Mass grave discoveries opens old wounds

Jelanee Nghipandoka stared at the bones neatly laid out on brown police bags: rows of thigh bones, rows of shin bones, heaps of knuckle bones, skulls in one corner and loose jaws lined up in the middle with a few loose teeth lying next to them. "Could the remains of my son be among those bones? He never returned from exile after joining the liberation struggle," the elderly man said through an interpreter. The white sand of northern Namibia glittered in the hot sun when villagers of Eenhana were finally allowed to view the mass grave discovered by chance when bulldozers unearthed layers of sand for a new sewerage system near an old South Africa military base, which is now occupied by former freedom fighters who are soldiers of the Namibia Defence Force. "It hurt me when I was informed about the mass graves. It still hurts, these are [the remains of] our people lying there," said President Hifikepunye Pohamba when he visited the site. "I call on all former fighters on both sides to come forward and inform the government of further grave sites," Pohamba pleaded. "Nothing will happen to you, nothing, we adopted the policy of national reconciliation at independence in 1990." But it might be exactly because of this policy that many have been denied the knowledge of what happened to their loved ones during the country's protracted liberation struggle. Calls for a truth and reconciliation commission, to allow for revelations and forgiveness, were met with the standard phrase, "we have the reconciliation policy", recited like a mantra by the ruling SWAPO party, which has won every election since independence in 1990. "For over fifteen years the government kept silent on these graves", said Phil ya Nangoloh, himself a former SWAPO fighter, now the executive director of the National Society for Human Rights. "Immediately after independence the new government should have unearthed the liberation fighters for possible identification and reburial, so that we all could deal with the past," noted Ya Nangoloh, who is at the forefront of calls for a South African-modelled truth and reconciliation commission. When a year of transition towards Namibia's independence started on 1 April 1989, South African army and police contingents were confined to their bases in northern Namibia. All SWAPO combatants were supposed to be north of the 16th parallel in southern Angola. Some UN military observers were already in the country, but not deployed in the north, which had seen some of the most intense fighting during the war. It remains a mystery why hundreds of heavily armed fighters from SWAPO's military wing PLAN (People's Liberation Army of Namibia) crossed the border from southern Angola into Namibia on the night of 31 March 1989, triggering heavy clashes with South African army and para-military forces that lasted for nine days. UN special representative Martti Ahtisaari reluctantly gave the go ahead for South African troops and police units to leave their barracks to stop the incursion. The fighting nearly derailed the peace process and intensive diplomatic negotiations were necessary over the next two weeks to get the peace process back on track. Since then, each side has blamed the other for having fired the first shots and breaching the UN peace accord. The engagement cost the lives of some 300 PLAN fighters and 26 South Africans. Yet neither side has given a proper account of what transpired. Instead former president Sam Nujoma, who still holds the SWAPO presidency, has laid the blame at the door of the apartheid regime in Pretoria and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. "It was a plot designed in Pretoria to attack our combatants," Nujoma said in Windhoek this week. "Thatcher sneaked into Namibia on 31 March and in a meeting with then foreign affairs mister of South Africa, Pik Botha, that country's administrator general Louis Pienaar and UN representative Martti Ahtisaari, where it was decided to attack the PLAN fighters," according to Nujoma. The PLAN combatants had simply wanted to report to UN bases and hand in their weapons, Nujoma maintained. But there were no UN bases defined at that time in the north and he did not explain why the 1,900 combatants chose to cross over the boarder at night. It is not only the fate of those who died in 1989 that remains unclear. PLAN fighters killed in skirmishes since the 1970's were hastily buried by local villagers, often on the instructions of the South Africans and at gunpoint. But their graves were not marked and remain so since independence. Only after the recent appeal of President Pohamba, villagers and former "Koevoet" (Crowbar) members - the notorious South African-trained paramilitary unit that had several hundred Namibians on their payroll - have come forward anonymously to give information on likely burial sites. Apart from the seven sites identified in the first two weeks of this month, three more were dug up and human remains found, the local Namibian newspaper reported on Friday. "Altogether 11 [new] places were identified, but our units only managed to dig at three of them so far and remains were found," regional police commander Christoph Nakanyala told the newspaper. A local villager told the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) this week that he had to bury seven PLAN fighters around 1983 near a cattle kraal (pen). "They came with their casspirs [armoured vehicles] and got stuck in the mud, it was the rainy season. To make the vehicle lighter, they dropped the corpses of seven combatants and told us to bury them, which we did," the man told NBC. He had kept silent until this month. Namibians have yet to come to terms with this troubled chapter in their country's turbulent history.