The purpose of the Public Protector Act is to provide for matters incidental to the office of the Public Protector as contemplated in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996; and to provide for matters connected therewith.
WHEREAS sections 181 to 183 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (Act No 108 of 1996), provide for the establishment of the office of Public Protector and that the Public Protector has the power, as regulated by national legislation, to investigate any conduct in state affairs, or in the public administration in any sphere of government, that is alleged or suspected to be improper or to have resulted in any impropriety or prejudice, to report on that conduct and to take appropriate remedial action, in order to strengthen and support constitutional democracy in the Republic;
AND WHEREAS sections 193 and 194 of the Constitution provide for a mechanism for the appointment and removal of the Public Protector;
AND WHEREAS the Constitution envisages further legislation to provide for certain ancillary matters pertaining to the office of Public Protector:
Establishment and appointment
(1) There shall be a Public Protector for the Republic.
(2) The President shall, whenever it becomes necessary, appoint a Public Protector in accordance with the provisions of section 193 of the Constitution.
(3) The Public Protector shall be a South African citizen who is a fit and proper person to hold such office, and who-
(a) is a Judge of a High Court; or
(b) is admitted as an advocate or an attorney and has, for a cumulative period of at least 10 years after having been so admitted, practised as an advocate or an attorney; or
(c) is qualified to be admitted as an advocate or an attorney and has, for a cumulative period of at least 10 years after having so qualified, lectured in law at a university; or
(d) has specialised knowledge of or experience, for a cumulative period of at least 10 years, in the administration of justice, public administration or public finance; or
(e) has, for a cumulative period of at least 10 years, been a member of Parliament; or
(f) has acquired any combination of experience mentioned in paragraphs (b) to (e), for a cumulative period of at least 10 years.
(4) The Public Protector shall not perform remunerative work outside his or her official duties.
Source: SABINET
Friday, November 25, 1994
Friday, November 4, 1994
Police Seize Suspect Obsessed by a Movie
Police officers in Nebraska have captured a Utah teen-ager accused of murdering his stepmother and half-sister after becoming obsessed with the movie "Natural Born Killers."
The 17-year-old suspect, Nathan K. Martinez, was found on Wednesday at a motel in the town of O'Neill, in northeastern Nebraska.
Mr. Martinez is charged in Utah with two counts of aggravated murder in the slaying of his 42-year-old stepmother, Lauren Martinez, and his half-sister, Alexis Martinez, 10, both of whom were shot in their sleep early Sunday at the family's home in Bluffdale, a suburb of Salt Lake City. Mr. Martinez's father and a brother were away on a hunting trip at the time.
Source: New York Times
The 17-year-old suspect, Nathan K. Martinez, was found on Wednesday at a motel in the town of O'Neill, in northeastern Nebraska.
Mr. Martinez is charged in Utah with two counts of aggravated murder in the slaying of his 42-year-old stepmother, Lauren Martinez, and his half-sister, Alexis Martinez, 10, both of whom were shot in their sleep early Sunday at the family's home in Bluffdale, a suburb of Salt Lake City. Mr. Martinez's father and a brother were away on a hunting trip at the time.
Source: New York Times
Friday, October 28, 1994
'Natural Born Killers' Is Banned in Ireland
Ireland has banned the Oliver Stone film "Natural Born Killers" and the British authorities have delayed release of the movie, which is about a couple on a murderous rampage.
Mr. Stone has defended the film, which stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, as a satire on how the news media can turn serial killers into celebrities.
The film censor in Ireland, Sheamus Smith, announced the ban on Wednesday without giving a reason. The film was to be released in Ireland on Nov. 18.
The British Board of Film Classification is debating whether to give it a certificate, and its release has now been delayed until next year.
"At the moment, it has not got a classification and the board will not make a comment on a film that has not been classified," a spokesman for the board said today.
Source: New York Times
Mr. Stone has defended the film, which stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, as a satire on how the news media can turn serial killers into celebrities.
The film censor in Ireland, Sheamus Smith, announced the ban on Wednesday without giving a reason. The film was to be released in Ireland on Nov. 18.
The British Board of Film Classification is debating whether to give it a certificate, and its release has now been delayed until next year.
"At the moment, it has not got a classification and the board will not make a comment on a film that has not been classified," a spokesman for the board said today.
Source: New York Times
Sunday, September 18, 1994
FILM VIEW; What We Don't Know About TV Could Kill Us
LATE IN THE MEDIA-CRAZED murder spree that is "Natural Born Killers," Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) point their guns at Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), the unctuous Australian star of a tabloid television show. That series, "American Maniacs," has helped make Mickey and Mallory pop-star murderers. Now Mickey turns on the reporter and speaks the truest lines in Oliver Stone's film. He says: "Killing you and what you represent is a statement. I'm not exactly 100 percent sure of what it's saying." But it's a statement, all right.
It wouldn't be fair to reveal whether Mickey pulls the trigger on Wayne, but his confusion about what the trash-TV reporter represents is a perfect reflection of the film's own problems. "Natural Born Killers" seems to say something about the insidious influence of the media -- tabloids and celebrity journalism in print as well as on television. Yet under its entertaining flash-and-dazzle surface, the film's statement is "TV can be a bad influence." No kidding.
"Natural Born Killers" is the first and the least thought-provoking of several films this season that grapple with the love/hate relationship of audiences to the media. Mr. Stone's sensory assault of a movie was followed by Robert Redford's elegant, profound "Quiz Show," which opened on Wednesday. And coming to the New York Film Festival on Oct. 6 is "The Troubles We've Seen," Marcel Ophuls's playfully serious documentary about reporting from Bosnia. When works as different and ambitious as these share a common subject -- that television can turn mass murder, the American dream or even war into entertainment -- the attention to television comes to resemble an obsession.
It's too easy to suggest, though, as "Natural Born Killers" does, that television is the Devil. (A kindhearted American Indian, about to be murdered, sees the words "demon" and "too much TV" superimposed on Mickey.) A sophisticated depiction of television must portray the attraction as well as the repulsion it evokes. Television wouldn't be an overwhelming influence, after all, if people didn't love to watch it.
"Quiz Show" understands television's allure and more; the film's grip on the audience echoes the intense connection between Americans and their favorite shows. The story of how the patrician Charles Van Doren disillusioned the nation when it learned that his game-show victories were rigged goes beyond a simple attack on television. In "Quiz Show" the telegenic Charles Van Doren takes the even grander shape of the movie-star-handsome Ralph Fiennes. This subtle actor's golden-boy manner suggests much about the heroic images -- deeply rooted in American history and dreams of upward mobility -- that television captured and enhanced in the 1950's.
When Herb Stempel (John Turturro), the belligerent loser from Queens, tries to blow the whistle on the deception he has also taken part in, no one -- especially the Harvard-educated Government investigator Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) -- wants to believe that this pathetic creature could be morally superior to the glittering, born-for-stardom Van Doren. The film chooses not to believe it, either. Think of how much less palatable, less mainstream the picture would have been if the central character were Stempel, that hard-to-love, charmless man.
"I have deceived my friends, and I have millions of them," Van Doren tells a Congressional committee in the film. No one stops to question the dizzying truth of that remark. In a way that is both real and absurd, television created bonds of friendship and loyalty between the star and his viewers. Struggling with his conscience, Van Doren goes from hero to fallen hero and remains the All-American no one wants to think badly of.
The strength of Paul Attanasio's script is that it depicts the way immense social issues were played out on the television screen in the days when television was still young. "Quiz Show" is the story of social problems that hadn't yet shattered the calm surface of the Eisenhower years: Protestants vs. Jews, money vs. intelligence, entertainment vs. learning, upper class vs. working class. The brilliance of Mr. Redford's direction is that he captures all this just the way television itself did -- smoothly, the calm surface belying epic battles beneath.
The opening and closing scenes suggest a perilous mass-media journey through history. At the start, crowds rush home to watch the quiz show "Twenty-One," and the NBC network proudly announces that the show is carried "coast to coast." Mr. Redford doesn't lean on the fact that we're witnessing the birth of the global village. He simply places us there.
As the final credits appear, faces of audience members laugh in eerie slow motion, magnified and horrendous. We are looking at ourselves as a hapless audience, appalled at our former naivete. "Quiz Show" stays with you, resonating long after you've left the theater, while the kinetic dazzle of "Natural Born Killers" is gone in a flash.
