The Courier-Mail and the 1971 Brisbane Springbok riot

Today’s Courier-Mail has a front page splash that purports to tell the “real story behind a Queensland political myth”. The article is about former premier Peter Beattie’s involvement in the 1971 Springbok tour riot in Brisbane and a vintage picture of the former Premier complete with impressive 70s style moustache adorns the front page. The article is based on a newly released police dossier which the Courier-Mail trumpets as “Forty years on, the facts come out”.

The bland inside headline of “Two sides to every story” hides far more than it reveals. With Beattie among 400 protesters facing off against 500 police there were at least 900 sides to this story, not to mention the important parts played by politicians, the unions and the media, of which the Courier-Mail was the most craven example. Given the subsequent revelations about Queensland’s police corruption and their role in the brutal repression of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era with the complicity of the media, a 64-page police dossier from the time is hardly to be trusted as an independent verification of what happened. Nor is today’s article the first time “the facts” have come out about the 1971 riot.

The best story of what happened when the white South African rugby team came to Brisbane during the Apartheid era was told in 2004 by Raymond Evans' “Springbok Tour Confrontation”, a chapter in Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (edited by Evans and Carole Ferrier).

Evans began his account with an ABC audio tape of Sounds of the Seventies. Protesters and foreign journalists (the local ones at the Courier-Mail stayed on the police side of the line) recounted events with fear audible in their voices. “[The police] just chased us with a big grin on their faces,” said one. “When people got to the bottom of the hill, they realised they had been trapped. I think that’s when they started to be brutal,” said another.

The voices were describing the events of the cold winter’s night of Thursday, 22 July 1971. The Springbok tour party was staying at the Tower Mill Motel on Brisbane’s Wickham Terrace. They were separated from the 400 protesters by a line of 500 quasi-military style police officers. The protest turnout was poorer than expected partly because of the police intimidation and partly because Brisbanites bought the official line “sport and politics should not mix”.

That this cliché was an easily exposed fiction did not matter - the media did not expose it. Both federal and state political leaders were quick to use the tour to bolster their faltering credentials. Fast-fading Liberal PM Billy McMahon provided RAAF transport after civilian carriers refused to carry the Springboks. He also opened up Enoggera Barracks to house the additional police Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen called in.

But while the Springboks did not save the PM, it amply served the Premier. Joh was in the job less than 2 years and still untested when he began to try out anti-democratic practices which became familiar in the next 16 years. Eight days before the game, he declared a State of Emergency to secure the Exhibition Grounds, suspending civil liberties for a month in the process. The legislation gave police carte blanche to treat protesters as they liked. The day before the Mill protest, 200 students marched to the city centre. 36 were arrested as police applied excessive force. TV cameramen and press photographers were also hassled by police and had their film confiscated.

Trade unionists kept out of the protests believing the convenient lie about sport and politics. But unions had make life awkward for Joh in the lead-up. The game had to be played at the Exhibition Grounds because BWIU unionists blackbanned essential plumbing works at the Ballymore rugby ground. The BWIU also halted the production of police batons and the AMIEU stopped the transport of police horses to the demonstration. But on the night of the protest, most sports-loving unionists stayed away from Tower Mill. It was students like Beattie who filled the police cells that night. It was easier to demonise the students in the media as hippies and long-haired layabouts. The other major protesters were Aboriginals who paralleled South Africa with Queensland. This was a truth the media could also ignore. After all, weren't Queensland's Aboriginals, as Joh said, "living on clover"?

The numbers of students, aboriginals and academics outside the Mill was swollen by plain clothes police who acted as agent provocateurs. With no warning, the line of uniformed police marched forward and ordered the protesters to clear the footpath. The demonstrators were forced to flee down the steep and pitch-dark hill into Wickham Park. The police attacked with fists, batons and boots as plain-clothes colleagues joined in. Some protesters escaped by jumping an eight metre high embankment into the busy traffic of Albert Street below. Some were simply thrown over.

