he can, in his pathetic, limited range of action, to try to deter them, but he is ignored. He screams, he cries, he begs, he tries to bargain, he prays.
It is in the morning, though, that I am forced to see what life has coughed up before me. What’s left of Wimpie is lying in a corridor between the bunks, just in front of my bed. He is still naked, shivering in a pool of his own blood where they have discarded him. I will literally have to step over the small body to go and eat my breakfast.”- Gayton McKenzie, an African gang member in South Africa, speaks for a research paper at the University of Pretoria, 2008.
■In 2008, a 52 year old diabetic man from Johannesburg as falsely jailed in Witbank for a second time, after making enquiries at the Clerk of the Court for some paperwork in respect of the original illegal arrest. He was arrested again and put into a detention cell with 30 African inmates at the Witbank police station. Four inmates carried him around naked in the cell while the rest sang and danced and then forced him to kneel over a rolled up mattress, then they proceeded to sodomize him until he later lost consciousness.
They continued to repeatedly rape him as he slipped in and out of consciousness. He was then left unattended in the cell for two days, before he was finally taken to a doctor to obtain medicine for his diabetes. The ‘case’ against him for which he had been wrongfully arrested in the first place, was withdrawn.”
■Also in 2008, 25 year old Nico Bouwer was repeatedly sodomized while in police custody in Polokwane just a few weeks before he was due to get married. He was on his way home from a friend’s house when his left tire burst and he hit a street lamp and a stoplight. Because of his injuries, he was transported to Polokwane hospital where he was arrested for drunk driving. Contrary to normal practice he was prevented from obtaining the immediate medical treatment he needed.
Instead he was taken to the holding cells, denied his right to a phone call and placed in a cell with 25 African majority inmates. Eight of these African men attacked Bouwer and repeatedly raped him. Some held his arms and forced his face into a pillow while they were sodomizing him. He was only allowed to call his lawyer the next day after he had appeared in court and was finally released on bail.
■During the same year, in Vryheid, game rancher Etienne van Wyk arrested for apparently transporting his own game animals without a licence. He was placed in a cell with hardened African criminals predisposed to violence, some of whom were repeat offenders. The next day after the rape that he had endured for several hours, he was released without being charged.
3) Rape of women by police
Rape of women under the guise of arrest is prolific and also under reported. There are several reported cases of intensely aggressive police intimidation brutality meted out to Europeans, who are too afraid to report these incidents to the Independent Complaints Directorate. The Police have been especially scrutinized for their refusal to bring perpetrators of heinous crimes against the European minority to justice. It should however be noted, not by the ANC government, but civil society and citizens.
It appears that the police and officials have the blessing of the ANC regime tocarry out these atrocities, not surprising when the the polygamous president, Jacob Zuma, believes “you cannot just leave a woman if she is ready.” To deny such a woman sex, would be “tantamount to rape”, he told the judge in his 2006 rape trial (he was acquitted).
There are also widespread reports of police corruption and a widely held perception that in some cases police collude with perpetrators. NGO’s and experts estimate that only 2.8% rapes are reported annually. This is hardly surprising taking into consideration reports of women who get raped by the police.
It is evident that many of those holding offices of power in the Police Force are exploiting their positions for personal gain through lucrative crime. There are also those who are targeting the European minority and repeatedly precipitating racially based brutality. It is not surprising to see this trend, given the degree of hate speech and hate advocacy leveled at the European minority, unchecked and without regard for the rule of law by the leadership of South Africa. Some proponents maintain the Police are committing acts of war against the very citizens they are meant to protect, while being goaded on and encouraged to do so by the leadership of South Africa.
■In December of 2011, one of the most brutal stories of rape by the police occurred. Four members of the Sandton Police Station, two of whom were uniformed police sergeants raped two European sisters (aged 27 and 24) simultaneously. They followed them to one of the sisters’ homes and pulled them over as they were driving into their apartment complex.
■In 2009, Martie Olivier, a mother-of-three was repeatedly raped by two uniformed policemen in Kempton Park, South Africa. Martie Olivier’s husband, Sarel, said they were unable to lay a charge of rape later that day because the police refused to take their statements. Although rape victims are not normally identified, the couple gave permission for their names to be published. The couple’s nightmare began shortly after midnight. Olivier said he and his wife, 29, were at a bbq at his parents’ house in Birch Acres on Saturday night, after which they went to a nearby pub for a drink.
