Abstract

Watching Rights

With nonracial elections around the corner, most of the position papers emerging from African National Congress (ANC) headquarters at Shell House focus on the urgent economic needs of the country's deprived majority: housing, jobs, land distribution, education, health care, electricity, water, sanitation. Those needs are overwhelming and, despite the country's great riches, it is hardly possible to overstate the magnitude of the task that awaits the former prisoners and returned exiles who will fill top offices in the government about to emerge. The new South African government will probably turn to it immediately following the elections, which will occur from April 26 through 28. Yet the area for action is already circumscribed. During the campaign, the ANC leadership is well aware of the importance to the national psyche of identifying responsibility for state criminality. Especially crucial will be the question of the role of the police in instigating, organizing or facilitating such crimes as the train massacres, the raids by hostel dwellers and the thousands of other politically motivated killings of township and shantytown residents over the course of more than a decade.