Around two thousand four hundred SASOL 1, NATREF and FLUOR workers were unfairly dismissed twenty years ago when they participated in a strike that commenced on October 1, 1987. Some of these workers had service records of between twenty and thirty-five years. Seventy-seven workers lost their lives that day and in the following days, after SASOL's management called on the riot police to intervene.

It should be noted that the number of workers killed as a result of SASOL's actions in October 1987 is even greater than the number killed at Sharpeville on 21 March, 1961. SASOL has not yet resolved this shameful event in its Apartheid history.

Khulumani Support Group in collaboration with the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities will commemorate INTERNATIONAL DAY OF THE ‘DISAPPEARED’ with a public discussion on Graves and Burial Sites as Spaces of Cultural and Religious Significance & their Implications for Families of Persons who ‘Disappeared’ in the 1st Floor Seminar Room of the CRL Rights Commission in the West Wing of the Women’s Gaol at Constitution Hill.

Khulumani Support Group, the membership organisation of around 44,000 victims and survivors of apartheid-era gross human rights violations in South Africa, was assisted to bring the case to the appropriate court in New York in support of their demands for accountability and for redress. For thousands of victims, there remains little to celebrate in this year of the tenth anniversary of the country’s much-respected Truth and Reconciliation Commission.