Yet Mr. Stone, too, has made the movie his subject demanded. "Quiz Show" depicts Van Doren on the cover of Time; "Natural Born Killers" depicts Mickey and Mallory on Newsweek. Not much else has stayed the same. Historically, Mr. Stone's story picks up long after "Quiz Show" ends. Television has turned into a forum for instant, disgusting celebrity, in which Charles Manson is a ratings king.
What the film misses is a sense of why television is alluring, of how a mass-murderer can become a star. The more Mr. Stone strains to say something important, the more the intended satire and substance elude him. He seems to have confused a big idea with a broad, simplistic one.
Critics who have been wringing their hands about the film's violence and shallowness dismiss it too easily, though. "Natural Born Killers" is a hit, its box-office appeal creepily echoing the popularity of shows like "American Maniacs." Surely Mr. Stone intended this mirroring effect, but reflecting the appeal doesn't come close to explaining it.
The perverse appeal of "Natural Born Killers" seems to be that it creates the illusion of making a provocative statement. Yet it never challenges the audience's conventional assumptions about television. The film plays into viewers' fascination with tabloid TV as well as their sneaking suspicion that it's bad for them; "Natural Born Killers" presents itself as a guilty pleasure that audiences don't have to feel guilty about.
And the seductive style provides an edge the film doesn't earn. Mr. Downey is so smarmy, funny and convincing that he makes us forget what a cheap, easy target his character is. The ultra-quick cuts, the cartoonlike inserts, the backdrops of newsreels that connect Mickey and Mallory to World War II are portentous, yet anyone who analyzes the film's lame satire won't be surprised by any of it.
THE BANALITY OF THE film's influence is creepier than anything in the movie. Five days after the film opened and became the No. 1 movie in the country, The New York Daily News ran a front-page story about an accused murderer, under the headline "Natural Born Killer." Two days later, after a man who was convinced that television was poisoning his mind killed an NBC stagehand, the New York Post's page 1 headline read "TV Networks Zapped My Brain" and New York Newsday's front-page headline was "TV Drove Me Crazy." No one can blame Oliver Stone for the way his film is used, but the movie's shallowness encourages a simple-minded view that TV is bad.
The subject of television's influence demands a more complex treatment. Marcel Ophuls, whose previous films have been authoritative historical documents about World War II ("The Sorrow and the Pity" and "Hotel Terminus"), has thrown himself into the subject, too.
"The Troubles We've Seen" is more than a series of interviews with television and newspaper reporters covering Bosnia. Mr. Ophuls interweaves these scenes with newsreels and clips of mainstream movies: Bing Crosby sings "White Christmas" in "Holiday Inn," and the Marx Brothers romp through "Duck Soup." "The Troubles We've Seen" creates the sense of trying to grab history as it swirls around us. Demonstrating that history is created through a mix of movies and reportage, Mr. Ophuls uses the documentary form to consider the difficulty of establishing anything like documentary truth.
If the sense that history is fluid seems obvious, consider the remark of a star anchor on French television. He justifies reality-based programs by telling Mr. Ophuls, "Show me a reality show that reconstructs a reality that didn't exist." The producers of "Twenty-One" and Wayne Gale himself couldn't have said it better.
Source: New York Times
It wouldn't be fair to reveal whether Mickey pulls the trigger on Wayne, but his confusion about what the trash-TV reporter represents is a perfect reflection of the film's own problems. "Natural Born Killers" seems to say something about the insidious influence of the media -- tabloids and celebrity journalism in print as well as on television. Yet under its entertaining flash-and-dazzle surface, the film's statement is "TV can be a bad influence." No kidding.
"Natural Born Killers" is the first and the least thought-provoking of several films this season that grapple with the love/hate relationship of audiences to the media. Mr. Stone's sensory assault of a movie was followed by Robert Redford's elegant, profound "Quiz Show," which opened on Wednesday. And coming to the New York Film Festival on Oct. 6 is "The Troubles We've Seen," Marcel Ophuls's playfully serious documentary about reporting from Bosnia. When works as different and ambitious as these share a common subject -- that television can turn mass murder, the American dream or even war into entertainment -- the attention to television comes to resemble an obsession.
It's too easy to suggest, though, as "Natural Born Killers" does, that television is the Devil. (A kindhearted American Indian, about to be murdered, sees the words "demon" and "too much TV" superimposed on Mickey.) A sophisticated depiction of television must portray the attraction as well as the repulsion it evokes. Television wouldn't be an overwhelming influence, after all, if people didn't love to watch it.
"Quiz Show" understands television's allure and more; the film's grip on the audience echoes the intense connection between Americans and their favorite shows. The story of how the patrician Charles Van Doren disillusioned the nation when it learned that his game-show victories were rigged goes beyond a simple attack on television. In "Quiz Show" the telegenic Charles Van Doren takes the even grander shape of the movie-star-handsome Ralph Fiennes. This subtle actor's golden-boy manner suggests much about the heroic images -- deeply rooted in American history and dreams of upward mobility -- that television captured and enhanced in the 1950's.
When Herb Stempel (John Turturro), the belligerent loser from Queens, tries to blow the whistle on the deception he has also taken part in, no one -- especially the Harvard-educated Government investigator Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) -- wants to believe that this pathetic creature could be morally superior to the glittering, born-for-stardom Van Doren. The film chooses not to believe it, either. Think of how much less palatable, less mainstream the picture would have been if the central character were Stempel, that hard-to-love, charmless man.
"I have deceived my friends, and I have millions of them," Van Doren tells a Congressional committee in the film. No one stops to question the dizzying truth of that remark. In a way that is both real and absurd, television created bonds of friendship and loyalty between the star and his viewers. Struggling with his conscience, Van Doren goes from hero to fallen hero and remains the All-American no one wants to think badly of.
The strength of Paul Attanasio's script is that it depicts the way immense social issues were played out on the television screen in the days when television was still young. "Quiz Show" is the story of social problems that hadn't yet shattered the calm surface of the Eisenhower years: Protestants vs. Jews, money vs. intelligence, entertainment vs. learning, upper class vs. working class. The brilliance of Mr. Redford's direction is that he captures all this just the way television itself did -- smoothly, the calm surface belying epic battles beneath.
The opening and closing scenes suggest a perilous mass-media journey through history. At the start, crowds rush home to watch the quiz show "Twenty-One," and the NBC network proudly announces that the show is carried "coast to coast." Mr. Redford doesn't lean on the fact that we're witnessing the birth of the global village. He simply places us there.
As the final credits appear, faces of audience members laugh in eerie slow motion, magnified and horrendous. We are looking at ourselves as a hapless audience, appalled at our former naivete. "Quiz Show" stays with you, resonating long after you've left the theater, while the kinetic dazzle of "Natural Born Killers" is gone in a flash.
Yet Mr. Stone, too, has made the movie his subject demanded. "Quiz Show" depicts Van Doren on the cover of Time; "Natural Born Killers" depicts Mickey and Mallory on Newsweek. Not much else has stayed the same. Historically, Mr. Stone's story picks up long after "Quiz Show" ends. Television has turned into a forum for instant, disgusting celebrity, in which Charles Manson is a ratings king.
What the film misses is a sense of why television is alluring, of how a mass-murderer can become a star. The more Mr. Stone strains to say something important, the more the intended satire and substance elude him. He seems to have confused a big idea with a broad, simplistic one.
Critics who have been wringing their hands about the film's violence and shallowness dismiss it too easily, though. "Natural Born Killers" is a hit, its box-office appeal creepily echoing the popularity of shows like "American Maniacs." Surely Mr. Stone intended this mirroring effect, but reflecting the appeal doesn't come close to explaining it.
The perverse appeal of "Natural Born Killers" seems to be that it creates the illusion of making a provocative statement. Yet it never challenges the audience's conventional assumptions about television. The film plays into viewers' fascination with tabloid TV as well as their sneaking suspicion that it's bad for them; "Natural Born Killers" presents itself as a guilty pleasure that audiences don't have to feel guilty about.
And the seductive style provides an edge the film doesn't earn. Mr. Downey is so smarmy, funny and convincing that he makes us forget what a cheap, easy target his character is. The ultra-quick cuts, the cartoonlike inserts, the backdrops of newsreels that connect Mickey and Mallory to World War II are portentous, yet anyone who analyzes the film's lame satire won't be surprised by any of it.
