Silenced by S. Africa ‘Restrictions’ : Apartheid Foes Find Life Out of Jail Is Not Freedom

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —  Raymond Suttner dropped off a pair of slacks for alterations a few days ago and, like many people with a busy schedule, he had to do some figuring to decide whether he would be able to pick them up that afternoon.

Suttner, a professor of law, had on his schedule, as he does every day, a trip to his local police station, where he has to check in between 3 and 4 p.m. or risk arrest.

He could drive across town to collect his slacks after that, but he would have to be back in his house by 6 p.m.--and stay there for the next 12 hours. If he is not there every night, the police can arrest him.

Suttner decided it was too close. The slacks would have to wait.

Recently freed from 27 months in detention without charge, Suttner is now his own jailer. In the argot of apartheid, he is a “restricted” person. He cannot be with more than four people at a time. He cannot leave Johannesburg or set foot on any campus, including the one where he is on the faculty. He cannot be interviewed for any news article.

“They’ve let him out, but into a prison without walls,” Suttner’s sister, Sally, said in a recent interview.

The number of restriction orders issued under a two-year-old state of emergency has increased sharply in recent months, civil rights groups say. Now more than 400 leading anti-apartheid campaigners are silenced by these restrictions, a peculiarly South African form of house arrest that has been in use for nearly 30 years.

“They’ve resumed with a vengeance,” said Priscilla Jana, an attorney who represents many restricted or detained activists. She describes the orders as a way “to keep people in check without the embarrassment of having so many people in jail without charge.”

Interviews with more than a dozen restricted people--in itself often a violation of the restriction orders--produce a picture of lives filled with fear and paranoia. A simple knock on the door can send their children scurrying and, as one woman put it, “shivers down your spine.”

Their political voices and even their jobs disappear. Friends desert them. Even the most innocuous errand involves a host of complications.

‘Ways to Break People’

“These are all ways to break people, to force them to sink into obscurity,” Sally Suttner said.

When Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) arrived at a Soweto clinic a few weeks ago for a meeting with Albertina Sisulu, the 70-year-old nurse locked herself in the clinic office because the senator was followed by reporters and television cameras.

Among other things, Sisulu’s restriction order prevents her from addressing more than 10 persons at a time and from talking with journalists. She eventually met Simon alone, in the office.

Co-founder of the United Democratic Front anti-apartheid coalition and wife of the jailed nationalist leader Walter Sisulu, Albertina Sisulu has been a leading government opponent for nearly half a century. She has been banned or restricted for 20 of the past 25 years.

“As people who have suffered under oppression ever since we were born, it has become part of our life,” Sisulu said on a recent evening, sitting in the living room of her small Soweto home. She says her restriction order does not prohibit foreign journalists from quoting her.

A ‘Most Annoying Thing’

Being under house arrest, as she is from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. every day, is a “most difficult and annoying thing,” she said. “Even if I hear a child crying in the street outside, I cannot go to help.”

The police often visit after midnight to make sure she is home.

“I think they are trying to break my spirit,” she said. “But they are failing. I never expected my enemy to be nice to me.”

Restriction orders are a relatively new part of a latticework of laws designed to dampen what the government believes is a revolutionary climate inside the country. The orders have a complex ancestry dating back to 1950, when “banning orders” were first introduced into the judicial system.

Over the next 25 years, more than 1,200 people were banned under security laws. But by 1984 fewer than a dozen people were banned, and in 1986 bannings were replaced, in practice, by restriction orders. Restrictions are virtually identical to bannings, except they are issued under the state of emergency rather than under laws enacted by Parliament.

A List of Prohibitions

For the most part, people are placed under restriction when they are released from detention. In issuing the orders, the Ministry of Justice usually prohibits the person from addressing groups, participating in specific political organizations, criticizing the government, talking to reporters, writing for publication and leaving the community. Many orders confine people to their homes at night. A few require regular reporting to a police station.

If the government ever releases Nelson R. Mandela, as has recently been rumored, it may place restrictions on the black nationalist leader to blunt his ability to rally large numbers of black South Africans.

The government views restrictions as a way of allowing detained political activists to go free without sacrificing public safety.

“We’re doing it for the humane value it has,” said Brig. Leon Mellet, spokesman for the ministry of law and order. “It allows people to get back with their families. These really aren’t restrictions. They are conditions: Don’t promote violence.”

