Imam Haron: The democratic state owes South Africans an explanation for delaying justice

9 October 2023

The Western Cape High Court’s ruling today that Imam Abdullah Haron was murdered by apartheid police in 1969 is very welcome, but it comes too late for anyone responsible for his death or the cover-up that followed to be held accountable because they are dead.

It comes too late to hold then Prime Minister BJ Vorster or his police minister friend Lourens Muller accountable because Vorster died in 1983 and Muller in 2005 (11 years after the advent of democracy).

It comes too late to hold the apartheid magistrate accountable for his false ruling at the 1970 inquest that the Imam died as a result of an accidental fall.

It comes too late to hold the medical professionals accountable for lying about the cause of his death.

And it comes too late to provide any comfort to Mrs Galiema Haron, who went to her grave in 2019 knowing the truth about her husband’s murder but denied the dignity of official confirmation of the facts.

While Judge Daniel Thulare’s judgement today sets the record straight – and is a victory for the group of activists and the Imam’s descendants, who forced the State into re-opening apartheid inquests, beginning with the 1971 murder by security police of Ahmed Timol – overturning the inquest finding is not enough.

South Africans deserve to know why their democracy elected government has deliberately delayed justice in respect of apartheid-era killings by the police (and military), because all South Africans are affected by the environment of criminal impunity, by the selective prosecutions by the NPA, and by the unresolved reverberations of a brutally divided history.

South Africans also deserve to know why their democratically elected government chose to ignore most of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), including the recommendations on prosecutions and narrowing inequality.

Instead of dressing the wounds of the past, as the TRC was set up to do, by ignoring the commission’s recommendations the wounds have been left to fester.

The State has been making various moves of late, including assigning extra investigative and prosecutorial resources, in an effort to demonstrate that it is taking the TRC cases seriously. This is commendable, but it is not enough.

To recover its integrity the State must come clean on the reasoning behind its instructions to prosecutors to allow many of apartheid’s most callous killers, and their handlers, to walk into the sunset, scot-free.

It is important for South Africans to know that there are consequences for breaking the law, which supersede privilege, connections, or political consideration.

* The State must also come clean on its rationale for rejecting the economic recommendations of the TRC such as the creation of a wealth tax, and why it is battling to spend money collected by the President’s Fund many years ago that was meant to contribute to rehabilitating the nation’s damaged soul…

Issued by Brett Herron, Secretary-General & Member of Parliament, GOOD, 9 October 2023