THE BANALITY OF THE film's influence is creepier than anything in the movie. Five days after the film opened and became the No. 1 movie in the country, The New York Daily News ran a front-page story about an accused murderer, under the headline "Natural Born Killer." Two days later, after a man who was convinced that television was poisoning his mind killed an NBC stagehand, the New York Post's page 1 headline read "TV Networks Zapped My Brain" and New York Newsday's front-page headline was "TV Drove Me Crazy." No one can blame Oliver Stone for the way his film is used, but the movie's shallowness encourages a simple-minded view that TV is bad.
The subject of television's influence demands a more complex treatment. Marcel Ophuls, whose previous films have been authoritative historical documents about World War II ("The Sorrow and the Pity" and "Hotel Terminus"), has thrown himself into the subject, too.
"The Troubles We've Seen" is more than a series of interviews with television and newspaper reporters covering Bosnia. Mr. Ophuls interweaves these scenes with newsreels and clips of mainstream movies: Bing Crosby sings "White Christmas" in "Holiday Inn," and the Marx Brothers romp through "Duck Soup." "The Troubles We've Seen" creates the sense of trying to grab history as it swirls around us. Demonstrating that history is created through a mix of movies and reportage, Mr. Ophuls uses the documentary form to consider the difficulty of establishing anything like documentary truth.
If the sense that history is fluid seems obvious, consider the remark of a star anchor on French television. He justifies reality-based programs by telling Mr. Ophuls, "Show me a reality show that reconstructs a reality that didn't exist." The producers of "Twenty-One" and Wayne Gale himself couldn't have said it better.
Source: New York Times
Wednesday, September 7, 1994
2 Ohioans Arrested in Series of Slayings
It was a cross-country crime rampage that began in rural Ohio one week ago with a stolen car, a missing woman and two male suspects. One was an ex-convict fresh out of prison, a man found guilty both of theft and of once biting his own baby so hard that he drew blood. The other was a gangly, troubled 16-year-old described as "a follower," not a violent criminal, by his hometown police chief.
The rampage turned murderous three times over in Missouri and Oklahoma, where the victims' cars were stolen after automobiles taken in previous crimes were abandoned. And it ended this morning, after a nationwide manhunt, with arrests in a dusty culvert at the edge of the mountains around Santa Fe.
But even after serving Federal warrants to 22-year-old Lewis E. Gilbert 2d and Eric A. Elliott, 16, the authorities in Ohio and F.B.I. officials remained puzzled over one peculiar psychological element, uncertain whether the teen-ager had been a willing accomplice, a terrified hostage or something in between.
These authorities said their first priority today was to try to find the missing Ohio woman, 79-year-old Ruth Lucille Loader, who, if still alive, might be able to shed some light on Eric Elliott's motivations. Asleep in a Ditch
The two men were apprehended as they lay in a ditch outside Santa Fe about 9:40 A.M., said Chief John Denko of the New Mexico state police.
Although they had two rifles, a shotgun and a handgun with them, "nothing bad happened" at the arrest scene, said Chief Denko, apparently because the two were taken by surprise as they slept. The police had received two telephone tips about suspicious people in the area.
The suspects were taken to Albuquerque and late this afternoon were charged before a United States magistrate, Lorenzo Garcia, with flight from prosecution. The authorities indicated that the two suspects would soon be extradited to Ohio.
Mr. Gilbert was released from state prison in Ohio on Aug. 15 after serving 11 months of an 18-month sentence for stealing a boat and breaking and entering. Although he had also been convicted of child endangering for a November 1992 incident in which he shook and bit his 3 1/2-month-old son, he was not assigned additional time and received "good time" credit for his behavior in prison, reducing his sentence for the other crimes, said Joe Andrews, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
When he left prison, the 6-foot-4-inch Mr. Gilbert returned almost immediately to Newcomerstown, Ohio, the home of his estranged wife and a place where he was well known to the local authorities.
"With the dealings we've had with him in the past, I consider him a violent person," said the Newcomerstown Police Chief, James Friel. But that was not true of Mr. Elliott, the teen-ager with whom Mr. Gilbert apparently crossed paths shortly after his release.
"Eric seemed like a clean-cut kid," recalled Chief Friel, who said the teen-ager had been working recently as a clerk in the local grocery. "But Eric is the type of individual I would classify as a follower." 'A Typical Teen'
That tendency apparently led Mr. Elliott to be involved in a break-in at the Cy Young Lanes, a local bowling alley, in late July. That brush with the law was his first. About $30 in change from vending machines and some liquor were taken, the owner, Leman Clark, said today in a telephone interview.
"I thought he was a typical teen," Mr. Clark said, recalling his impressions of Mr. Elliott before the break-in. "I didn't think he was a bad kid."
Chief Friel said Eric had been frightened almost to tears by his arrest and pending trial. "He was worried about it constantly, calling the officer to find out what was going on," Chief Friel said. "I don't know if meeting Gilbert pushed him over the edge or what."
Last week Mr. Elliott was spotted with Mr. Gilbert in a 1989 Buick Skylark belonging to the 79-year-old Mrs. Loader, who had been at her farmhouse in Port Washington, Ohio, a few miles from Newcomerstown, recovering from cancer surgery. She is still missing, and the authorities say they fear she was killed for her car.
The Skylark automobile turned up last Thursday more than 600 miles away in Fulton, Mo., stuck in the mud. A few miles from where it was abandoned, the authorities found the bodies of 86-year-old William Brewer and his wife, Flossie, 76, in their home. They had been robbed, and each had been shot three times in the head. Searching for Motive
And their car, a 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass, was missing. On Sunday, it turned up, also abandoned, on the shore of Lake Stanley Draper, near Oklahoma City. A few hundred feet away, the police found the body of Roxie Ruddel, 37, a security guard at the lake marina. She had been shot to death, and her 1991 Dodge pickup truck was missing. In New Mexico this morning, the state police said, they found an abandoned Dodge truck with Oklahoma license plates a few miles from the culvert where Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Elliott were apprehended, although the authorities have not positively identified it as the one belonging to Ms. Ruddel.
Now the authorities are trying to piece together the crimes, search for a motive. In no case, the authorities said, did the assailants make off with more than $40 in cash.
Officials are also trying to figure out just how willing and active a role Mr. Elliott may have played. His father, Robert, of Cleveland, insisted in recent days that Mr. Elliott was not prone to violence and must have been coerced somehow by Mr. Gilbert.
"Maybe he is in fear to where he thinks he has to go along with what is happening," the father told The Daily Oklahoman over the weekend. "The more I hear reports on this fellow he's supposed to be with, the more concerned I get."
An F.B.I. special agent in Cleveland, Robert Hawk, said, "I'm unaware of any hostage situation, but that's something that will be looked at by us and local authorities."
The intrigue over the case was also compounded by the fact that it appeared to offer eerie overtones of life imitating the movies. As the pair and made their way west, they became the object of widespread news reports, and their violent, seemingly pointless mission was compared to the one depicted in "Natural Born Killers," the recently released Oliver Stone film about the murderous escapades of two deranged lovers.
Still, despite the similarities, the police cautioned today that no evidence had turned up that either suspect had been motivated by the movie or had even seen it.
In Newcomerstown, a rural community of about 12,000 people in south central Ohio, homicide has simply not been a fact of life. "I can't remember when they had a murder down there," said the Tuscarawas County Sheriff, Harold McKimmie. "I've been in office 12 years, and we've never had a murder there in that section of the county."
Source: New York Times
The rampage turned murderous three times over in Missouri and Oklahoma, where the victims' cars were stolen after automobiles taken in previous crimes were abandoned. And it ended this morning, after a nationwide manhunt, with arrests in a dusty culvert at the edge of the mountains around Santa Fe.
But even after serving Federal warrants to 22-year-old Lewis E. Gilbert 2d and Eric A. Elliott, 16, the authorities in Ohio and F.B.I. officials remained puzzled over one peculiar psychological element, uncertain whether the teen-ager had been a willing accomplice, a terrified hostage or something in between.
These authorities said their first priority today was to try to find the missing Ohio woman, 79-year-old Ruth Lucille Loader, who, if still alive, might be able to shed some light on Eric Elliott's motivations. Asleep in a Ditch
The two men were apprehended as they lay in a ditch outside Santa Fe about 9:40 A.M., said Chief John Denko of the New Mexico state police.
Although they had two rifles, a shotgun and a handgun with them, "nothing bad happened" at the arrest scene, said Chief Denko, apparently because the two were taken by surprise as they slept. The police had received two telephone tips about suspicious people in the area.
The suspects were taken to Albuquerque and late this afternoon were charged before a United States magistrate, Lorenzo Garcia, with flight from prosecution. The authorities indicated that the two suspects would soon be extradited to Ohio.
