In 1988 a police “Vlakplaas” death squad under commander Eugene de Kock bombed Khotso House, headquarters of the SA Council of Churches, injuring 18 people.
The bombing was at the instruction of Security Branch chief Lt-Gen Johan van der Merwe, who was given the green light by law & order minister Adriaan Vlok, who in turn got the nod from then president PW Botha.
Of the four men in that chain of command, the foot soldier De Kock was jailed in 1996 for two life terms plus 212 years for a pyre of apartheid crimes (though he was released on bail in 2015 and still lives), while an unrepentant Botha died on Halloween a decade later, a month after his old pal Augusto Pinochet of Chile.
A publicly repentant Vlok, granted amnesty by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for the Khotso House bombing and other crimes, is still free, albeit hobbling with a cane at 85.
Van der Merwe died on August 27 at 86 without ever seeing the inside of a jail cell, having been granted amnesty for crimes such as the cover-up of the murder of activist Stanza Bopape. As a founder and deputy leader of the Foundation for Equality Before the Law, an apartheid apologist outfit that shields perpetrators from justice, he was viewed as the “Godfather” of dirty tricks cops wanting to get off the hook for gross human rights violations.
Having authorised the creation of the notorious “kitskonstabels” in Zululand with his deputy, Basie Smit (who had oversight of Vlakplaas and is still alive), he defended the group of about 200 IFP paramilitaries trained by special forces in the Caprivi Strip under arrangements made between IPF leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Van der Merwe, the late defence minister Lt-Gen Magnus Malan, and others — by agreeing to hide them or pay their bail if they were arrested.
In 1996 Malan and 19 others were let off the hook thanks to an allegedly deliberately botched prosecution at the “Trial of the Generals” — despite evidence that directly proved the general ordered a Caprivi-trained death squad’s murders.
Van der Merwe probably ordered the destruction of all Security Branch files kept on individuals and organisations between 1960 and 1993 — the exact remit time frame of the TRC — to cover the bloodstained tracks of his brutal service. The order was allegedly issued verbally in late 1992 to all provincial Security Branch branches by Brig Alfred Oosthuizen, head of its intelligence section in Pretoria — but must have originated with the boss.
Ironically, in its final report in 2003 the TRC commended the police for having provided valuable information to its investigators, in contrast to the recalcitrant SA Defence Force (SADF). But former TRC chief investigator Dumisa Ntzebeza later described the obliteration of the Security Branch files, along with their corresponding sets by the former National Intelligence Service (NIS) under Niël Barnard (still alive), the old SADF and other security entities as “a paper Auschwitz”.
A more complete record in the relevant archives would have greatly served TRC investigators, subsequent researchers and even prosecutors. Questioned about the destruction of the records, Van der Merwe once disingenuously claimed that the paper files were destroyed in the changeover to computers.
Oosthuizen’s destruction order was not entirely followed. Surviving indices of the missing files paint a picture of Van der Merwe’s paranoid securocrat empire in its death throes: its agents gathered intelligence on everything from ultraleft Pan Africanist Congress militants and ultraright Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging heavies to primary schools and even kitsch artist Vladimir Tretchikoff.
One vanished Free State Security Branch file was on the botched 1993 SADF raid on the PAC’s armed wing Apla in Mthatha, ordered by president FW de Klerk, in which five teenagers were killed. Although shortly before his death last November De Klerk would apologise “for the pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage that apartheid has done to black, brown and Indians in SA”, he never admitted to having issued kill orders, while president or earlier as a member of PW Botha’s deep state übercabinet.
For his ground-breaking 2009 book on post-TRC prosecutions German researcher Ole Bubenzer interviewed Van der Merwe on several occasions in 2006, revealing that two cherry-picked groups of ANC cabinet ministers had run parallel series of ultrasecret negotiations during the TRC from 1997/98 to 2003. One was led by Van der Merwe for the former SA Police with safety & security minister Sydney Mufamadi for the ANC; another was led by generals Constand Viljoen and Jannie Geldenhuys for the former SADF, with Thabo Mbeki and then Jacob Zuma for the ANC.
“The consultations [with the military],” Bubenzer writes, “were like the security police consultations, generally aimed at finding a mutual solution as to how to avoid trials after the TRC through new indemnity mechanisms.” Although Mufamadi admitted to me in 2020 that he had led such talks with Van der Merwe, he claimed they were rather aimed at the “difficult” task of “convincing them to co-operate with the TRC”.
But it was Van der Merwe, Vlok and three senior Security Branch agents who benefited from the ANC’s attitude of compromise, being slapped on the wrists with suspended sentences illicitly plea-bargained behind closed doors for the attempted assassination of Frank Chikane. Yet while in office in 1995 Mufamadi dismissed Van der Merwe because of evidence that he was meddling in investigations into covert state-backed “Third Force” violence, which took place largely among communities of colour during the transition period, in which about 25,000 people lost their lives.
Two of three key orchestrators of that bloodletting, Maj-Gen Tolletjie Botha of military intelligence’s directorate of covert collection, and Special Forces commander Maj-Gen Joep Joubert, were never tried and are now dead; only Civil Co-operation Bureau head Col Joe Verster is still alive, but it seems was never at risk of prosecution.
Operation Dual
Also beyond the reach of justice are Joubert’s predecessors, Kat Liebenberg and Fritz Loots; together the three gave the direct orders from 1979 to 1987 under Operation Dual for an estimated 420 anti-apartheid detainees to be murdered and their bodies dumped in the ocean from light aircraft.
Biochemwar chief Brig Wouter Basson, implicated in Operation Dual, was acquitted on a phalanx of charges in 2002, and not one of his associates — even those denied indemnity and with Operation Dual charges against them ruled valid by the Constitutional Court in 2005 — has faced a judge.
Other senior perpetrators, potentially including those running the clandestine NIS “offensive units” O61/, K31, K32 and K43, which committed assassinations abroad, remain shadowy unknowns.
As the internecine warfare in KwaZulu-Natal fuelled by apartheid-era weapons and trainees shows us, what we don’t know about the past can still hurt us.
• Schmidt, a veteran journalist, is author of ‘Death Flight’ which exposed Operation Dual and the secret negotiations to prevent post-Truth & Reconciliation Commission prosecutions.
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