TRC Final Report

Volume 2

Chapter 2

Subsection 13

Extra-judicial executions and killings

98 The powers granted to security force personnel, and the secrecy in which they operated, created conditions for summary executions and killings for which they did not have to account. Usually, inquests into deaths were not held in operational areas. When they were, they were usually brief and inadequate, and responsibility was commonly attributed to “persons unknown”. It was common practice for the security forces to leave bodies where they lay or to bury them in shallow graves at the place of death.

99 Koevoet in particular kept no proper or official records of the identities, numbers or whereabouts of people it killed. It seems that the unit was only really interested in keeping scorecards of those it killed for bounty. These practices were confirmed by journalists who were allowed to travel with security force units, as well as by court testimonies by security force members. At the height of the war, in the early to mid-1980s, Koevoet alone claimed a kill rate of around 300 to 500 people a year, for which its members were paid a bounty per corpse. Rough ‘body counts’ were periodically issued by military headquarters, but there was never any independent confirmation as to whether these figures were accurate or whether the victims were civilians or SWAPO fighters.

100 The South African authorities refused to accord prisoner-of-war status to captured SWAPO combatants, despite the 1977 Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions, which extended the provisions of the Conventions to anti-colonial struggles and wars of national liberation and self-determination.

101 While combatants were initially put on trial and imprisoned (see above), there is considerable evidence that, as the war progressed, South African security forces, especially Koevoet, resorted increasingly to summary executions of captured combatants. The payment of bounty served as an incentive for the extra-judicial murder of captives. The representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in South West Africa said in 1981 that “it simply does not happen in any conflict or battle that you have a clash with 200 people and forty-five killed and no prisoners or wounded are taken”³ .

102 In other cases, captured combatants were kept in makeshift detention centres, such as the camp at Osiri, 160 kilometres north of Windhoek, where they were interrogated and often tortured. Reporters found that Osiri detainees were held in tiny corrugated-iron cages and were always blindfolded in the presence of their interrogators. Though periods of detention were limited to thirty days, detention orders could be renewed indefinitely, running into months and even years.

103 After the formation of Koevoet, it became standard practice to ‘persuade’ captured guerrillas to ‘turn’ and become askaris assisting Koevoet in the conflict against their former comrades. This was a practice pioneered by the Rhodesian Selous Scouts, the archetypal model for Koevoet and the unit within which most of Koevoet’s founding members had learnt their counter-insurgency skills. There is considerable evidence that the process of ‘turning’ was accompanied by torture and that the price of non-compliance was summary execution. Once ‘turned’, these askaris and other Koevoet members are said to have carried out atrocities while disguised as SWAPO fighters in order to discredit the liberation movement, as the Selous Scouts had done during the Rhodesian war.

104 One such incident occurred at the village of Oshipanda near Oshikuku in June 1983. A group of armed black men in camouflage uniforms raided the kraal of Mr Hubertus Mateus Neporo, a modestly prosperous shop-owner who was suspected of giving financial backing to SWAPO. They ransacked the kraal, stealing cash, clothes and a radio, and smashing the family vehicle. Neporo was away that night, but the rest of his family and other occupants of the kraal were lined up against a wall and shot. Neporo lost his wife, children, mother, brother and friends – in all, eight civilians were murdered. The official line from the police, media and magistracy was that they were killed by ‘terrorists’. However, one kraal resident survived and identified the attacker as a certain Nakale from the Koevoet base at Okalongo. Within months of this incident, Koevoet members were reported to be boasting of this successful false-flag operation.

105 In an amnesty application, SADF conscript Mr Kevin Hall [AM1383/96] provides an insight into the brutal nature of the conflict with SWAPO as well as the routine use of torture. In May/June 1975, he was stationed at the Mapungeerela base in northern South West Africa. He recounts an incident where he was sent out on a seven-day patrol with instructions “to eliminate or arrest any terrorists”. On the first night of the patrol, the group was “attacked by unknown forces and came under heavy gunfire”. A lengthy gunfight ensued. In the morning, several bodies were discovered, as well as three badly wounded combatants. According to Hall:

I realised that none of them could survive and to save them any further suffering I shot and killed the three of them. When I shot them, I turned my head away as I could not bear their suffering any more.

106 Hall’s action in killing the three was a gross violation of human rights for which he applied for amnesty. His commanding officer, whom he names but whom the Commission cannot identify as he has not applied for amnesty, is likewise accountable. So too is the command structure of the SADF at the time.

107 A day or two later, while on the same patrol, the group came across four unarmed “terrorists” and arrested them. On their return to base, the four were placed in a hole in the centre of the base “approximately eight foot square by about seven foot deep” which served “as a place of safekeeping of all arrested terrorists”. Hall continued:

They were the only ones in the hole. Whilst I was guarding them some of the troops poured boiling water over their heads; another troop of whom I cannot remember the name jumped into the hole and cut off the left ear and centre finger of the right hand of one of the [still living] prisoners.

108 Amnesty applicant Captain Eugene Fourie [AM3767/96] was a member of the Security Branch of the SAP stationed in Oshakati between June 1980 and January 1982. His application covers the death of a “SWAPO terrorist” whom he was interrogating. Fourie describes how, after administering electric shocks, the victim “het op ‘n stadium inmekaar gesak en sy bewyssun verloor en hy is toe agterna oorlede” (collapsed at one stage and lost consciousness and later died).

109 Former security policeman Warrant Officer Paul Francis Erasmus [AM3690/96] served in Owamboland in 1981. He applied for amnesty for the murder of a suspected SWAPO medical officer and for “suspects who were tortured on a regular basis by myself and other SB [Security Branch] members with the full knowledge and consent of commanding officers”.

110 Another former member of the Security Branch based at Oshakati, Warrant Officer John Deegan, gave a lengthy statement to the Commission on his experiences with the SAP and Koevoet in South West Africa and Angola. He describes visiting the Security Branch offices in Oshakati in January 1981 where a round-the-clock interrogation session had been underway for about a week.

We would work in shifts and the prisoners were kept awake, beaten, shouted at, deprived of food and water and toilet facilities and electric shocks were applied …

111 He describes how, during this particular session, the base came under rocket attack. The interrogators reacted by severely assaulting the teacher they were questioning at the time. Deegan joined the assault. Later that night the victim died.

When I was told about his death I was scared and realised that I was a murderer now, but the official lack of response to the incident made me realise that this had happened in reality before; no charges were brought against us and no official inquiry was ever held. Since then even to this day I have vivid nightmares about this man.