Mr. Gilbert was released from state prison in Ohio on Aug. 15 after serving 11 months of an 18-month sentence for stealing a boat and breaking and entering. Although he had also been convicted of child endangering for a November 1992 incident in which he shook and bit his 3 1/2-month-old son, he was not assigned additional time and received "good time" credit for his behavior in prison, reducing his sentence for the other crimes, said Joe Andrews, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
When he left prison, the 6-foot-4-inch Mr. Gilbert returned almost immediately to Newcomerstown, Ohio, the home of his estranged wife and a place where he was well known to the local authorities.
"With the dealings we've had with him in the past, I consider him a violent person," said the Newcomerstown Police Chief, James Friel. But that was not true of Mr. Elliott, the teen-ager with whom Mr. Gilbert apparently crossed paths shortly after his release.
"Eric seemed like a clean-cut kid," recalled Chief Friel, who said the teen-ager had been working recently as a clerk in the local grocery. "But Eric is the type of individual I would classify as a follower." 'A Typical Teen'
That tendency apparently led Mr. Elliott to be involved in a break-in at the Cy Young Lanes, a local bowling alley, in late July. That brush with the law was his first. About $30 in change from vending machines and some liquor were taken, the owner, Leman Clark, said today in a telephone interview.
"I thought he was a typical teen," Mr. Clark said, recalling his impressions of Mr. Elliott before the break-in. "I didn't think he was a bad kid."
Chief Friel said Eric had been frightened almost to tears by his arrest and pending trial. "He was worried about it constantly, calling the officer to find out what was going on," Chief Friel said. "I don't know if meeting Gilbert pushed him over the edge or what."
Last week Mr. Elliott was spotted with Mr. Gilbert in a 1989 Buick Skylark belonging to the 79-year-old Mrs. Loader, who had been at her farmhouse in Port Washington, Ohio, a few miles from Newcomerstown, recovering from cancer surgery. She is still missing, and the authorities say they fear she was killed for her car.
The Skylark automobile turned up last Thursday more than 600 miles away in Fulton, Mo., stuck in the mud. A few miles from where it was abandoned, the authorities found the bodies of 86-year-old William Brewer and his wife, Flossie, 76, in their home. They had been robbed, and each had been shot three times in the head. Searching for Motive
And their car, a 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass, was missing. On Sunday, it turned up, also abandoned, on the shore of Lake Stanley Draper, near Oklahoma City. A few hundred feet away, the police found the body of Roxie Ruddel, 37, a security guard at the lake marina. She had been shot to death, and her 1991 Dodge pickup truck was missing. In New Mexico this morning, the state police said, they found an abandoned Dodge truck with Oklahoma license plates a few miles from the culvert where Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Elliott were apprehended, although the authorities have not positively identified it as the one belonging to Ms. Ruddel.
Now the authorities are trying to piece together the crimes, search for a motive. In no case, the authorities said, did the assailants make off with more than $40 in cash.
Officials are also trying to figure out just how willing and active a role Mr. Elliott may have played. His father, Robert, of Cleveland, insisted in recent days that Mr. Elliott was not prone to violence and must have been coerced somehow by Mr. Gilbert.
"Maybe he is in fear to where he thinks he has to go along with what is happening," the father told The Daily Oklahoman over the weekend. "The more I hear reports on this fellow he's supposed to be with, the more concerned I get."
An F.B.I. special agent in Cleveland, Robert Hawk, said, "I'm unaware of any hostage situation, but that's something that will be looked at by us and local authorities."
The intrigue over the case was also compounded by the fact that it appeared to offer eerie overtones of life imitating the movies. As the pair and made their way west, they became the object of widespread news reports, and their violent, seemingly pointless mission was compared to the one depicted in "Natural Born Killers," the recently released Oliver Stone film about the murderous escapades of two deranged lovers.
Still, despite the similarities, the police cautioned today that no evidence had turned up that either suspect had been motivated by the movie or had even seen it.
In Newcomerstown, a rural community of about 12,000 people in south central Ohio, homicide has simply not been a fact of life. "I can't remember when they had a murder down there," said the Tuscarawas County Sheriff, Harold McKimmie. "I've been in office 12 years, and we've never had a murder there in that section of the county."
Source: New York Times
Friday, August 26, 1994
FILM REVIEW: NATURAL BORN KILLERS; Young Lovers With a Flaw That Proves Fatal
MEET Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), two renegades living out the oldest story in the teen-age wasteland. They're young, they're in love and they kill people, in thrill-crazy, rock-video style. "If I don't kill you," Mickey says to one soon-to-be victim, "what is there to talk about?" For Mickey, it's more than just a rhetorical question.
With more sophistry than poetry, Oliver Stone apotheosizes these trash archetypes in "Natural Born Killers," his supposed satire about an America despoiled by violence and exploitation. Satire? In his skill as a manipulator of thoughts and images, in his short-circuiting ordinary narrative, and in his intuitive visual brilliance, Mr. Stone could well turn out to be the most influential American film maker of his generation. But as a satirist, he's an elephant ballerina.
Scratch the frenzied, hyperkinetic surface of "Natural Born Killers" and you find remarkably banal notions about Mickey, Mallory and the demon media. ("Media's like weather, only it's man-made weather," says Mickey, delivering one of the rare memorable lines in the screenplay.) To wit: Born bad. Blame society. The sins of the fathers. Lost innocence. True love. Wild horses, deadly rattlers, fireworks, freight trains. Elements like these would appear more honestly threadbare if Mr. Stone were not a match for Mickey and Mallory in the area of overkill.
But he has exploded the slender premise of "Natural Born Killers" (from a story by Quentin Tarantino, whose distinctive voice is not heard here) into a firestorm of quick cuts, hot colors, gyroscopic camera movements and emblematic visions. Such techniques, intensified so furiously (thanks to superb editing by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan) that they become pharmacologically seductive, have a way of obscuring this film's more mundane troubles. Not least of them is the fact that "Natural Born Killers" is dense and unmodulated enough to be exhausting. Despite isolated moments of bleak, disturbing beauty, it is finally less an epiphany than an ordeal. Not for the first time, Mr. Stone assembles an arsenal of visual ideas and then fires away point-blank in his audience's direction. If viewers flinch during this tireless two-hour barrage, are they simply no match for the film maker's tough, unrelenting style? Or has he by now perfected his own form of exploitative fallacy? While "Natural Born Killers" affects occasional disgust at the lurid world of Mickey and Mallory, it more often seems enamored of their exhilarating freedom. If there is a juncture at which these caricatures start looking like nihilist heroes, then the film passes that point many times.
Meanwhile, how can anything Mr. Stone says about his characters be dismissed as tasteless or unfunny, since they themselves are meant to be embodiments of a tasteless world? "I Love Mallory," a grotesque sitcom version of Mallory's childhood, with Rodney Dangerfield in stained underwear as her lecherous father, is fairly typical of the film's light touch. Arriving on the scene as the Prince Charming who will rescue Mallory by helping to murder her parents, Mickey shows up carrying a dripping 50-pound bag of raw meat.
Equally representative is an opening sequence at a roadside restaurant, where Mallory taunts the locals by writhing seductively to the jukebox, then savagely attacks a man who tries to flirt with her. At first, while this goes on, Mickey simply sits at the counter, reading a newspaper whose headline says he and Mallory have just killed six teen-agers at a slumber party.
Then he joins in, as Mr. Stone pumps up the music, switches film stock, lets the camera sway vertiginously, shows a bullet circling playfully toward the scared face of someone about to die, and so on. Grand flourish: when the spree is over, Mickey and Mallory dance together to "La Vie en Rose," with fireworks exploding romantically behind them. Mini-witticism: Mickey may have killed almost everyone in sight, but when he spoke to the waitress, he ordered nonfat milk.
Unfolding in only semi-linear fashion, "Natural Born Killers" devotes its first hour to Mickey and Mallory's rampage, interspersing lurid bloodshed with moments of eerie tenderness. (After the opening slaughter, these two find themselves in the moonlight, with a holy glow enveloping Mallory as she squats in the dirt and speaks about angels.) The couple's blood wedding, with an exchange of rattlesnake rings and Mallory's white veil drifting off into the abyss of a deep canyon, offers one of the film's most genuinely haunting visions, if only because it eludes easy understanding.
