JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — 

They were imprisoned without charge and denied adequate food and water for months on end. Some of their eardrums burst when they were forced to puff out their cheeks while being repeatedly slapped on the face. Others were lathered in pork grease and forced to crawl through colonies of biting red ants.

Jailers extracted confessions by hitting detainees with revolvers, slamming their heads against trees or, more often, beating them on the soles of their feet because, a security chief said, other body parts “easily rupture.”

Those atrocities may seem to be familiar stories from the land of apartheid. But they were committed by the African National Congress–against its own black prisoners.

And the first detailed accounts of ANC prison camp torture during the 1980s were revealed in an extraordinary report released Monday by ANC President Nelson Mandela.

Although ANC leaders congratulated themselves for making the highly critical report public, it raised dark questions about the ANC’s past commitment to human rights–and its future behavior in a South African government.

The report, commissioned by Mandela, cited dozens of instances of torture, inhumane prison conditions and allegations of murder of prisoners held by the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) at its Quatro camp in Angola during the 1980s. The camp was closed in 1988.

The three-member commission gave Mandela a list of members of the ANC’s security department who should be “dealt with” for mistreating prisoners. And it said no one found guilty of those atrocities should ever again be allowed to occupy positions of power in the ANC.

Mandela said the “transgressions” were “inexcusable.” And he said the ANC leadership “accepts ultimate responsibility for not adequately monitoring and therefore eradicating such abuses.”

“The morality of our liberation struggle demands of us the highest moral and ethical standards,” he said.

But, Mandela added, the abuses “must be understood in the context in which they occurred,” namely the ANC’s 30-year guerrilla war and attempts by the white-minority government to infiltrate the ANC’s army. Most of the ANC’s detainees were accused of being government informers.

The commission said interviews with 17 former detainees and several other former ANC security officials uncovered “serious allegations that certain prisoners disappeared or were murdered.” And it recommended that the ANC conduct an independent investigation into those allegations because “the families and friends of victims are entitled to be told the truth.”

The panel also recommended that the ANC compensate detainees financially for their ordeal. And it suggested that the ANC provide medical and psychological assistance to former detainees and help them resume their educations.

Also, the panel said, “These witnesses deserve, in our view, a clear and unequivocal apology for the wrongs that they have suffered.”

Mandela said the ANC would launch a more thorough investigation, and he said it would consider the compensation. But neither he nor any of the other senior ANC leaders who made the report public Monday were willing to apologize.

“We regret the fact that abuses were committed,” Mandela said, adding that it was “sufficient that we learned from our past mistakes.”

The ANC also declined to name the officials implicated in the torture, saying they deserved a fair hearing. Although the part of the report made public did not list those officials, it sharply criticized one, Mzwai Piliso, head of the ANC’s security and intelligence department for much of the 1980s.

It said Piliso, now head of the ANC’s human resources department, had acknowledged that he presided over some of the beatings. He told the commission he saw it as his job to extract information “at any cost.”

The commission devoted 25 pages of its 74-page report to detention conditions, which it described as “consistently harsh, only varying in degree of harshness.”

source:ANC Admits Torture of Its Own Prisoners : S. Africa: Mandela terms ‘inexcusable’ documented atrocities committed on black inmates at detention camp in Angola in 1980s. – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)