Legal disputes following on a farmworker eviction
6 March 2008

Prosecution of Pieterse will not proceed, but he is to lay charges

 

Nosey Pieterse, President of Bawsi (The Black Association of The Wine and Spirits Industry) says that the prosecuting authority will not proceed with charges against him, after his arrest following an incident in April 2007. The police’s original charge of ‘assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm’  followed Pieterse’s intervention in the eviction of a farmworker and the flattening of the farmworker’s house.

In his statement, Pieterse says that he stood in front of a bulldozer which was intending to demolish the house, and that he was abused (including in racial terms) by the farm manager, one Joan Ertzen. An ANC councillor, Dan Kotze, was also abused after he arrived on the scene, says  Pieterse. The house was, apparently, destroyed – illegally, says Pieterse.

The Bawsi president is a controversial figure beyond his interventions on behalf of workers eveicted (often  illegally, it is alleged) from the farm homes: last year he declared his intention of filing a class-action suit against ‘the wine industry’ unless it established a fund to deal with endemic alcoholism.

Now, he says, he has laid a civil charge against Ms Ertzen ‘and will follow that up with a charge of criminen injura against her later this week’. Furthermore, he intends to ‘also issue a summons against the police for wrongful arrest and detention, deprivation of liberty, infringement of dignity, legal cost and damage to his good standing in the community’.

The name of the farm involved is not known to Grape, nor do we know of any statement Ms Ertzen has publicly made concerning the incident.