That's hardly the case with "American Maniacs," the tabloid television show starring Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), who appreciates Mickey and Mallory for their entertainment value. At one of its funnier moments, the film dwells on the show's re-enactment of their exploits, with a title that says "A Dramatization" as two actors, playing Mickey and Mallory, shoot a bicyclist identified as an American bronze medalist. Finally persuading Mickey to sit for an interview after 50 killings in three weeks, Wayne asks the inevitable question: "Any regrets?"
As played by Mr. Downey with a thick Australian accent and perfect lip-smacking unctuousness, Wayne is one of the film's more deft inventions. But he, like everything else about "Natural Born Killers," is allowed to go overboard. After their operatic arrest in a ghastly, green-lit drugstore (another of Mr. Stone's genuinely disturbing images), Mickey and Mallory go to prison and are manipulated by a leering detective (Tom Sizemore) and a publicity-happy warden (Tommy Lee Jones). Even before it culminates in an actual riot, this section of the film becomes hysterical, to the point where it even features the rare out-of-control performance from Mr. Jones.
Mr. Harrelson and Ms. Lewis deal as captivatingly as they can with the film's wavering attitudes toward their characters. Both hit the requisite raw nerves, and both also make sense of the material's occasional romantic reveries. Used in a labored effort to give this story a spiritual dimension is Russell Means, as the only character in the film whose life means anything to Mickey and Mallory. Balthazar Getty is seen briefly as a young man who gets killed at a gas station, which probably qualifies as some kind of black joke.
Mr. Harrelson looks wild-eyed and deadly during parts of "Natural Born Killers," but he is at his scariest when serenely telling Wayne that he feels possessed of a certain purity. "I don't think I'm any scarier than you are," he says. "That's your shadow on the wall. You can't get rid of your shadow, can you, Wayne?" The point is made even more chillingly over the closing credits, as Leonard Cohen, a true poet of doom, sings succinctly: "Get ready for the future, it is murder."
Just before those credits roll, Mr. Stone shoots himself in the foot with a quick montage of tabloid television's latest, greatest hits: the Bobbitt and Menendez trials, Tonya Harding, O. J. Simpson. For better or worse, those are spectacles that cast a long shadow. And for all its surface passions, "Natural Born Killers" never digs deep enough to touch the madness of such events, or even to send them up in any surprising way. Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering. But it's no match for the awful truth.
"Natural Born Killers" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes strong language, sexual situations and extreme, frequent violence, of the sort that could well have warranted a tougher rating. NATURAL BORN KILLERS Directed by Oliver Stone; written by David Veloz, Richard Rutowski and Mr. Stone, based on a story by Quentin Tarantino; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan; production designer, Victor Kempster; produced by Jane Hamsher, Don Murphy and Clayton Townsend; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is rated R. WITH: Woody Harrelson (Mickey), Juliette Lewis (Mallory), Robert Downey Jr. (Wayne Gale), Tommy Lee Jones (Dwight McClusky), Tom Sizemore (Jack Scagnetti), Rodney Dangerfield (Mallory's father), Edie McClurg (Mallory's mother) and Russell Means (Old Indian).
Source: new York Times
You can view the Internet Movie Database trailer here
With more sophistry than poetry, Oliver Stone apotheosizes these trash archetypes in "Natural Born Killers," his supposed satire about an America despoiled by violence and exploitation. Satire? In his skill as a manipulator of thoughts and images, in his short-circuiting ordinary narrative, and in his intuitive visual brilliance, Mr. Stone could well turn out to be the most influential American film maker of his generation. But as a satirist, he's an elephant ballerina.
Scratch the frenzied, hyperkinetic surface of "Natural Born Killers" and you find remarkably banal notions about Mickey, Mallory and the demon media. ("Media's like weather, only it's man-made weather," says Mickey, delivering one of the rare memorable lines in the screenplay.) To wit: Born bad. Blame society. The sins of the fathers. Lost innocence. True love. Wild horses, deadly rattlers, fireworks, freight trains. Elements like these would appear more honestly threadbare if Mr. Stone were not a match for Mickey and Mallory in the area of overkill.
But he has exploded the slender premise of "Natural Born Killers" (from a story by Quentin Tarantino, whose distinctive voice is not heard here) into a firestorm of quick cuts, hot colors, gyroscopic camera movements and emblematic visions. Such techniques, intensified so furiously (thanks to superb editing by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan) that they become pharmacologically seductive, have a way of obscuring this film's more mundane troubles. Not least of them is the fact that "Natural Born Killers" is dense and unmodulated enough to be exhausting. Despite isolated moments of bleak, disturbing beauty, it is finally less an epiphany than an ordeal. Not for the first time, Mr. Stone assembles an arsenal of visual ideas and then fires away point-blank in his audience's direction. If viewers flinch during this tireless two-hour barrage, are they simply no match for the film maker's tough, unrelenting style? Or has he by now perfected his own form of exploitative fallacy? While "Natural Born Killers" affects occasional disgust at the lurid world of Mickey and Mallory, it more often seems enamored of their exhilarating freedom. If there is a juncture at which these caricatures start looking like nihilist heroes, then the film passes that point many times.
Meanwhile, how can anything Mr. Stone says about his characters be dismissed as tasteless or unfunny, since they themselves are meant to be embodiments of a tasteless world? "I Love Mallory," a grotesque sitcom version of Mallory's childhood, with Rodney Dangerfield in stained underwear as her lecherous father, is fairly typical of the film's light touch. Arriving on the scene as the Prince Charming who will rescue Mallory by helping to murder her parents, Mickey shows up carrying a dripping 50-pound bag of raw meat.
Equally representative is an opening sequence at a roadside restaurant, where Mallory taunts the locals by writhing seductively to the jukebox, then savagely attacks a man who tries to flirt with her. At first, while this goes on, Mickey simply sits at the counter, reading a newspaper whose headline says he and Mallory have just killed six teen-agers at a slumber party.
Then he joins in, as Mr. Stone pumps up the music, switches film stock, lets the camera sway vertiginously, shows a bullet circling playfully toward the scared face of someone about to die, and so on. Grand flourish: when the spree is over, Mickey and Mallory dance together to "La Vie en Rose," with fireworks exploding romantically behind them. Mini-witticism: Mickey may have killed almost everyone in sight, but when he spoke to the waitress, he ordered nonfat milk.
Unfolding in only semi-linear fashion, "Natural Born Killers" devotes its first hour to Mickey and Mallory's rampage, interspersing lurid bloodshed with moments of eerie tenderness. (After the opening slaughter, these two find themselves in the moonlight, with a holy glow enveloping Mallory as she squats in the dirt and speaks about angels.) The couple's blood wedding, with an exchange of rattlesnake rings and Mallory's white veil drifting off into the abyss of a deep canyon, offers one of the film's most genuinely haunting visions, if only because it eludes easy understanding.
That's hardly the case with "American Maniacs," the tabloid television show starring Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), who appreciates Mickey and Mallory for their entertainment value. At one of its funnier moments, the film dwells on the show's re-enactment of their exploits, with a title that says "A Dramatization" as two actors, playing Mickey and Mallory, shoot a bicyclist identified as an American bronze medalist. Finally persuading Mickey to sit for an interview after 50 killings in three weeks, Wayne asks the inevitable question: "Any regrets?"
As played by Mr. Downey with a thick Australian accent and perfect lip-smacking unctuousness, Wayne is one of the film's more deft inventions. But he, like everything else about "Natural Born Killers," is allowed to go overboard. After their operatic arrest in a ghastly, green-lit drugstore (another of Mr. Stone's genuinely disturbing images), Mickey and Mallory go to prison and are manipulated by a leering detective (Tom Sizemore) and a publicity-happy warden (Tommy Lee Jones). Even before it culminates in an actual riot, this section of the film becomes hysterical, to the point where it even features the rare out-of-control performance from Mr. Jones.
Mr. Harrelson and Ms. Lewis deal as captivatingly as they can with the film's wavering attitudes toward their characters. Both hit the requisite raw nerves, and both also make sense of the material's occasional romantic reveries. Used in a labored effort to give this story a spiritual dimension is Russell Means, as the only character in the film whose life means anything to Mickey and Mallory. Balthazar Getty is seen briefly as a young man who gets killed at a gas station, which probably qualifies as some kind of black joke.
Mr. Harrelson looks wild-eyed and deadly during parts of "Natural Born Killers," but he is at his scariest when serenely telling Wayne that he feels possessed of a certain purity. "I don't think I'm any scarier than you are," he says. "That's your shadow on the wall. You can't get rid of your shadow, can you, Wayne?" The point is made even more chillingly over the closing credits, as Leonard Cohen, a true poet of doom, sings succinctly: "Get ready for the future, it is murder."
