UNMASKING A GUILTY PAST

By Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town

The memories are not eroded by the years--they just burn brighter in the mind of Peter Cecil Jones, who saw Steve Biko led to his death. He remembers the summer night in August 1977 and the roadblock on the highway in the eastern Cape, 80 miles from Port Elizabeth. He hears his friend's calm reply to the police officer's question, "Who are you, big man?": "I am Steven Bantu Biko." He recalls the long, fearful hours in a holding cell, where he and Biko destroyed a secret document by eating it. He remembers the handcuffs and leg-irons at police headquarters in Port Elizabeth; the pimply-faced policeman in a shiny suit snarling, "You're going to disappear, and no one will ever know what happened"; and his friend's indistinct last words as officers shoved Biko and Jones into separate cars, something like, "I'll be seeing you."

But Jones never saw his friend again. Biko, the 31-year-old leader of the Black People's Convention--the political arm of his black-consciousness movement--was regarded by many as the Malcolm X of South Africa's liberation struggle. He died in a police cell of brain injuries, naked, 24 days after his arrest. A magistrate delivered the three-minute verdict that no one could be found criminally responsible. Jimmy Kruger, then Minister of Justice, declared that Biko's death "leaves me cold." Many others, however, were left in a blazing fury of rage. The murder set off a barrage of condemnation and marked a turning point in the struggle against racial segregation.

Jones did not learn of Biko's death until he was transferred from solitary confinement to a maximum-security prison six months later. Now 46, he is a businessman involved in black economic initiatives and remains active in the struggle to uncover the truth about Biko's death.

That truth, in all its ugly detail, is emerging in affidavits by Jones and others before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the inquiry that convened last April to investigate and adjudge some of the worst abuses of apartheid. Many of those providing details are the killers themselves, eager to exchange information for the commission's promises of amnesty. Last month the commission disclosed that applications had been filed by a number of former security policemen in connection with the deaths of at least 10 antiapartheid activists, including Biko, as well as incidents of torture and assault, including the mistreatment of Jones.

The applications tell how the security police abducted black agitators, tortured, beat and then killed them, says commission deputy chairman Alex Boraine. Three men who vanished after they were kidnapped in 1985 were given coffee laced with sleeping pills and taken away to be shot. Their bodies were burned, then tossed into a river. Some sources also said that the police cut off a victim's hand after killing him and kept it in a bottle to terrify prisoners during interrogation.

Although the commission did not reveal the names of the amnesty applicants, several were made public last week by their lawyer. One is the man who led the interrogation of Biko, former Colonel Harold Snyman, and two were on his staff at the time, retired Lieut. Gideon Nieuwoudt, then a detective sergeant, and former Captain Daantjie Siebert. Nieuwoudt is free on bail, pending appeal of a 20-year prison sentence he was given last year for his part in the 1989 bombing deaths of three black policemen and an informer.

After nearly 20 years, those names and faces are still etched in Jones' memory. He describes Nieuwoudt as a tall Afrikaner with a habit of constantly combing back his hair. Snyman was a bureaucrat, "a weak mediocrity," while Siebert was "an apostle of racial domination." Equally unforgettable were the traits they all shared: "They were vicious and brutal. They had the power of life and death."

It could be months before hearings are held on Biko's death and the full story comes out. Meanwhile, more than 3,500 others have knocked on the doors of the commission, hoping to share the good fortune of former police captain Brian Mitchell, who had served four years of a 30-year sentence for his part in a 1988 police raid in which 11 people were killed in KwaZulu-Natal. After testifying before the commission late last year, Mitchell was set free on the ground that he had simply been obeying orders in the raid. That verdict, plus a widespread assumption that the commission's writ will not extend to the country's former political leaders, who also bear paramount responsibility for apartheid's crimes, has prompted some South Africans to pose a disturbing question: Is it possible that the country might be paying too high a price for truth and skimping on justice?