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Discovery of Graves Opens Old Wounds

Sunday Times (Johannesburg)
NEWS
November 27, 2005
Posted to the web November 29, 2005

By Julian Rademeyer
Johannesburg
FOR 20 years Pauline Dempers has been searching for what happened to her
fiancé, the father of two of her children. The last time she saw Frans Teister
was at a Swapo hospital near the southern Angolan town of Lubango, where the
couple had fled their home in Namibia to join the battle against South Africa's
illegal occupation of their country.
But, shortly after their last conversation in 1986, Dempers was detained by her
comrades-in-arms and accused of being an "enemy agent". She was stripped naked,
tortured, humiliated and beaten until she "confessed".
For the next three years - separated from her three-year-old daughter - she
languished in the overcrowded "dungeons" of Lubango.
Dempers believes Teister may be buried in one of the mass graves being exhumed
along the Namibian border with Angola.
Her story cuts to the heart of the Pandora's box that has been opened by the
exhumations.
Blanket amnesties put in place prior to Namibian independence, and the policy
of national reconciliation adopted by the Swapo government under Sam Nujoma,
sought to ignore the atrocities committed by the South Africans - and those
carried out by Swapo.
Calls for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Namibia have consistently
been rejected.
"They are totally against it because they know their own actions are going to
be exposed," said
Phil Ya Nangoloh of the National Society for Human Rights in Windhoek.
The organisation contends that up to 4 000 people "disappeared" during purges
and witch-hunts in the camps of southern Angola.
Dempers, now the national co-ordinator of the Breaking the Wall of Silence
Movement, an organisation of former Swapo detainees, still does not know why
she was singled out.
During the first interrogation, her hands and feet were bound and a rag was
shoved into her mouth to stifle her screams. Six men beat her.
The next day they continued. They threatened to kill her, saying the order had
come from Nujoma.
"It was so unreal. I was taken to a room filled with sand. There were pieces of
sticks full of blood and human hair. The smell of blood was so fresh in that
room. People were stamping all over me ... "
Eventually she told them what they wanted to hear. Asked who had recruited and
trained her, she gave them "any name that sounded like an Afrikaner name".
"That was the only way to survive. Some people were beaten to death."
She was incarcerated in one of the "dungeons", underground barracks where
people were "packed like sardines".
She says Nujoma visited the prison camp on three occasions while she was there
and taunted the detainees, saying he did not know whether to call them
"enemies" or "agents".
After the April 1 1989 "incursion" that nearly scuppered the peace process,
Nujoma again visited the camp. "He boasted that, for the last time, his sons -
the gallant fighters - had defeated the enemy."
At least 300 Swapo soldiers, probably many more, died in clashes with the
notorious "hunter-killer" police unit, Koe voet. Swapo maintains its soldiers
crossed the border on April 1 to hand over their weapons and were attacked by
the South Africans. But recent media reports have quoted former Swapo
commanders saying Nujoma ordered his soldiers into Namibia to establish bases,
ignoring warnings from his generals that "blood will flow".
Released in 1989, Dempers found her daughter, a child she had named Survival,
in a "production camp".
" I asked her about her mother and she said: 'She is Pauline and she is in the
dungeons because she is the enemy.' I said: 'I am Pauline. I am your mother...'
She just stared at me and didn't say a word."
The last reference to her fiancé came from a man named Adam Witbooi, who worked
for the United Nations and was sent to northern Namibia in August 1989 to
repatriate a group of 16 Swapo men.
One of the names on his list was Frans Teister.
The group never arrived.

   

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