Just before those credits roll, Mr. Stone shoots himself in the foot with a quick montage of tabloid television's latest, greatest hits: the Bobbitt and Menendez trials, Tonya Harding, O. J. Simpson. For better or worse, those are spectacles that cast a long shadow. And for all its surface passions, "Natural Born Killers" never digs deep enough to touch the madness of such events, or even to send them up in any surprising way. Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering. But it's no match for the awful truth.
"Natural Born Killers" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes strong language, sexual situations and extreme, frequent violence, of the sort that could well have warranted a tougher rating. NATURAL BORN KILLERS Directed by Oliver Stone; written by David Veloz, Richard Rutowski and Mr. Stone, based on a story by Quentin Tarantino; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan; production designer, Victor Kempster; produced by Jane Hamsher, Don Murphy and Clayton Townsend; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is rated R. WITH: Woody Harrelson (Mickey), Juliette Lewis (Mallory), Robert Downey Jr. (Wayne Gale), Tommy Lee Jones (Dwight McClusky), Tom Sizemore (Jack Scagnetti), Rodney Dangerfield (Mallory's father), Edie McClurg (Mallory's mother) and Russell Means (Old Indian).
Source: new York Times
You can view the Internet Movie Database trailer here
Sunday, July 31, 1994
JUDICIAL SERVICE COMMISSION ACT 9 OF 1994
The purpose of the Judicial Services Commission Act is to regulate matters incidental to the establishment of the Judicial Service Commission by the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1993; and to provide for matters connected therewith.
Source: SABINET
Source: SABINET
Friday, June 10, 1994
Egypt Begins Crackdown on Strongest Opposition Group
After a series of raids and arrests that have weakened Islamic groups trying to topple the Government by force, Egyptian security forces have begun a crackdown against the country's most powerful opposition organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, which rejects violence.
The campaign, which includes the detention and interrogation of scores of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, signals a drive by the Government to curtail not only those movements that have carried out violent attacks, but also one that has come to dominate many municipalities, professional and labor associations and university faculties.
The confrontation pits the Government of President Hosni Mubarak for the first time against the intellectual authors of Islamic fundamentalism, who the President contends are merely terrorists. 'This Is the First Time'
"This is the first time this Government has linked us to terrorism," said Issam al-Irian, a senior Brotherhood leader, as he sat in a spartan office in central Cairo. "It is part of a wide move by the Government to curtail all forms of democratic participation. It is an expression of the Government's weakness. But by narrowing the opportunities for democratic participation, the Government is creating more problems that it is solving."
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, is the prototype for modern Islamic fundamentalist political parties throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
Although it has been officially banned since 1954, with a membership estimated in the hundreds of thousands it is the largest Egyptian opposition movement -- legal or illegal -- and dominates many of the 14,000 private philanthropies that provide services from health clinics to primary schools.
Its assets, with backing from supporters here and in Persian Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Brotherhood, which has its headquarters in central Cairo, calls for the establishment of an Islamic state by peaceful means. It rejects the violence used by outlawed organizations like the Islamic Group in their efforts to topple the Government. Control of Civic Institutions
But at the same time, the Brotherhood has mounted an aggressive campaign to take control of a variety of civil and charitable institutions. It now dominates the largest of Egypt's 22 professional associations, including the medical, engineering and legal groups. And, aside from the rejection of the use of force, the goals of the Brotherhood dovetail with those of the underground groups.
The wide reach of the Brotherhood is based on its charitable work, including scores of clinics, hospitals and schools. But it also appeals to many Egyptians, especially those in the professional classes, as the only credible opposition movement.
"The Brotherhood, among the professional class, owes its support to the fact that it is an effective protest movement," said Said al-Naggar, the head of New Civic Forum, a liberal think tank. "It is the only outlet many people have to express dissatisfaction with the current system. Many of the professionals do not necessarily support the Islamic ideology, although there is a feeling that Western-style opposition parties, whether socialist or democratic, have failed."
But there is a price for effective organization. Women, for example, must wear the hejab, or head scarf, if they want to enter the Physicians' Union, a former leftist stronghold with a membership of 80,000 that is now controlled by the Brotherhood. Low-Cost Appliances
"The Brotherhood provides loans, cars, furniture and even electrical appliances to union members, at low cost," said Mohammed al-Farhat, who is not a member of the Brotherhood. "The union gives the physicians and their families the best quality health care at a minimal price. They have a reputation for being honest and careful with union funds." That reputation has wide appeal in a country whose Government is seen as thoroughly corrupt.
Until now, the Government concentrated its efforts on battling the Islamic Group, which has waged a two-year campaign of violence in which nearly 400 people, mainly police officers and militants, have been killed. But security forces have killed one militant commander and captured several others, putting the underground groups on the defensive.
"The security situation over all is much better now than a few months ago," a Western diplomat said. "This has made it easier to do this. The Government has the energy and the manpower available to go after what it sees as a second-tier organization."
But Brotherhood leaders say the Government wants to silence the only effective opposition in a country that nominally has a multiparty system, but where the same ruling group has been in power since 1952.
While refusing to lift the ban on the Brotherhood, President Mubarak has, until now, allowed it to operate. Brotherhood members were even permitted to run in parliamentary elections in 1988, although the candidates ran as members of the tiny Liberal and once-moribund Socialist Labor Party, both of which the Brotherhood now controls. Election Fraud Alleged
The main opposition parties, including the Socialist Labor Party, have boycotted subsequent parliamentary elections because of what they say is fraud. But the tolerance of the Brotherhood appears to have ended. For the first time, President Mubarak has begun referring to the group as a "terrorist" organization in public statements.
Government officials say documents discovered in February at the office of a company that had links to the Brotherhood directly tied the organization to violent groups.
They also say a defector from the underground armed movement detailed payments by Brotherhood supporters to armed factions.
And they have angrily criticized Brotherhood leaders for organizing a demonstration by hundreds of lawyers last month that turned violent. The demonstration was called to protest the death in police custody of a lawyer who defended jailed militants. Government critics and human rights groups say the lawyer, Abdel Harith Medani, was tortured to death. The Government denies the charge.
"The Brotherhood is a ring trying to agitate disturbances on the street," said Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi. "And this is also what the terrorists and the murderers are doing with their explosions and assassinations." Spiritual Leader Questioned
The Government has taken a number of steps in its new campaign against the group. Hamed Aboul-Nasr, 81, the ailing spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, was called in for police questioning for two days this week, accused of writing anti-Government leaflets and inciting the lawyers' protest last month. Parliament has canceled the right of professors to elect the deans of university faculties, many of which are now dominated by the Brotherhood.
Mayors and village council members, many of whom belong to the Brotherhood, will be appointed by the Government rather than elected.
Brotherhood members, including most of the senior leaders around the country, have been arrested. A prominent clergyman was recently prevented from delivering a sermon to thousands of worshipers. And editors and reporters from Al Shaab, the paper of the Socialist Labor Party and a strong fundamentalist voice, have been hauled into court and imprisoned in recent weeks for articles critical of the Government.
The crackdown worries many who fear that if the Brotherhood leaders are driven underground or imprisoned, they could call on their followers to join the armed movements. Comparison to Algeria
"I never believed that the Brotherhood represented the moderate branch of the Islamic movement," said Hussein Ahmed Amin, Egypt's former Ambassador to Algeria and a prominent writer. "It was a matter of the distribution of roles. The Brotherhood preached a moderate line to get into Parliament and the Labor Party, which it came to dominate, as well as to appeal to those who wanted change, but deplored violence.
"But the origin of the trouble in Egypt is the same as in Algeria. The rise in militancy is caused by the failure to create a democratic system, by social and economic grievances, Government corruption, a lack of housing, unemployment, immigration from the rural areas to the cities and a lack of competing ideologies. The Islamic movement will not disappear with repression. And if the Government presses the Brotherhood too hard it could become more overtly radical and put all its energy into acts of terror."
Brotherhood leaders are not shy about echoing such a threat.
"If our supporters believe we cannot achieve our goals peacefully," said Mohammed Maamoun al-Hodaiby, the spokesman for the Brotherhood, "then they may turn to more radical means to achieve them.
"What do you expect?"
Source: New York Times
The campaign, which includes the detention and interrogation of scores of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, signals a drive by the Government to curtail not only those movements that have carried out violent attacks, but also one that has come to dominate many municipalities, professional and labor associations and university faculties.
