JOHANNESBURG — The body of a young antiapartheid activist who was kidnapped and tortured in 1983 by South African police has never been found, her family never able to mourn at a grave, her killers not sent to prison.
The new move against the former policemen goes to the heart of long-running tension in South Africa over the push for reconciliation among the country’s racial groups and the desire to punish perpetrators of human rights abuses during the traumatic decades that preceded multiracial elections in 1994.
The 23-year-old, freshly graduated from university, had been a courier for the armed wing of the then-banned African National Congress when she was snatched by the police and tortured for weeks, according to the officers’ own testimony 16 years ago to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which could grant amnesty to those who fully confessed to human rights abuses committed during apartheid, recommended that more than 300 cases be prosecuted, but the Simelane murder is “one of the only” cases pursued by prosecutors, according to a statement from an attorney for Simelane’s family and a lawyer for the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, which is involved in the case.
