[ad_1]
Attorney George Bizos receives a Luminary Award from the Free Market Foundation on February 19, 2014 in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / The Times / Daniel Born)
George Bizos began his career defending victims in rural areas, in small, not highly publicized cases. “The law was all we had in South Africa, the last hopeful place under apartheid,” he said.
George Bizos, who died Wednesday at the age of 92, never recovered from the pain of losing his close friends, former Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson, who died in 2012, Nelson Mandela, who died in 2013, and Nadine. Gordimer, who died in 2014.
In an interview, Bizos said: “I don’t want it to come out, but I wonder who the bell tolls for now.” He then began to relive his past, focusing on his friendship with Mandela, a key theme in a life story marked by achievements as a civil rights lawyer and human rights defender, by his dual citizenship as a Greek South African, by his experience as a refugee. in the Union of South Africa at age 13, and his love of classical Greek literature and philosophy.
Bizos began his career defending victims in rural areas, in small, not highly publicized cases. “The law was all we had in South Africa, the last hopeful place under apartheid,” he said. Later, his reputation as a cross-examiner on the dock was recognized; he perfected what he called “the stage whisper” and was able to tear terror into the hearts of torturers and murderers sanctioned by the apartheid state.
Denied citizenship by the South African government, Bizos waited 32 years for a passport; She said that the distance from the house generated an “almost pathological” longing. She desperately wanted to take her wife, Arethe, and their children, Damon, Kimon, and Alexis, to the ancestral home.
At Bizos’s 75th Birthday Party, Chaskalson said, “With George in the room, there could never be a pause in the conversation.” Because Bizos was a great talker and storyteller; a boats, husband, father of three children, grandfather, warm friend and host. A brilliant advocate, he was happiest at home, getting up early to take care of his garden, even mentioning his vocation as a “great horticulturist” on his CV, along with his numerous awards and accolades.
Bizos was increasingly disappointed by those who “make up the facts to support conspiracy theories, question the motives of prosecutors and judges when things don’t go their way, and the people who participated in the Fight who think they should stay unpunished – one person, Allan Boesak, who had 16 judges in three courts, claimed that he did not have a fair trial.
“Patriotism is the last refuge”, he said, “the question is not what you have contributed to the Fight, but [whether you have] committed a crime. ”
Representing the Legal Resource Center where he served as Senior Legal Advisor, in the Farlam Commission of Inquiry into the police shootout against miners in Marikana, he pointed out similarities in the police shootings in Sharpeville when police opened fire in a protest march against the pass.
His voluminous memory Odyssey to freedom (2007) dramatizes the main trials in which he acted and provides a background for his dual identity as a South African Greek. When asked where he felt he belonged the most, he said, “You don’t ask a child which parent they prefer.” This is a quote from the poem Ithaca by Constantine P Cavafy. Bizos’s The exile from Nazi-occupied Greece, for which he became famous on a ship during World War II, was dramatic.
Denied citizenship by the South African government, Bizos waited 32 years for a passport; She said that the distance from the house generated an “almost pathological” longing. She desperately wanted to take her wife, Arethe, and their children, Damon, Kimon, and Alexis, to the ancestral home.
For Bizos, identity was “a state of mind.” Despite her secondary and tertiary education in English, she always thought and dreamed in her mother tongue, she told me. He spoke often of wisdom, just as he hoped he had achieved through personal trials. His struggle with English and Afrikaans in South Africa during his first two years in the Union kept him out of school. His father went to work in Pretoria; the young Bizos worked as an assistant in a Greek-owned shop, sleeping in a single room, displaced and alone, longing for his mother and brothers. Later, with the help of some kind school teachers, he regained the super confidence that he described in. Odyssey where he recounts his demonstration of a nasty streak at school in Kalamata.
At Wits University, where he studied for an LLB, he was on the “amorphous left” on the Student Representative Council, but did not belong to any political party; he described himself as “an undisciplined guy.” Only when he was appointed to represent the ANC’s constitutional and legal committee in the early 1990s did he ask if he would need to apply for a membership card. No, he didn’t have to go through the process, said Cyril Ramaphosa, then ANC secretary general, but he would arrange an exemption for toys.
