Keith Mokoape, who was responsible for the training and recruitment of dozens of fighters. “We took them to the camps and never taught them anything apart from an AK-47,” said retired Maj. For many, it did little to address the vacuum left by the disbandment of their units at the end of apartheid.
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In 2011, South Africa passed a law that recognized all former combatants of any military organization as veterans, and established the Department of Military Veterans, which was supposed to address the plight of former freedom fighters. Lindiwe Zulu, South Africa’s minister of social development, who also fought against the apartheid regime, said, “We need to scale up the support that government needs to give to people that gave up their lives for the struggle.” Veterans of the liberation struggle, mostly Black men and women, also charge that their benefits are unequal to those of their white counterparts who formed part of the apartheid government’s army. Like many government service programs in post-apartheid South Africa, the distribution of veterans’ benefits has been plagued by allegations of corruption and mismanagement. Kgogo and his comrades, some dressed in faded fatigues, sang old liberation songs. Prosecutors did not rule out the possibility of also charging them with terrorism at the next hearing, scheduled for February. A judge granted 42 of them bail of 500 Rand - about $34 each - but kept 11 in custody because of prior convictions. The 53 veterans - among them several women - were charged on Tuesday in a packed courtroom inside a prison where many liberation-era fighters were executed by the apartheid regime. She had been meeting with the veterans as part of a task force set up by President Cyril Ramaphosa in November to address the bottlenecks in delivering benefits. She was recently appointed defense minister and promised to investigate why the veterans had not received their benefits. Modise, herself once a guerrilla fighter, said that before the tensions rose last Thursday, she had joined the veterans singing liberation anthems, “because they were our songs, too.” Afterward, she said of her politically awkward face-off with her former comrades, “We were not threatened, just uncomfortable with being held against our will.” A spokesperson for the Department of Defense and Military Veterans estimated that there are at least 20,000 veterans from liberation groups, and that the government has compensated 495 of them since 2016, offered trauma counseling to 4,500 veterans and their families, and promised to repatriate the remains of dozens of fighters who died in exile. But officials blamed obstacles, including an out-of-date database and the very definition of who is a veteran. The South African government has conceded that dozens of former freedom fighters have not received their promised benefits.