The judge presiding over the hearing into whether the cold case murder in Paris in 1988 of ANC anti-apartheid activist Dulcie September should be reopened for investigation heard that her killing constituted the crime of apartheid.
Lawyer for the family Yves Laurin argued before an unusually packed civil chamber at the Paris Court of Appeal, in an old palace on the Île de la Cité island in the Seine river on which the Notre Dame cathedral also stands, that the French state itself was guilty of “gross misconduct” and “denial of justice” by botching the initial investigation and denying a reopening of the case in 2022.
Present in the court on April 2, according to reporting by Alexandre Fache for the venerable communist daily l’Humanité, were Randolph Arendse, September’s 85-year-old brother-in-law, who had travelled from Lausanne, Switzerland, and her 49-year-old nephew Clement Arendse who had travelled from London to hear the pleadings.
Such was the interest in the hearing that a larger venue had to be found, and even then, much of the public gallery was left standing. Also in attendance, Fache wrote, were Jacqueline Derens, September’s friend, translator and biographer, and Daniel Breuiller, the former mayor of Arcueil in Val-du-Marne where September had been living at the time of her murder.
September was not always a charterist: born in Cape Town and practising as a teacher, she had joined the African Peoples’ Democratic Union of SA (Apdusa), a Trotskyist organisation, alongside the likes of Neville Alexander; after Sharpeville, their Apdusa faction took a more militant stance and formed the National Liberation Front in 1963.
That led to her arrest and detention that year; she was treated brutally in prison. Released under a strict banning order in 1969, she nevertheless managed to relocate to Britain in 1973 where she joined the Anti-Apartheid Movement, then the staff of the ANC three years later.
In 1983, she was elected ANC chief representative for France, Switzerland and Luxembourg, underwent brief military training in the USSR, and became a visible thorn in the side of the apartheid regime with her workaholic activism across Europe and in the UN, arguing for disinvestment from SA and full economic sanctions against the regime.
On the morning of March 29 1988, she was shot five times in the head and once in the back by two men armed with silenced .22 calibre pistols outside the ANC’s Paris office at 28 Rue des Petites-Écuries, 10th Arrondissement, as she was opening the office.
Her assassination provoked international outrage, with 20,000 mourners turning out in Paris behind a black banner that read “Dulcie was our friend”, but her killers, apparently disguised as painters, were never properly identified and the initial investigation was shut down after 10 years, in 1992.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) stated: “In an interview with the commission in April 1998,” former Vlakplaas commander Col “Eugene de Kock described the September assassination as a CCB [Civil Co-operation Bureau] operation managed by Commandant Dawid Fourie, its deputy head, in which the two who pulled the trigger were members of the Comorien Presidential Guard. He named one of these as Jean-Paul Guerrier (aka Captain Siam),” a former French paratrooper.
Testifying before the TRC on May 18 1998, former CCB head of intelligence Christoffel Nel said that “from the general atmosphere at the CCB head office whenever reference was made to Dulcie September’s death, I had never any doubt in my mind that it was a CCB operation”. He stated that it was likely the CCB used “a French Foreign Legion person” or similar for the assassination rather than a South African.
The TRC resolved that “while it is not able to make a definitive finding on the assassination of Dulcie September, the commission believes on the basis of the evidence available to it that she was a victim of a CCB operation involving the contracting of a private intelligence organisation which, in turn, contracted out the killing”.
The leading theory for the motive of the assassination, held to by investigative journalists Hennie van Vuuren in his 2017 book Apartheid Guns and Money and Caroline Dumay, Stefan Carstens, and Nadine Theron in their 2023 France24 documentary, is that September was on the trail of French involvement in substantial sanctions-busting arms sales to SA via a secret Armscor office at the SA Embassy in Paris.
Van Vuuren and Dumay’s team suspect French secret service involvement in her killing, but September may also have been compromised by the ANC itself as her superior at their London headquarters, Samuel Khanyile (aka “Solly Smith”) was later revealed to have been an apartheid double agent.
Dumay’s team was unable to trace Guerrier, but found in SA former French mercenary Richard Rouget, who was implicated as being perhaps the second triggerman; Rouget claimed he was falsely accused, though admitted he was involved in smuggling arms into SA via the Comoros.
Fache quotes the family’s lawyer, Laurin, recalling at the hearing that after recent engagements with the ministry of justice, they had discovered to their horror “that the entire judicial file and all the seals that went with it had been destroyed.
“The victim’s bloody clothes, pieces of her jaw shattered by bullets, her diary, her notebooks, her audio cassettes … everything. It’s an entire part of the history of apartheid that has been erased, in the greatest secrecy; it’s an irreparable error.” Partly on this basis, he is alleging the state’s gross misconduct and denial of justice.
In a novel move, Laurin, after consultations with the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office, also asked the court to consider the assassination to constitute the crime of apartheid, a first-tier international crime against humanity first codified by the UN in 1973. France is not a signatory of the Apartheid Convention but rather to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court which includes apartheid among crimes against humanity. If the court agrees, it would remove any legal limitations on investigation and prosecution.
The crime of apartheid, though of international application, has only ever once been proffered in prosecution, that in the trial which will start on April 14 in the Johannesburg high court against former Vlakplaas askari Ephraim Mfalapitsa and former Security Branch explosives expert Sebastiaan Rorich for the explosion that killed three of the “Cosas Four” in 1982.
French state advocate Bernard Grelon, for the State Judicial Agent, argued against Laurin at the Paris hearing in a tone that was, according to Fache at times “bordering on arrogance” that: “this is not the Dulcie September case, but a technical trial, which must examine whether the justice system made errors in dismissing the case in 1992.
“When we look at the file, and move away from fantasies, we can only confirm the judgment of the first instance,” which had dismissed the family’s request for a reinvestigation.
Laurin argued rather that: “we’re told it’s old, it’s time-barred, it’s inadmissible. But we refuse to allow Dulcie September to be subjected to a second death, this time through a judicial process.”
Jacqueline Derens told Fache: “The state continues to consider this murder a common crime. But Dulcie was not killed by a burglar or a jilted lover. She was killed because she opposed apartheid.”
Another of September’s nephews, Michael Arendse, told Business Day that despite the French Judicial Agent’s stance that the chance to reopen the case had expired, “we are adamant that someone has to be held responsible for her murder … It must be kept in mind that Dulcie approached the French police twice for protection, which they did not provide but should have in terms of French law.”
The Court of Appeal’s decision will be handed down on June 10, and Arendse said the family looked forward to the ruling.
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