Others still, including Beattie, sought sanctuary in the nearby Trades Hall building near Jacob's Ladder (now demolished to make way for the IBM building). One unionist saw a girl held and punched by police while a youth (later identified as Beattie) was also jumped on and held to the floor. Two of the three police attacking him were forcibly ejected from the building and the third became frightened when he realised he was alone. The last policeman, Lindsay Daniels left the injured Beattie alone and became quiet. He was wearing two different police numbers at least one of which was wrenched off by students who now greatly outnumbered him.

Outside, 50 police attempted to gain entry to the building. When ambulance officers were allowed admission, police followed them in and were restrained only because they were accompanied by an inspector. Beattie was taken under armed guard to the orthopaedic ward of the Royal Brisbane Hospital for observation of suspected spinal injuries. According to the Courier-Mail report, two doctors told police no excessive force was used in the attack.

According to another report years later quoted by Evans, Beattie said he was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest though he was the one assaulted. “I will never forgive or forget what happened next,” Beattie said. “I was verballed by the police who manufactured the most incredible statements about the whole thing.” Beattie was later released on bail and police never pressed charges.

The day after, angry students at the University of Queensland held a political strike. That night protesters significantly outnumbered police at the Mill and officers refrained from repeating their tactics from the night before. The day after was the Saturday of the game. Just 6,000 attended instead of the anticipated 30,000 full house. With the Oval ringed by barbed wire, protesters demonstrated in nearby Victoria Park instead. 2,000 people turned up faced by 900 police. Led by Labor Senator George Georges, marchers went down Fortitude Valley and into the city conducting the first sit-in at Queen Street. Violence was minimal during the day as Labor MP Bill Hayden urged caution. But the peace did not last.

After some outbreaks of violence in the city, a thousand gathered once more at the Mill that evening. Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod commanded his men to drive the protesters down into the park once more. Whitrod, who was inside the motel, claimed the police charge was in response to a rock thrown into a motel window. The offending missile was never produced and glaziers called to fix the window insisted the fall of the glass suggested it was broken from inside. But with country officers present threatening a no confidence motion in Whitrod’s “soft handling" of demonstrators, he was determined to act tough. He was supported by Joh who wanted to “stop all this business of going soft on all these demonstrations” because he could see it “leading to complete anarchy”.

The only anarchy in town that weekend was caused by rampaging police officers sanctioned by the Government while the Courier-Mail looked the other way. 40 years on, the paper is as cowardly as ever, preferring to concentrate on the irrelevant issue of whether Beattie called the police “pigs” rather than question the nature of the assault. The Springbok riot set the template for one and half decades of police brutality and corruption sanctioned by an undemocratic Premier who could hose down a meek press simply by “feeding the chooks”.

50th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre

Sunday was the fiftieth anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, a day now called Human Rights Day, which was celebrated with rare political unity. According to The Sowetan a service was held at the Sharpeville cricket stadium which was attended by members of the ANC, United Democratic Movement, Democratic Alliance, African People's Convention, Independent Democrats and Inkatha Freedom Party. Each of the political parties present was given two minutes to deliver speeches. Keynote speaker Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said the people had to take ownership of history both as various political organisations and members of society. “A common ownership of our history is the basis of nation building and must never be undermined by any interest group based on the subjectivity of race, class or ideology,” he said. (picture GALLO/GETTY)

The Sharpeville Massacre was a brutal event which shaped South African politics, both black and white for the next half a century. White police killed 69 black people and wounded 178 during a demonstration against segregation laws. While the massacre was instrumental in focussing world anger on the apartheid system, it also exacerbated political tensions within the black community between the ANC and the breakaway Pan Africanist Congress, which exist to this day.

Sharpeville was a small township built to service the white industrial cities of Vanderbijlpark and Vereeniging. Here itinerant black workers would live in shanty-towns and earned a pittance in the nearby coal and steel industries. On 21 March 1960 the PAC organised a peaceful protest as part of their campaign against the pass system for black South Africans which severely limited their movements. PAC was a hardline organisation founded a year earlier as a breakaway from the ANC after the latter instituted its Freedom Charter with its commitment to a non racial South Africa.

