Biehls Seek Lasting Good From Tragedy

CAPE TOWN, South Africa —  As soon as the amnesty hearing for the murderers of Newport Beach’s Amy Biehl ended last week, the committee began hearing its next case: a grenade attack on a church service that killed 11 worshipers.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is considering amnesty applications from more than 7,000 people in human rights violations committed from 1960 to 1994.

While South Africans struggle to reconcile with the painful legacy of apartheid, Amy Biehl’s parents have had little time to dwell on the past. They are too busy looking ahead to projects in their daughter’s memory.

Peter and Linda Biehl’s testimony to the amnesty committee on Wednesday captured worldwide attention for its power in recalling her life and work.

“In all of this, Amy as a person has been a little bit lost,” Linda Biehl said later. “It was important to us to let people know who she really was.”

But the parents’ presentation for the most part looked to the future and challenged South Africans to give meaning to their daughter’s death.

Amy Biehl was stoned and stabbed to death in August 1993 by followers of a small black-militant party who stopped her car and attacked her as she drove black friends home. The 26-year-old Orange County woman had been in South Africa for 10 months on a Fulbright scholarship, assisting with voter education and women’s rights projects ahead of the election in April 1994 that created a nonracial democracy and ended white-minority rule.

The Biehls understand that if Amy’s four convicted killers are granted amnesty and released from their 18-year prison terms, their prospects for employment are bleak. If amnesty is refused and the four men stay in jail, chances of learning a skill in South Africa’s overcrowded prisons are equally minimal.

So Peter Biehl cited prisoner rehabilitation, literacy training and job skills training as three initiatives that the Amy Biehl Foundation could support if asked.

“How do we link arms in friendship and do something?” Peter Biehl asked the hushed hearing room. “We, the Amy Biehl Foundation, are willing to do our part as catalysts for social progress.

“Are you, the community of South Africa, prepared to do your part?”

He said later that he and his wife had brought 50 pounds of literature on prisoner rehabilitation in the hope of sharing that research with South Africans who are interested in getting involved.

“There’s a wealth of epidemiology, if you will, on these subjects, so why not collect the experiences and work with South Africans to come up with something just as unprecedented as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself?” Biehl asked. “Why not? It seems to us that’s the next step.”

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On Friday, the Biehls visited the classroom of the Mosaic project, the largest single initiative supported by the Amy Biehl Foundation. Operating from a community center in the same township of Guguletu where Amy was killed, the Mosaic program is training 18 black women as community service workers specializing in counseling abused women.

Peter Biehl disclosed that Mosaic may soon grow dramatically by adding a major mental-health services education program for township residents. He would not give details, but other sources said the U.S. government is considering a funding request for the project.

Mosaic is run by Rolene Miller, a Cape Town social worker and educator who sat beside the Biehls during the amnesty hearing. Miller never knew Amy; the Biehls say it is often easier to work with those who were not close to their daughter because her friends inevitably feel guilt.

“We don’t consider Amy to have been a victim,” Peter Biehl said. “She was doing what she wanted in life, and she was well aware of the risks and the rewards.”

Amy was not “a blond bimbo” looking naively for excitement in Africa, her father said. Rather, she was a sophisticated Stanford graduate and experienced traveler who had worked in several African countries.

In fact, she had not wanted to make the drive into Guguletu on the afternoon that she died, knowing there had been tension in the township. She agreed to do so only after being asked a second time.

South Africa’s most prominent film producer, Anant Singh, announced Friday that the family has given him permission to produce a movie on Amy’s life, highlighting her courage and her contribution. Singh said American writer Johanna Baldwin has written the script, and production is planned for next year.

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The Biehls have carefully avoided any preaching about South Africa, even to the point of saying it is for South Africans, not them, to forgive Amy’s killers.

“People don’t want foreigners to come in and tell them what to do,” Linda Biehl said. “Amy was involved here in things like assisting with the bill of rights. She was a facilitator. That’s our role as well.”

The parents said they have other interests beyond South Africa, including their other three children, and that they hold no hatred of the four men convicted of killing their daughter.

Linda Biehl asked, “Why should we allow these guys to stop the rest of our lives?”

Peter Biehl agreed that the couple would be handing their daughter’s killers an insidious victory if the family stopped living and stopped having a future.

Through Mosaic and other ventures flowing from the foundation’s work, “Amy’s death is producing life,” Peter Biehl said. “I just hope that never becomes cliched.”