The confrontation pits the Government of President Hosni Mubarak for the first time against the intellectual authors of Islamic fundamentalism, who the President contends are merely terrorists. 'This Is the First Time'
"This is the first time this Government has linked us to terrorism," said Issam al-Irian, a senior Brotherhood leader, as he sat in a spartan office in central Cairo. "It is part of a wide move by the Government to curtail all forms of democratic participation. It is an expression of the Government's weakness. But by narrowing the opportunities for democratic participation, the Government is creating more problems that it is solving."
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, is the prototype for modern Islamic fundamentalist political parties throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
Although it has been officially banned since 1954, with a membership estimated in the hundreds of thousands it is the largest Egyptian opposition movement -- legal or illegal -- and dominates many of the 14,000 private philanthropies that provide services from health clinics to primary schools.
Its assets, with backing from supporters here and in Persian Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Brotherhood, which has its headquarters in central Cairo, calls for the establishment of an Islamic state by peaceful means. It rejects the violence used by outlawed organizations like the Islamic Group in their efforts to topple the Government. Control of Civic Institutions
But at the same time, the Brotherhood has mounted an aggressive campaign to take control of a variety of civil and charitable institutions. It now dominates the largest of Egypt's 22 professional associations, including the medical, engineering and legal groups. And, aside from the rejection of the use of force, the goals of the Brotherhood dovetail with those of the underground groups.
The wide reach of the Brotherhood is based on its charitable work, including scores of clinics, hospitals and schools. But it also appeals to many Egyptians, especially those in the professional classes, as the only credible opposition movement.
"The Brotherhood, among the professional class, owes its support to the fact that it is an effective protest movement," said Said al-Naggar, the head of New Civic Forum, a liberal think tank. "It is the only outlet many people have to express dissatisfaction with the current system. Many of the professionals do not necessarily support the Islamic ideology, although there is a feeling that Western-style opposition parties, whether socialist or democratic, have failed."
But there is a price for effective organization. Women, for example, must wear the hejab, or head scarf, if they want to enter the Physicians' Union, a former leftist stronghold with a membership of 80,000 that is now controlled by the Brotherhood. Low-Cost Appliances
"The Brotherhood provides loans, cars, furniture and even electrical appliances to union members, at low cost," said Mohammed al-Farhat, who is not a member of the Brotherhood. "The union gives the physicians and their families the best quality health care at a minimal price. They have a reputation for being honest and careful with union funds." That reputation has wide appeal in a country whose Government is seen as thoroughly corrupt.
Until now, the Government concentrated its efforts on battling the Islamic Group, which has waged a two-year campaign of violence in which nearly 400 people, mainly police officers and militants, have been killed. But security forces have killed one militant commander and captured several others, putting the underground groups on the defensive.
"The security situation over all is much better now than a few months ago," a Western diplomat said. "This has made it easier to do this. The Government has the energy and the manpower available to go after what it sees as a second-tier organization."
But Brotherhood leaders say the Government wants to silence the only effective opposition in a country that nominally has a multiparty system, but where the same ruling group has been in power since 1952.
While refusing to lift the ban on the Brotherhood, President Mubarak has, until now, allowed it to operate. Brotherhood members were even permitted to run in parliamentary elections in 1988, although the candidates ran as members of the tiny Liberal and once-moribund Socialist Labor Party, both of which the Brotherhood now controls. Election Fraud Alleged
The main opposition parties, including the Socialist Labor Party, have boycotted subsequent parliamentary elections because of what they say is fraud. But the tolerance of the Brotherhood appears to have ended. For the first time, President Mubarak has begun referring to the group as a "terrorist" organization in public statements.
Government officials say documents discovered in February at the office of a company that had links to the Brotherhood directly tied the organization to violent groups.
They also say a defector from the underground armed movement detailed payments by Brotherhood supporters to armed factions.
And they have angrily criticized Brotherhood leaders for organizing a demonstration by hundreds of lawyers last month that turned violent. The demonstration was called to protest the death in police custody of a lawyer who defended jailed militants. Government critics and human rights groups say the lawyer, Abdel Harith Medani, was tortured to death. The Government denies the charge.
"The Brotherhood is a ring trying to agitate disturbances on the street," said Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi. "And this is also what the terrorists and the murderers are doing with their explosions and assassinations." Spiritual Leader Questioned
The Government has taken a number of steps in its new campaign against the group. Hamed Aboul-Nasr, 81, the ailing spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, was called in for police questioning for two days this week, accused of writing anti-Government leaflets and inciting the lawyers' protest last month. Parliament has canceled the right of professors to elect the deans of university faculties, many of which are now dominated by the Brotherhood.
Mayors and village council members, many of whom belong to the Brotherhood, will be appointed by the Government rather than elected.
Brotherhood members, including most of the senior leaders around the country, have been arrested. A prominent clergyman was recently prevented from delivering a sermon to thousands of worshipers. And editors and reporters from Al Shaab, the paper of the Socialist Labor Party and a strong fundamentalist voice, have been hauled into court and imprisoned in recent weeks for articles critical of the Government.
The crackdown worries many who fear that if the Brotherhood leaders are driven underground or imprisoned, they could call on their followers to join the armed movements. Comparison to Algeria
"I never believed that the Brotherhood represented the moderate branch of the Islamic movement," said Hussein Ahmed Amin, Egypt's former Ambassador to Algeria and a prominent writer. "It was a matter of the distribution of roles. The Brotherhood preached a moderate line to get into Parliament and the Labor Party, which it came to dominate, as well as to appeal to those who wanted change, but deplored violence.
"But the origin of the trouble in Egypt is the same as in Algeria. The rise in militancy is caused by the failure to create a democratic system, by social and economic grievances, Government corruption, a lack of housing, unemployment, immigration from the rural areas to the cities and a lack of competing ideologies. The Islamic movement will not disappear with repression. And if the Government presses the Brotherhood too hard it could become more overtly radical and put all its energy into acts of terror."
Brotherhood leaders are not shy about echoing such a threat.
"If our supporters believe we cannot achieve our goals peacefully," said Mohammed Maamoun al-Hodaiby, the spokesman for the Brotherhood, "then they may turn to more radical means to achieve them.
"What do you expect?"
Source: New York Times
Friday, June 3, 1994
PUBLIC SERVICE ACT (PROCLOMATION 103 OF 1994)
The purpose of the Public Service Act is to provide for the organisation and administration of the public service of the Republic, the regulation of the conditions of employment, terms of office, discipline, retirement and discharge of members of the public service, and matters connected therewith.
Source: SABINET
Source: SABINET
Wednesday, April 27, 1994
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Amendment Act, No. 2 of 1994
To introduce a new Constitution for the Republic of South Africa and to provide for matters incidental thereto.
A copy of the interim constitution can be found here.
Source: Constitutional Court of South Africa
A copy of the interim constitution can be found here.
Source: Constitutional Court of South Africa
Saturday, April 2, 1994
The Freedom Charter
The Freedom Charter is a statement of core principles of the South African Congress Alliance, which consisted of the African National Congress and its allies the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Democrats and the Coloured People's Congress. Here is the text of the Freedom Charter adopted at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, on 26 June 1955.
The charter calls for democracy and human rights, land reform, labour rights, and nationalization. The South African government denounced the congress as treason and banned the ANC. However, the charter continued to circulate in the revolutionary underground and inspired a new generation of young militants in the 1980s.
1. We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
1.1. that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people;
1.2. that our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality;
1.3. that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;
1.4. that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief;
And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white together equals, countrymen and brothers adopt this Freedom Charter; And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won.
2. The People Shall Govern!
Every man and woman shall have the right to vote for and to stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws;
2.1. All people shall be entitled to take part in the administration of the country;
2.2. The rights of the people shall be the same, regardless of race, colour or sex;
2.3. All bodies of minority rule, advisory boards, councils and authorities shall be replaced by democratic organs of self-government .
