Namibia’s long road to national reconciliation

OIVA ANGULAAS a survivor of Swapo’s Lubango prison camps, Tangeni Mureko (49) needs no reminder of how painful it is to live, how terrible to die.

Mureko was detained by Swapo shortly after his arrival at Lubango, southern Angola, when he was 15. His jailers accused him of being a South African spy.

“I felt bored, lonely, upset, angry and helpless, and did not believe I would be harmed by my comrades.”

But Mureko was subjected to brutal questioning by Swapo security agents, during which he was constantly beaten with sticks, deprived of sleep, and tied upside down. “Worst of all were the lashes,” Mureko says.

“For three and a half years, imagine being barefoot, wearing flappy shorts and a telniashka vest, and nothing else. And a diet of porridge or rice. So we were all soon suffering from a host of diseases: asthma, malaria, dysentery, beriberi – that was a real killer – and depression.”

As he recalls those terrible years and finally the day of homecoming on 4 July 1989, together with 152 fellow dungeons survivors, Mureko stops breathing for a few seconds.

“My brother Adolph and four of my cousins – Lucky, Patrick, Simon and Samuel – were killed alongside many others in the Lubango prison camps in 1989, just a few days after I was released . . . “

Mureko could hardly think of them still alive 30 years after the attainment of self-rule from South Africa in 1990.

“I could not wait to see them dead already, because they had stopped suffering,” he said yesterday.

His brother and cousins, known as the ‘Mureko brothers’, are listed by a Namibian-based advocacy group, Breaking the Wall of Silence (BWS), as part of the victims of the Lubango prison camps who disappeared.

BWS asserts thousands of people suffered and died in the Lubango prison camps because of Swapo’s perverted, tribal bigotry and paranoia that dirtied Namibia’s war of independence in the 1980s.

It further estimates that hundredsof innocent cadres, all members of Swapo and its disbanded armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (Plan), are still unaccounted for.

BWS was formed by Swapo ex-detainees, their relatives and concerned Namibians some 24 years ago to seek truth and closure to rights abuses carried out by Swapo in exile, especially in Angola.

“What happened in Lubango was a great human tragedy and an act of evil,” Mureko sighs.

“The least we can do is to make sure Namibians see the human faces of us, the survivors, so that the victims of the Lubango crimes are not merely a story.”

Another ex-detainee, Benjamin Gawiseb, says the Swapo government opted for a policy of “so-called national reconciliation”.

“Such a move did not consider the victims’ voices. This amounted to choosing impunity,” he says.

Some justify the Lubango purges, saying they were “a necessary evil” to prevent Swapo from being undermined from within. Others say “victims were caught in the crossfire” of the liberation war.

A group of ex-detainees and some family members of the disappeared had an audience with president Hage Geingob at State House in Windhoek on 15 May last year, with the meeting ending inconclusively.

Geingob told them to accept that any such [brutal] acts were part of the war and they have to move on in the name of national reconciliation.

According to ex-detainees and family members of the disappeared, such viewpoints clearly fail to grasp the fact that the movement’s authoritarian culture and the absolute power of its security machine under Solomon ‘Jesus’ Hawala, notoriously known as ‘The Butcher of Lubango’, were crucial factors in the tragedy known as the Swapo spy-drama of the 1980s.

Protecting alleged spies against murder, torture, humiliating or degrading treatment, and providing such ‘spies’ a fair trial was and is in line with international law.

In dealing with the spy hysteria “Swapo perfidiously defied all established international protocols regarding armed conflicts,” says Pauline Dempers, the BWS national coordinator.

Swapo has through the years stifled calls for a thorough investigation into Namibia’s war-era wrongdoings, she says.

This culture of impunity became even more stubborn with the party achieving hegemonistic status, with a two-third majority in parliament in the 1994 national polls, Dempers says.

She says attempts to engage the government in open talks on the predicament the Lubango dungeons victims find themselves in were started in 2000 with a letter to then Swapo secretary general, Hifikepunye Pohamba, who refused to meet a BWS delegation or receive any communication from them.

In July 2006, however, a BWS delegation met with then minister of presidential affairs, Albert Kawana, at State House to plead for direct talks with Pohamba. Dempers says a written message was left for him, with no response despite several follow-ups.

“Pohamba . . . had led the Lubango victims in circles over the issues,” Dempers says.

“Our engagement with him proved pointless. He doggedly refused to face up to the past rights abuses by Swapo in exile.”

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