Highgate Hotel shooting survivor Neville Beling in desperate need of help

Neville Beling survived the Highgate pub shooting in East London, in 1993 and since he has had to live with his disabilities. Now friends and lawyers have approached the President’s Fund to secure funds so that Neville can be placed in a facility for assisted living.(Photo: Supplied)

By Shaun Smillie

21 Jul 2024

A survivor from a 1993 pub attack in east London has watched his world get smaller and smaller over the years. And he is still searching for answers. This is his story.

Neville Beling died three times on the operating table, and each time the doctors brought him back.

There had been other operations, as many as 50, where doctors tried to give Beling a semblance of the life he had before he walked into the Highgate Hotel in East London. And then recently Beling was going to add another operation to that list, this time to correct a hernia.

But at the last minute the surgeon decided that they would not operate on Beling, it was just too risky. Instead the hernia and the pain would be managed and Beling would only be operated on if there was an absolute need.

For more than three decades Beling has watched his abilities deteriorate. There was a time when he could fish off the beach in East London, but he can’t do that anymore. Until recently he gardened.

“I need to be careful because if I trip and fall, I will be wheelchair bound for the rest of my life,” he says.

Beling is just 51 years of age, although they say he looks 10 years older.

One of the few living survivors

This, all thanks to the bullets that ripped through his body that Saturday night, 31 years ago. He is one of the few living survivors of the Highgate shooting, and while it happened 30 years ago, he is now in desperate need of help. As he tells friends, his time is running out.

That evening on May 1, 1993, a 20-year-old Beling and his cousin Roland Park walked into the Highgate Hotel pub in East London and ordered beers at the bar.

Their drinks had just arrived when Beling turned his head and saw a man in the doorway. The man raised the barrel of the AK-47 assault rifle he was carrying, and opened fire.

Aftermath of the Highgate Hotel shooting. (Photo: Courtesy of Daily Dispatch)

Beling fell to the floor, pulling his cousin with him, but it was too late. Bullets struck his back, left hip and arm while Park was left uninjured.

The mystery gunmen who opened fire in two sections of the pub left five patrons dead, and their identities have been a mystery ever since.

Read more on Daily Maverick: Thirty years later, the truth behind the Highgate Hotel massacre remains murky

Following the shooting Beling spent months in hospital, and when he finally came home he could no longer work.

“I have only got about 40% use of my left arm and my left hip is shattered. So I walk with my left leg shorter than my right,” Beling said.

With his parents dead, he now lives alone.

Initially, it was thought that the attack was carried out by the military wing of the PAC’s Azanian People’s Liberation Army (Apla) as part of Operation Great Storm. In that year before South Africa’s first democratic elections Apla had targeted public places including churches, restaurants and bars.

The aftermath of the Highgate Hotel shooting. (Photo: Courtesy of Daily Dispatch)

But Apla has denied carrying out the shooting, and its members never applied for amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The armed wing did claim responsibility for other shootings that occurred during the same period. Investigations by the police were bungled from the start, and since then theories have emerged as to who committed the crime. The list of suspects include a renegade Apla group, a right-wing unit and Third Force members who were trying to disrupt the upcoming elections.

Read Beling’s submission to the TRC here

Beling has watched his world get smaller and smaller through the years. To help him, lawyers and friends are trying desperately to get him into a facility for assisted living.

But to do this, Beling needs funding and his lawyers with the Foundation for Human Rights have approached the President’s Fund. But there is a problem. Besides acknowledging that they had received the application, there has been no further communication from the fund.

As of Wednesday Beling hadn’t heard from the fund.

Beling’s lawyers are deciding what they are going to do next.

Questions sent to the President’s Fund by Daily Maverick have gone unanswered.

The President’s Fund was established in terms of section 42 of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act to pay reparations to victims under apartheid.

It is administered by the TRC Unit within the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and is mandated to make reparations in six categories.

These include:

Providing a once-off grant to victims of apartheid.

Giving educational support to both victims and their families.

Financing housing provisions for victims.

Assisting financially with exhumations and reburials of deceased apartheid victims.

Offering access to healthcare.

Funding the rehabilitation of communities that were affected by apartheid.

But in the past there have been problems with the fund, with media reporting of unspent money. As of its last annual report reveals there was just under R2-billion in the fund.

Victims of apartheid have complained that they have not received funding from it.

Read more: Highgate Massacre — NPA to hold inquest 31 years later, families hopeful but under ‘no illusions’

Last year members of the Khulumani Support Group, a civil rights organisation, slept outside the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg demanding reparations for crimes committed during apartheid.

The Khulumani Support Group, which assists victims of apartheid, said that money from the President’s Fund should be used to pay for the reparations.

Even though he is in pain and is facing an uncertain future, Beling does have something to look forward to. Soon he might just learn who the man was who shot him.

A long-awaited inquest is now scheduled to take place.

The inquest is to be held in East London, although as yet it is not known when it will take place. For decades Beling has tried to investigate what happened that night in 1993, but it has been difficult trying to sort out the truth and the conspiracy theories that swirl around the mystery.

“It’s an absolute miracle, and through sheer force of will, that he has survived in order to see justice done and to find out who the perpetrators are,” said Theresa Eldmann, a friend and researcher who works with the survivors of the Highgate shooting.

Beling has a feeling that a couple of surprises will emerge during the inquest. Perhaps a witness will come forward and reveal enough to explain why a working-class pub in East London was the target of such a brutal attack.

“I don’t know where it’s going to go. But we will only find that out when we go to court,” he said. DM

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One of the few living survivors