3. All National Groups Shall have Equal Rights!
3.1. There shall be equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools for all national groups and races;
3.2. All people shall have equal right to use their own languages, and to develop their own folk culture and customs;
3.3. All national groups shall be protected by law against insults to their race and national pride;
3.4. The preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination and contempt shall be a punishable crime;
3.5. All apartheid laws and practices shall be set aside.
4. The People Shall Share in the Country's Wealth!
4.1. The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people;
4.2. The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;
4.3. All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people;
4.4. All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions.
5. The Land Shall be Shared Among Those Who Work It!
5.1. Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger;
5.2. The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers;
5.3. Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land;
5.4. All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose;
5.5. People shall not be robbed of their cattle, and forced labour and farm prisons shall be abolished.
6. All Shall be Equal Before the Law!
6.1. No-one shall be imprisoned, deported or restricted without a fair trial; No-one shall be condemned by the order of any Government official;
6.2. The courts shall be representative of all the people;
6.3. Imprisonment shall be only for serious crimes against the people, and shall aim at re-education, not vengeance;
6.4. The police force and army shall be open to all on an equal basis and shall be the helpers and protectors of the people;
6.5. All laws which discriminate on grounds of race, colour or belief shall be repealed.
7. All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights!
7.1. The law shall guarantee to all their right to speak, to organise, to meet together, to publish, to preach, to worship and to educate their children;
7.2. The privacy of the house from police raids shall be protected by law;
7.3. All shall be free to travel without restriction from countryside to town, from province to province, and from South Africa abroad;
7.4. Pass Laws, permits and all other laws restricting these freedoms shall be abolished.
8. There Shall be Work and Security!
8.1. All who work shall be free to form trade unions, to elect their officers and to make wage agreements with their employers;
8.2. The state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work, and to draw full unemployment benefits;
8.3. Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work;
8.4. There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers;
8.5. Miners, domestic workers, farm workers and civil servants shall have the same rights as all others who work;
8.6. Child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be abolished.
9. The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened!
9.1. The government shall discover, develop and encourage national talent for the enhancement of our cultural life;
9.2. All the cultural treasures of mankind shall be open to all, by free exchange of books, ideas and contact with other lands;
9.3. The aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace;
9.4. Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit;
9.5. Adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan;
9.6. Teachers shall have all the rights of other citizens;
9.7. The colour bar in cultural life, in sport and in education shall be abolished.
10. There Shall be Houses, Security and Comfort!
10.1. All people shall have the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security;
10.2. Unused housing space to be made available to the people;
10.3. Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no-one shall go hungry;
10.4. A preventive health scheme shall be run by the state;
10.5. Free medical care and hospitalisation shall be provided for all, with special care for mothers and young children;
10.6. Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, creches and social centres;
10.7. The aged, the orphans, the disabled and the sick shall be cared for by the state;
10.8. Rest, leisure and recreation shall be the right of all:
10.9. Fenced locations and ghettoes shall be abolished, and laws which break up families shall be repealed.
11. There Shall be Peace and Friendship!
11.1. South Africa shall be a fully independent state which respects the rights and sovereignty of all nations;
11.2. South Africa shall strive to maintain world peace and the settlement of all international disputes by negotiation - not war;
11.3. Peace and friendship amongst all our people shall be secured by upholding the equal rights, opportunities and status of all;
11.4. The people of the protectorates Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland shall be free to decide for themselves their own future;
11.5. The right of all peoples of Africa to independence and self-government shall be recognised, and shall be the basis of close co-operation.
12. Let all people who love their people and their country now say, as we say here:
THESE FREEDOMS WE WILL FIGHT FOR, SIDE BY SIDE, THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES, UNTIL WE HAVE WON OUR LIBERTY
Source: ANC
The charter calls for democracy and human rights, land reform, labour rights, and nationalization. The South African government denounced the congress as treason and banned the ANC. However, the charter continued to circulate in the revolutionary underground and inspired a new generation of young militants in the 1980s.
1. We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
1.1. that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people;
1.2. that our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of government founded on injustice and inequality;
1.3. that our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;
1.4. that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief;
And therefore, we, the people of South Africa, black and white together equals, countrymen and brothers adopt this Freedom Charter; And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing neither strength nor courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won.
2. The People Shall Govern!
Every man and woman shall have the right to vote for and to stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws;
2.1. All people shall be entitled to take part in the administration of the country;
2.2. The rights of the people shall be the same, regardless of race, colour or sex;
2.3. All bodies of minority rule, advisory boards, councils and authorities shall be replaced by democratic organs of self-government .
3. All National Groups Shall have Equal Rights!
3.1. There shall be equal status in the bodies of state, in the courts and in the schools for all national groups and races;
3.2. All people shall have equal right to use their own languages, and to develop their own folk culture and customs;
3.3. All national groups shall be protected by law against insults to their race and national pride;
3.4. The preaching and practice of national, race or colour discrimination and contempt shall be a punishable crime;
3.5. All apartheid laws and practices shall be set aside.
4. The People Shall Share in the Country's Wealth!
4.1. The national wealth of our country, the heritage of South Africans, shall be restored to the people;
4.2. The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole;
4.3. All other industry and trade shall be controlled to assist the wellbeing of the people;
4.4. All people shall have equal rights to trade where they choose, to manufacture and to enter all trades, crafts and professions.
5. The Land Shall be Shared Among Those Who Work It!
5.1. Restrictions of land ownership on a racial basis shall be ended, and all the land re-divided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger;
5.2. The state shall help the peasants with implements, seed, tractors and dams to save the soil and assist the tillers;
5.3. Freedom of movement shall be guaranteed to all who work on the land;
5.4. All shall have the right to occupy land wherever they choose;
5.5. People shall not be robbed of their cattle, and forced labour and farm prisons shall be abolished.
6. All Shall be Equal Before the Law!
6.1. No-one shall be imprisoned, deported or restricted without a fair trial; No-one shall be condemned by the order of any Government official;
6.2. The courts shall be representative of all the people;
6.3. Imprisonment shall be only for serious crimes against the people, and shall aim at re-education, not vengeance;
6.4. The police force and army shall be open to all on an equal basis and shall be the helpers and protectors of the people;
6.5. All laws which discriminate on grounds of race, colour or belief shall be repealed.
7. All Shall Enjoy Equal Human Rights!
7.1. The law shall guarantee to all their right to speak, to organise, to meet together, to publish, to preach, to worship and to educate their children;
7.2. The privacy of the house from police raids shall be protected by law;
7.3. All shall be free to travel without restriction from countryside to town, from province to province, and from South Africa abroad;
7.4. Pass Laws, permits and all other laws restricting these freedoms shall be abolished.
8. There Shall be Work and Security!
8.1. All who work shall be free to form trade unions, to elect their officers and to make wage agreements with their employers;
8.2. The state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work, and to draw full unemployment benefits;
8.3. Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work;
8.4. There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers;
8.5. Miners, domestic workers, farm workers and civil servants shall have the same rights as all others who work;
8.6. Child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be abolished.
9. The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened!
9.1. The government shall discover, develop and encourage national talent for the enhancement of our cultural life;
9.2. All the cultural treasures of mankind shall be open to all, by free exchange of books, ideas and contact with other lands;
9.3. The aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace;
9.4. Education shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all children; Higher education and technical training shall be opened to all by means of state allowances and scholarships awarded on the basis of merit;
9.5. Adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan;
9.6. Teachers shall have all the rights of other citizens;
9.7. The colour bar in cultural life, in sport and in education shall be abolished.
10. There Shall be Houses, Security and Comfort!
10.1. All people shall have the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security;
10.2. Unused housing space to be made available to the people;
10.3. Rent and prices shall be lowered, food plentiful and no-one shall go hungry;
10.4. A preventive health scheme shall be run by the state;
10.5. Free medical care and hospitalisation shall be provided for all, with special care for mothers and young children;
10.6. Slums shall be demolished, and new suburbs built where all have transport, roads, lighting, playing fields, creches and social centres;
10.7. The aged, the orphans, the disabled and the sick shall be cared for by the state;
10.8. Rest, leisure and recreation shall be the right of all:
10.9. Fenced locations and ghettoes shall be abolished, and laws which break up families shall be repealed.
11. There Shall be Peace and Friendship!
11.1. South Africa shall be a fully independent state which respects the rights and sovereignty of all nations;
11.2. South Africa shall strive to maintain world peace and the settlement of all international disputes by negotiation - not war;
11.3. Peace and friendship amongst all our people shall be secured by upholding the equal rights, opportunities and status of all;
11.4. The people of the protectorates Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland shall be free to decide for themselves their own future;
11.5. The right of all peoples of Africa to independence and self-government shall be recognised, and shall be the basis of close co-operation.
12. Let all people who love their people and their country now say, as we say here:
THESE FREEDOMS WE WILL FIGHT FOR, SIDE BY SIDE, THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES, UNTIL WE HAVE WON OUR LIBERTY
Source: ANC
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