About this site

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

Human Rights Issues

On the next 35 pages Monitor presents four articles.

The first is a photo essay which, when read together with Prof Du Toit's interview at the beginning of the book, makes for sobering reading. The essay is on the white right, and the paramilitary training some members of this broadly defined sub-group are at present undergoing.

The photographs were by Guy Tillim, and the accompanying text is by Hans Brandt. This text, revealing the subject group's interwoven racism, confusion, fear, xenophobia and belligerance, goes a long way to explain the soul of what Van Zyl Slabbert, in a previous Monitor, described as the "bushveld Rambo" syndrome. In that Monitor, Prof Slabbert divided the white right into three groupings: the "bushveld Rambos"; the genuine partitionists; and those who have fled for cover from the perceived consequences of NP policy.

It is good to remember that the bushveld Rambos are just a subgroup of the group that is the white right, and it is a small subgroup at best. On democratic criteria, it is ignorable. The problem is its potential for impacting on society by undemocratic means. And here we return to Prof Du Toit's interview in this Monitor, and to the photographs and the text. And our concerns grow.

Following this essay Monitor presents two large excerpts from the newly released SA Law Commission's Interim Report on Group and Human Rights. The Law Commission's report is in fact over seven hundred pages long and includes the summary that is reprinted here for Monitor's readers. The draft bill proposed in the Commission's report is also reprinted here. These documents are followed by a comment from Prof Gerhard Erasmus which puts the Law Commission's report into a broader perspective.

Monitor has previously reproduced the ANC's draft Bill of Rights, with articles of commentary. In fact, Monitor believes that a collection of Monitor magazines provides the best selection of documents and articles on South Africa that one will find in any journal. Certainly the most comprehensive. That is Monitor's unique service, and its handwriting.

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. Return to theThis resource is hosted by the site.