A Matter of Duty

For all its apartheid repression, South Africa remains two crucial steps short of being a full-fledged police state. It still has an independent judiciary and a free, if often intimidated press. Now, in what promises to be one of South Af rica's hardest-fought court cases in years, the limits of press freedom are being tested. The occasion is the trial of the editor in chief of Johannesburg's Rand Daily Mail, Laurence Gandar, who was arraigned last week for, as he put it, "fulfilling the recognized duty of a newspaper." As Gandar saw that duty, it included publishing a 1965 expose of conditions in South Africa's prisons, re lated mainly by an artist and onetime air force lieutenant named Harold Strachan. During three years as a political prisoner, Strachan recounted, he frequently saw black prisoners whipped, kicked and tortured with shocks from an electrotherapy machine. The Mail collected an affidavit from Strachan, and sworn corroborating statements from two warders and two ex-prison ers, to back up a sensational series of stories and an editorial demand for a government inquiry into prison conditions.

Nettlesome Critic. Instead of investigating its prisons, the government investigated Gandar's sources. One by one, they were convicted of making false statements, on the strength of testimony from a parade of government witnesses --despite a presiding magistrate's suspicions that the witnesses were painting "too rosy a picture" of prison life. Strachan was sent back to jail and served 18 months. With the Mail's informants thus legally discredited, the government finally moved against Gandar, long a nettlesome critic, and against the reporter who wrote the original series, Benjamin Pogrund.

They are charged under a stringent Prisons Act that makes it a crime to publish false information on prisons without taking "reasonable" steps to verify it. The onus of proof is on the accused. The government no longer denies the main thrust of the Mail's stories, since ample evidence of prison brutality is now on the record. Instead, the charges against Gandar and Pogrund are based on legalistic quibbles. For instance, the prosecution does not dispute that prisoners were tortured with electric shocks--only that the newspaper said the shocks were administered on orders from a prison officer and were an everyday occurrence.

Dereliction of Duty. As the trial began last week, Gandar got in the first blow in his opening statement. The Mail, he declared, had gone "well beyond what most newspapers would have considered adequate" in checking its facts. Not to have published the stories, he said, "would have been a dereliction of duty, a suppression of a matter of vital public concern." Fulfilling that duty could now cost Gandar and Pogrund, if they are convicted, a year in prison on each of two counts.

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