Former Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock’s inability to testify at the reopened “Cradock Four” inquest in Gqberha last week came amid an appeal to the Khampepe commission into ANC prevention of apartheid-era prosecutions about why no liberation movement perpetrators were being pursued.
The groundbreaking R167m constitutional damages lawsuit brought against the state on January 20 by the Foundation for Human Rights and 25 victims of apartheid crimes and families of survivors, while representative of all races, notably did not include victims of liberation movement atrocities.
The reopened Cradock Four inquest, the Khampepe commission and the constitutional damages suit are technically unconnected, but they are key components of a broad new front mounted by those abused by the previous regime in seeking justice and closure.
In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of 1996-2003 commended the old SA Police and its Security Branch political unit for having been relatively forthcoming — or at least far more so than the old SA Defence Force — about their involvement in gross human rights violations.
But today is a different era, with the immense work of the TRC, which inspired similar processes around the world, now cast by radicals as a “sell-out”, precisely because of the ANC cabinet-level suborning of the independence of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) that judge Sisi Khampepe will be examining next month.
There are also rumblings of discontent among conservatives that no liberation movement perpetrators are being pursued by a reinvigorated NPA alongside state perpetrators like those who brutally murdered the Cradock Four — Fort Calata, Matthew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli — outside Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) on June 27 1985.
Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum has now asked the Khampepe commission to also investigate the failure to prosecute ANC terrorism during apartheid. An opinion piece in the Sunday Tribune at the weekend called its appeal “apartheid denialism”, yet both sides have engaged in denialism.
The original statutory TRC Amnesty Committee process was, controversially, that perpetrators across the political spectrum would be granted amnesty on a case-by-case basis for politically motivated crimes if they truthfully and fully detailed what had occurred.
Outraged at the unfairness of this amnesty deal, several iconic struggle families, such as that of Steve Biko, strongly objected on ethical grounds and absented themselves from the TRC process. Yet amnesty cut through the curtain of silence drawn around apartheid’s dirty deeds, allowing many families to find out for the first time what had happened to their murdered and disappeared loved ones.
The committee denied amnesty to those in the cell in September 1977 when Biko allegedly fell during a struggle to make him sit down, striking his head hard against a wall. Gideon Nieuwoudt, Harold Snyman, Ruben Marx, Daantjie Siebert and Johan Beneke were denied amnesty in part because their version did not constitute a politically motivated crime. So the irony is that, though Nieuwoudt is long dead, possible prosecutions may now result, depending on the outcome of the new Biko inquest announced last month.
It appears from the founding affidavit in the R167m constitutional damages case — led by Calata’s son, Lukhanyo Calata — that the ANC leadership under Thabo Mbeki and then Jacob Zuma were likewise ill at ease with the TRC, which their own party had endorsed.
Afraid that ANC and SA Communist Party leaders, particularly those involved in the armed struggle, would be imprisoned alongside police and military dirty-tricks assassins, there is compelling evidence that in the period 1998-2003 Mbeki and Zuma embarked on a series of ultra-secret talks with apartheid generals to prevent prosecutions of any perpetrators earmarked for the courts by the TRC.
Those talks will now, 22 years later, be the focus of the Khampepe commission — which will also examine what happened after the talks fell apart on February 17 2003, with the ANC going it alone and, according to evidence that will be heard, sabotaging the NPA’s attempts at prosecuting TRC cases.
Again, not everyone is happy, with many involved in the constitutional damages suit, which demanded such a commission of inquiry, claiming that holding the commission before the damages claim is settled is an attempt by President Cyril Ramaphosa to pre-empt and thus scuttle the damages suit.
On October 3, however, the Pretoria high court dismissed an application by the government to stay the damages suit until the Khampepe commission was concluded, with judge Nicolene Janse van Nieuwenhuizen ruling that the damages applicants “have been denied this right for more than 20 years … some of [them] are elderly, eager to find closure and put the matter to rest”.
ANC interference in the NPA saw the likes of former law & order minister Adriaan Vlok and police commissioner Johan van der Merwe and three Security Branch underlings set free on a plea bargain behind closed doors for the attempted murder of Rev Frank Chikane. Vlok admitted in a 2021 interview that the notorious “permanent removal from society” order that led to the Cradock Four murders was a kill instruction — yet he and Van der Merwe died as free men.
And that is what is worrying families and surviving victims who hope to see justice: many alleged perpetrators are dying peacefully at home without ever having faced their accusers. Of current concern is the health of De Kock, the former Vlakplaas commander, who was scheduled to testify in the Cradock Four inquest last week but was booked off by his cardiologist.
“When he [my doctor] says it’s time to go and one is able to take the strain, then obviously I will go for it [and testify]; there’s no reason not to,” De Kock told Business Day.
Indeed, De Kock, at liberty after more than 20 years in prison, has proved very useful to many investigators chasing up leads on gross human rights violations.
But De Kock, the most senior officer jailed for apartheid crimes, feels that he has been treated as the sole Judas goat for the regime’s evils and commented that “They [responsible higher officers] are hiding behind me again”, sharing a picture of former police counter-intelligence chief Maj-Gen Izak Johannes “Krappies” Engelbrecht, who is due to testify on Wednesday.
The inquest continues this week.