Olivier said that on his way home, he drove into a driveway and out again as he made a U-turn. A marked police van suddenly stopped in front of the couple’s Toyota Run-X. Two men in police uniform climbed out of the van and moved to the driver’s side of their car before yanking the door open, he said. They then allegedly threw him into the back of the van without explanation.
“One of the policemen approached me and asked what I was prepared to give them in exchange for my husband’s release,” said Martie. She gave him the R400 she had onher. However, the man asked: “Do you really love your husband? Is there nothing more you can do?” He then allegedly climbed into the driver’s seat of the Toyota and drove toward the Kempton Park police station. The police van followed, she said.
Olivier, who was in the police van, said: “About 200m from the police station I noticed the car pulling off the road, but I thought nothing of it. It’s the police after all.” At the police station, the policeman driving the van opened the doors at the back and told him he had been caught driving under the influence, but that he was free to go. The other policeman arrived shortly afterwards in the Toyota with Olivier’s wife in the passenger’s seat. When Olivier climbed into their car, she told him she had been raped.
“She appeared traumatized and I could see her underwear had been torn,” he said. It was then that he attacked police officers with bare fists. “When I returned to the car, my wife was gone. I thought she had run away.” She allegedly lost consciousness when one of the policemen slammed herhead into the dashboard while her husband was inside the police station. There were two policemen in the car with her when her husband was inside the station.
She said she came to on a lounge floor in an unfamiliar house. Her next recollection was of a security guard who woke her in a flowerbed at Boston Business College. “He asked me why the police had dropped me off there. I couldn’t give him an answer,” she said. After hours of searching, Olivier said he saw his wife in a traumatized condition walking from the Boston Business College at “exactly 07:20”. He immediately took her to the police station, after which she was medically examined at a nearby trauma centre, where evidence of a rape was found on her body and dress. She also had visible injuries.
“I have scratch marks and bruises between my legs and on my body. In our car there was also blood from the first time I was raped.” She was given anti-retroviralmedication to protect her against HIV.
Our contention however is that regardless of such propositions, the leadership of State and therefore all arms of the State have a duty to protect all of its citizens from reprehensible violations of human rights across the board. Failures to do so in respect of the European minority are endemic and continue unchecked.
In one example, an university student was raped and tortured for several hours by an African perpetrator who virtually dissected her face and body with over 40 well placed cuts while keeping her alive. The perpetrator was arrested shortly after the incident, but then released by two policemen. A journalist, Hilda Fourie and medical doctor ‘LP’ – A surgeon and other medical personnel – aghast at the horrendous injuries inflicted on the student launched a fundraising campaign to pay a reward to the man who captured the girl’s torturer-rapist.
The African was able to attack the woman inside her flat because she had just seen off her friends after Bible-study, which she presumed safe as she lived in a security complex. Outraged medical personnel described the attack as follows:
The woman was virtually dissected and then raped by her attacker. This savage ordeal lasted several hours.”With time at his disposal the attacker waited for her in her secured apartment, and with a butcher knife stabbed her.” He then took the knife and started to dissect her face by cutting open the nose, through the lips and ended under her chin. She fought back fiercely – and he tried to stab out one of her eyes. A deep cut was made from her neck and stopped at her lung. All her fingers were then cut into: her left thumb was carved apart and was just hanging by its senews. Two other fingers’ senews were also cut through.
The torturer then forced her to the bedroom and made very deep cutting wounds to her legs. After cutting main arteries on her body (she suffered 22 cuts and stabs in total) she was bleeding copiously, and then he raped her amidsts the bloodbath he had created around her.” Distraught medical personnel including the orthopaedic surgeon who rushed to help her, all were deeply angered and upset, said Dr “LP” – saying this was one of the worst cases of mutilation they had ever seen. Notwithstanding that South African medical personnel are used to having to treat very gruesome trauma-injuries: such as the ones inflicted upon the tens of thousands of members of the European Minority.
Yet, even in light of the severity of the attack, the police still allowed the perpetrator to go free, which again confirms their approval and alliance with the attacker and rapist and not the victim.
This can also be put in context when viewed in terms of Rafael Lemkin;’s definition, which is generally accepted as the norm: “Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups . . ..”