Only a Temporary Measure

The authorities say restriction orders are only a temporary measure that will not be necessary when the threat of violent revolution has passed and the state of emergency is lifted.

But “that means it’s good for life,” Albertina Sisulu said. “It (the state of emergency) is the only way they can stay in power.”

So far, restriction orders have been appeal-proof.

“In the field of security legislation, the legislature has removed the courts’ jurisdiction,” Judge David Friedman noted last month in a case challenging a restriction order in Durban. Friedman said the judicial system had no authority to “examine executive excesses” in emergency regulations.

The penalty for violating a restriction order is, officially, two years in jail and a $4,000 fine. But ordinarily violators are simply arrested and re-detained.

‘Now I Must Fear’

“At least when I was in detention, I knew I was detained,” said a 17-year-old black girl who was released from detention in August and restricted. She has been re-detained once since then. “Now I must fear that they will come around any time,” she said.

The government contends that many activists, once restricted, quickly and willingly divorce themselves from politics. However, civil rights groups say restriction orders have not killed the anti-apartheid struggle but have forced it underground.

“South Africans live in an intensely politicized environment,” said a restricted lawyer, a national officer in an organization that was itself restricted earlier this year. “We eat, sleep and drink politics. Many of us have a great deal of political energy, and not being able to channel that energy is devastating.”

“As a leader,” Albertina Sisulu said, “you’re looked up to in the community. It’s so painful and difficult not to be able to help when you’re needed.”

Life Seems to Stand Still

Life for the restricted person, though, often seems to stand still.

“You fall into serious periods of depression because your voice is silenced, your influence is temporarily crushed, and your ideas can no longer be circulated or debated,” said Beyers Naude, 73, a white pastor who was allowed to associate with only one person at a time during the eight years he was banned.

Helen Joseph, a white leader in the anti-apartheid movement, has lived under some form of government restriction for 26 years; the latest such restriction order was lifted in 1982, when she was 77 years old.

“Eventually, you get used to it and it becomes a way of life,” she said in an interview in her garden. It was the peacefulness of the garden, she said, “that kept me going during those years.”

Isolation was always the enemy, she added.

‘You Become a Social Leper’

“You are cut off from free access to your friends, and you become a social leper,” she said. “To this day, there are people who, when they come to visit, are afraid to park their cars out front.”

Even today, at age 83, Joseph is a “listed person,” meaning the government considers her such a threat to state security that her words cannot be quoted or published inside the country.

Raymond Suttner’s restriction, imposed last month, is believed to be the most severe in South Africa. The government had been reluctant to release Suttner from detention. But as one of the only white detainees in a racially segregated prison system, Suttner had spent months in isolation and grown increasingly depressed. Prison officials eventually allowed him to keep a pet bird in his cell for company.

When Suttner was released, on humanitarian grounds, he received a two-page list of conditions. He is prohibited from entering any school, making it impossible for him to resume teaching. The University of Witwatersrand has continued to pay his salary, however, and he may work with students on individual projects from an off-campus office.

Still Adjusting

Suttner, 43, is still adjusting to his conditional freedom. Friends say he is intellectually agile but tense and agitated at times.

“One just feels that he has one eye on the clock all the time,” said his sister, Sally, a social worker.

The restriction order makes it impossible for him to see a movie or play, because he must report to the police both morning and afternoon and be in his house by 6 p.m.

When Suttner tried to plan a shopping trip with his sister recently, they had to check the map to see if the two largest Johannesburg-area shopping centers were officially within the “magisterial district of Johannesburg,” to which Suttner is restricted. One was not, and the other was right on the border.

“He’s got to spend his life looking at these things,” his sister said.

Knowing that he is locked in at night, Suttner invites his friends to visit him then. But a couple of police officers usually arrive as well--to count his guests.

Examined Restriction Order

As a result, Suttner and his lawyer had to examine the restriction order carefully. When it says four persons, for example, does that include family members? Does it include other people who may share the same house? They have decided that it probably does not.

Among Suttner’s fears--and this applies to many restricted people--is that he is an easy target for right-wing extremists.

“They know where you live and that you’ll be there every night,” Sally Suttner said. “He can’t even get away.” She said he will soon have to hire security guards.

Restricted people say they are always looking over their shoulder, even when they are not doing anything illegal. That makes you “your own jailer,” said attorney Jana, who was banned herself in the early 1980s.

“One is inclined to think every car following you is a police car,” she said. “It is absolutely nerve-racking.”