STEVE KAHANOVITZ
Thank you very much.  Chairperson, first I'd like on behalf of the Legal Resources Centre to thank the Commission for inviting us as lawyers to address you at this extremely important hearing.
 I see our role as a limited one because of the events you will be hearing from the people who were most affected by it, those living in the area.
 That limited role is to explain and to summarise the legal proceedings arising out of the burning of thousands of homes belonging to tens of thousands of people in this area in 1986.
 I was not an eyewitness to those events, but in view of the legal proceedings I will describe, I have learnt through them I believe, and others  at the LRC have also learnt and developed an understanding of what took place here, which I believe will be to the benefit of your Commission's task of understanding our South African past.
 I've taken the oath to tell the truth of the sequence in respect of legal proceedings.  In view of the knowledge obtained during the course of conducting those proceedings, I learnt many things and formed opinions of what took place here.
 The courts before which we appeared at no stage ever had to give a judgement for reasons that will become more apparent later.  Thus the opinions that I will refer to, are not those of the court, nor of others, but conclusions that I have drawn, which may hopefully assist the Commission in this deliberations.
 Before proceeding to the legal proceedings, I must make it clear that this legal activity took place against the backdrop of the horror of an apartheid State which for thousand living in this area, was even greater as their lives were disrupted by police activity and fighting leading to extreme suffering.
 Here in the Western Cape with its Coloured labour preference policy, where pass laws were even more viciously enforced, lies for African citizens of South Africa a more vigorously oppressed, than very possibly elsewhere.