The committee also found widespread evidence of sexual abuse at the camps, while nurses claimed death certificates had been falsified to hide neglect.
The apartheid government had maintained these institutions since 1963, allowing them to be run by private interests. The government guaranteed a 90 percent occupancy rate, with payment made on a per-head basis. Psychiatrists entrusted with care of the patients subjected them to barbaric treatment including electric shock without anesthetic and allowed them to die from easily treatable physical illnesses.
Abuses at the camps were unearthed by the South African edition of Freedom and members of CCHR more than 20 years ago. Vested interests in the then government tried to cover up the psychiatrists’ crimes and even went so far as to ban news coverage of the camps, located in old mining compounds where inmates were exploited as slave labor, working long hours to make coat hangers, wire brushes, mats and other articles without pay. The extraordinary death rate was later labeled in the South African press as “mental genocide.”
The government under Nelson Mandela has recommended sweeping reforms to prevent such abuses from happening again.
Advancing the Cause of Human Rights continued...
    
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