Law Lecturer’s Health Suffered in 27 Months : S. Africa Frees Longest-Detained White

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  University law lecturer Raymond Suttner, the government’s longest-serving white detainee, was released from jail Monday, two years and three months after he was arrested by the South African authorities under an hours-old state of emergency.

Suttner, 43, was freed “on humanitarian grounds” because his health has deteriorated, Adriaan Vlok, the government’s minister of law and order, said in a statement. At the same time, though, Vlok ordered Suttner’s activities severely restricted.

A year ago, Vlok had said Suttner was so dangerous to public safety that he would be kept in detention until the end of the country’s state of emergency, which President Pieter W. Botha declared in 1986 and renewed last June for a third year.

For much of his time in prison, Suttner was held in solitary confinement because he was the only white detainee in a segregated prison system, according to his lawyer. He was allowed visits by his brother or sister twice a month.

Suttner had tears in his eyes when he greeted his sister at a Johannesburg house Monday evening. He was wearing a sweat shirt and blue jeans, and on his shoulder was a small pet bird, known as a Rosy Faced Lovebird, that he recently had been allowed to keep with him in his Pretoria prison cell.

Suttner, the author of “Thirty Years of the Freedom Charter” and one of the anti-apartheid movement’s leading intellectuals, spoke haltingly with his sister and appeared to stumble on his words. Friends said it was Suttner’s deteriorating emotional health, more than his physical health, that spurred the authorities to release him.

Health problems have surfaced among several detainees in recent weeks, and some anti-apartheid activists have complained of poor conditions in prison. The government contends that prison conditions are of a high standard and says any allegations of mistreatment are investigated thoroughly.

Zwelakhe Sisulu, 37, editor of the weekly New Nation and a former Nieman fellow at Harvard University, was admitted to a hospital for several weeks recently, suffering from depression. The father of two young children, Sisulu has been in detention 21 months.

Suttner’s restriction order is similar to that placed on several dozen other leading anti-apartheid figures. He must report twice daily to the local police station, cannot leave Johannesburg and is confined to his house every night from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

He is also prevented from granting interviews, speaking to large groups, writing for publication or entering any school facility. The order effectively prevents Suttner from resuming his job at the University of Witwatersrand, where he taught law.

Suttner was among hundreds of people detained on June 12, 1986, the first day of the current state of emergency, as he was boarding a plane for Harare, where he was to give lectures at the University of Zimbabwe.

Civil rights groups estimate that about 32,000 people have been detained at various times since the emergency was declared. About 18,000 of them have been held for at least a month, 1,000 for more than a year and 250 for more than two years.

Detention without trial is an important component of the government’s emergency regulations, which give the authorities broad power to suspend civil liberties in the name of public order. Through those detentions, as well as restrictions on anti-apartheid organizations, the government has hushed many of the opponents.

Suttner was education secretary for the United Democratic Front’s Transvaal branch. The front, a coalition of 650 anti-apartheid groups with about 3 million members, is among 19 groups whose political activities have been banned by the government.

Suttner served eight years in prison on Robben Island for helping the outlawed African National Congress. He was released in 1983.

After his detention without charge, he made several appeals through the courts to win his freedom, arguing that his detention was based on “partisan political opposition to my wholly lawful views on the Freedom Charter,” the blueprint for a non-racial, post-apartheid South Africa that has been endorsed by the Democratic Front and the ANC.

But Vlok, the minister of law and order, said Suttner was being held because he was “a self-confessed Communist” who advocated “people’s power.”