The protests against the pass laws were the ANC’s idea and were due to start on 31 March 1960. But the PAC pre-empted them with the Sharpeville protest. On 21 March, about 6,000 people converged on the local police station offering themselves up for arrest for not carrying pass books. There were a small number of officers inside the station but they were not too worried as the atmosphere was peaceful. But as the crowd grew during the day, it got more tense. Police rushed in 130 reinforcements in Saracen armoured cars. They were supported by sabre jets who buzzed the crowd in an effort to scatter them.

When the crowd responded by throwing stones, the officer began making arrests. A fight broke out and the crowd advanced towards the police fence. What happened next is disputed. Hendrik Verwoerd, the then prime minister claimed that the protesters had shot first – though no arms were found on any of the protesters or victims. The police report later that year said inexperienced and panicky officers opened fire setting off a chain reaction. However evidence given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 34 years later said the police action was deliberate.

What was not disputed was the death toll. 69 died including 8 women and 10 children, and over 180 were injured, including 31 women and 19 children. Many were shot in the back. In the week that followed, blacks across the country were enraged and there were demonstrations, protest marches, strikes and riots. On 30 March the government declared a state of emergency and arrested almost 20,000 people. The UN condemned the massacre and a year later the UN Security Council passed resolution 134 concerning ”the situation arising out of the large-scale killings of unarmed and peaceful demonstrators against racial discrimination and segregation in the Union of South Africa”. Of the permanent members only Britain and France abstained and foreign investors quickly pulled out of the country. Sharpeville played a crucial part in the gradual isolation of racist South Africa.

As a result of the massacre both the PAC and the ANC were banned leading to the radicalisation of both organisations and formation of their military wings. All of these events would lead to the ultimate collapse of the apartheid regime in the late 1980s. Author Millard W. Arnold said the ban and heavy-handed crackdown had "welded together three generations of black people united in their opposition to Apartheid." South Africa would have to endure 30 more years of pain before Sharpeville could be forgiven, if never forgotten. The TRC would eventually find the police actions constituted "gross human rights violations in that excessive force was unnecessarily used to stop a gathering of unarmed people” but its terms of reference meant that no one was charged for the crime. Perhaps it is best it is so. It means only the marginalised PAC (which got 0.27 percent of the electoral vote in 2009) still look back ruefully on Sharpeville and think what might have been.

Rolling out Rohlilahla: London unveils Nelson Mandela statue

Nelson Mandela will attend an unveiling of his statue opposite the British houses of parliaments on Wednesday this week. The 89-year-old Nobel laureate’s statue will stand alongside the figures of former British Prime ministers Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli. Announcing Mandela’s presence, London mayor Ken Livingstone said Friday that putting the statue in Parliament Square reflected Mandela's place as a world statesman and as "one of the key political figures of our time". "There can be no better way for this statue to be unveiled than with Nelson Mandela himself present," he said.

Nelson Mandela was born Rohlilahla Mandela in the small village of Mvezo, on the Mbashe River on 18 July 1918. The village was near the city of Umtata (now Mthatha) in the Eastern Cape province of Transkei. Rohlilalha means "to pull a branch of a tree", and also colloquially, "troublemaker". Mandela was minor royalty. His father was the principal councillor to the Acting Paramount Chief of Thembuland.

Rohlilahla was sent to an English school, aged 7 and found a teacher who could not pronounce his name. Instead he called him Nelson in honour of the hero of Trafalgar. After his father’s death 2 years later, young Mandela was sent away to become the Paramount Chief’s ward. He was to be groomed to assume high office. From the regent, Mandela said, he learned "a leader ... is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go on ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind."

However, influenced by the cases that came before the Chief s court, he became determined to become a lawyer, not a leader. Mandela went to a Wesleyan secondary school called Healdtown and then enrolled at the University College of Fort Hare where he was elected onto the Student's Representative Council. But he was soon suspended for joining in a protest boycott. He went to Johannesburg where he completed his BA by correspondence. Mandela became a legal clerk and commenced study for his law degree. While studying for this degree in Johannesburg he joined the African National Congress (ANC) in 1942.