As a junior lawyer, his breakthrough came when he achieved the acquittal of 15 protesters arrested for public violence during an anti-pass protest in Liechtenstein. This victory attracted the attention of the great Vernon Berrangé, a famed and feared criminal and human rights lawyer, whose devastating interrogations were legendary. Berrangé mentored Bizos and sent the young lawyer a lot of work, as did Mandela and Oliver Tambo, whose combined legal practice was a household name among black South Africans.
As a junior member of the The defense team of the African National Congress in the Rivonia trial in 1963-1964, Bizos’s star was set and Mandela on Robben Island put him in touch with the ANC. Incredibly, he was invited to eat seafood with the island’s prison authorities while his client Mandela was sent back to his cell. His then promise to bring Mandela home to his grandfather’s olive groves was finally fulfilled in 2001. At a hotel in Athens, Mandela experienced déjà vu and believed he had been to Greece before, possibly in a previous life. . Bizos’ devotion to Mandela and the details of their friendship were recounted in Sixty-five years of friendship (2017).
Despite his status as a village hero, in his own community, Bizos was not always appreciated. His advice to those promoting the “Greek blood” idea to see a hematologist didn’t earn him friends there, but he had friends everywhere.
Unlike Mandela, Bizos did not experience catharsis in forgiveness and No one to blame? In search of justice in South Africa (1998) wrote about several unsolved murder cases of detainees in prison, including Steve Biko, Ahmed Timol, and Neil Aggett. Bizos acted as a lawyer in numerous political trials, including that of Bram Fischer, and in the investigations of Biko, Timol and Aggett. Having defended Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in his many trials between 1958 and 1992, who said he had received instructions from Mandela himself, he was devastated when two members of the Mandela family turned against him in 2013.
Bizos used to say that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was born out of a necessary commitment, but that it did not bring justice. “I am very concerned about high profile people who avoided telling the truth to the truth commission or publicly. The truth commission has a structure to grant amnesty in recognition of the truth, at a price, ”he said.
On the team that opposed amnesty requests for the murders of Ruth First and Jeanette and Katryn Schoon, Bizos’ stellar performances revealed the extent of their anger and disappointment. She told me: “The victims do not have the means to use the justice system to obtain reparation; they cry out for justice ”. He could allow himself to be objective, he said, but he was not a victim; however, he felt their pain, identified with the oppressed. How else could he have fought like he did?
He was enraged by politicians who lied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and claimed not to have known about the torture and abuse by the security forces. In 2017, he testified in the reopened investigation into the death of Ahmed Timol. The sentence, stating that Timol was murdered by members of the Security Subdirectorate after being interrogated and tortured and that he did not commit suicide as they had claimed, was a vindication.
George Bizos was born on November 14, 1927, in the village of Vasilitsi, south of Koroni on the Messinian peninsula of the Peloponnese. He was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church and said he “responded to the liturgy”; he considered the trial of Jesus Christ to be “the greatest political trial of all.”
His Saheti co-founder, the South African Hellenic Institute for Education and Mentoring in Senderwood, Johannesburg, in 1974, has produced excellent results. As a Democrat, he insisted that being Greek was not a prerequisite for attendance, but students would surely learn about what Greeks had to offer the country.
Bizos’ work took him beyond the borders of South Africa: He acted as a lawyer in the trial of Namibian nationalist leader Toivo JA Toivo and served as a judge in the Botswana court of appeal from 1985 to 1993.
In March 2001, Bizos ruled on the absence of government in Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, who refused to accept that Zimbabwean courts could rule on the legality of his land grabbing program, did not distinguish between the rule of law and the rule of law, he said. Bizos defended Morgan Tsvangirai, the president of the Movement for the Democratic Change (MDC), who in 2004 was acquitted of charges of treason and intent to kill Mugabe.
He was appointed ambassador of Hellenism by the prefect of Attica and Athens in 2006 and in 2009 launched the South African Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon. This was part of a long legal dispute over the British Museum’s refusal to collect the Parthenon Marbles in the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. He was pleased with the honors he was awarded, but aware that “popularity is temporary.”
Despite his status as a village hero, in his own community, Bizos was not always appreciated. His advice to those promoting the “Greek blood” idea to see a hematologist didn’t earn him friends there, but he had friends everywhere.
“Ithaca has given you a beautiful journey,” Cavafy writes in Ithaca. That Bizos had two Ithacas may explain his acceptance of duality, his ability to always see the other side. Now that this beautiful journey is over, you have left the country forlorn. DM