The ANC advocated a political settlement to the dispossession of the blacks. Their plight was made worse in 1948 when the National Party won power on a platform of opposition to support for Britain in World War II. Once in power they outlined their system of separateness. That election institutionalised racism in South Africa as the newly elected government began to enact its apartheid laws. Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning apartness or separateness. Race laws touched every aspect of social life, including a prohibition of marriage between non-whites and whites, and the sanctioning of ``white-only'' jobs, preferment and public spaces. In 1950, they went one step further with the Population Registration Act which required all South Africans be racially classified into one of three categories: white, black (African), or coloured (of mixed decent or Asian).

In response the ANC launched its Defiance Campaign of non-violent resistance with Mandela as its volunteer-in-chief. Mandela was arrested for violating the Suppression of Communism Act. He was found guilty but got a sentence of nine months imprisonment suspended for two years. The National Party government banned him from all public appearances in 1952 and again from 1953 to 1955. In 1953, the Nationals passed the Public Safety Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act which empowered the government to declare states of emergency and increased penalties for protesting against or supporting the repeal of a law.

In 1960, a large group of blacks in Sharpeville near Vereeniging in Transvaal began a protest and refused to carry their passes. The government declared a state of emergency. On 21 March, ANC’s rivals the Pan African Congress organised a protest march. Vereeniging was the march’s emotive choice: it was the site of the treaty which ended the Anglo-Boer War in 1902. After a hostile protest, nervous police opened fire on the crowd. Somewhere between 50 and 75 of the police opened fire. With emergency services slow to arrive, 69 people were killed and another 187 people were wounded.

Though it wasn’t their march, Sharpeville was a profound influence on the ANC and Mandela. They both lost their pacifism and formed the military wing of the ANC known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation” and abbreviated as MK) in 1961. Mandela was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to five years' imprisonment with hard labour. In 1963 Mandela was brought back to stand trial for plotting to overthrow the government by violence. His statement from the dock received considerable international publicity.

On 12 June 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. From 1964 to 1982, he was held at the forbidding Robben Island Prison, 12kms off Cape Town with the party’s leadership. In 1982 he was moved to the low security prison at Pollsmoor on the mainland. Mandela’s ability to make friends with prisoners and jailers alike became legendary. Despite the greater comfort of Pollsmoor, the transition distressed Mandela because of the loss of camaraderie and vibrant intellectual and cultural life the party’s leaders established on the island.

As the years of his sentence grew, so did his international reputation. “Free Nelson Mandela” became a catchcry. In 1983, the British ska band The Special’s Jerry Dammer turned catchcry into a hit single “Nelson Mandela”. The lyrics “I say Free Nelson Mandela/
I'm begging you/Free Nelson Mandela” sunk into the Western public conscience as a guilty meme. In February 1985 National Party President P.W. Botha offered Mandela conditional release in return for renouncing armed struggle. Mandela responded "What freedom am I being offered while the organisation of the people remains banned? Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts”. New President F.W. de Klerk finally released him unconditionally on 11 February 1990 after 28 years of imprisonment.

After his release from prison, Mandela emerged as the world's most significant moral leader since Mahatma Gandhi. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with de Klerk in 1993. A year later, Mandela won outright power with the ANC winning the election with 63 percent of the vote. Mandela orchestrated a successful transition to black rule with the much-feared right-wing white rebellion never coming to fruition. Mandela endeared himself to the white population by encouraging the nation to get behind the Springboks in the 1995 World Cup. It didn’t hurt his cause that South Africa won the tournament. Mandela retired to world acclaim in 1999 and has since been a prestigious ambassador for South Africa, black Africa, black and humanitarian causes.

In the year he won election in 1994, he also published his much anticipated autobiography "A Long Walk to Freedom". In one episode of the book Mandela recalled a visit to London with his fellow anti-Apartheid campaigner Oliver Tambo. "When we saw the statue of General Smuts near Westminster Abbey, Oliver and I joked that perhaps someday there would be a statue of us in its stead," he wrote. Instead he now stands unveiled next to Smuts in the pantheon of British-endorsed greats.