TRC Final Report

Volume 6

Section 3

Chapter 1

Subsection 32

Failure to ask questions

357. While Mr de Klerk and others have consistently denied knowing that the security forces were involved in illegal action, the Commission was struck by the fact that, in numerous cases, nobody appears to have asked any questions. Applicants themselves occasionally expressed their amazement at such disclaimers.

358. For example, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Roelof ‘Pik’ Botha, Dr LD ‘Niel’ Barnard, and General Coetzee all testified that when they had convened for the State Security Council at 11am on 20 December 1985, they had been unaware of the raid on Maseru the night before. They further testified that the raid had not been reported at the meeting nor had there had been any discussion about it. The astonishing failure even to mention the raid is best expressed by General van der Merwe, who testified as follows:

[By] lunch, it was headline news in the newspapers and no-one asked any questions.. One would have expected that if they did not know who it was, the State P resident would have at least asked the Chairperson of the CIC: ‘What is going on here? A number of MK members were killed in Lesotho and this is an essential aspect of the threat with regard to us’ and he would have wanted to know who was responsible for it.. [No] member of the SSC [who] had security background and who received information about this threat, could have pretended for any moment that the only people who had the capabilities of doing such things would be the Security Forces of South Africa. Anyone who pretended not to have that knowledge and wanted to blame any other body for this operation, would have been extremely naive and extremely ignorant at that stage. (Pretoria hearing, 29 February 2000.)

359. In his evidence before the Amnesty Committee, Mr Vlok testified that there were no questions in the State Security Council about the Cosatu House and Khotso House bombings. He testified that, at the next SSC meeting, he had been congratulated by the State President for the Khotso House incident. However, despite the fact that there had been specific input about the problems Khotso House was giving at the previous meeting, nobody asked any questions or commented on the destruction of the building.

360. This determination to ask no questions seems to have been replicated throughout the command structures of the Security Branch. For example, when asked to get rid of ‘a package’ (the body of Stanza Bopape), Brigadier Schalk Visser, divisional commander of the Eastern Transvaal, told Brigadier Gerrit Erasmus that he did not want to know the details.

361. According to Brigadier Cro n j e :

All actions under my jurisdiction which happened in this manner were taken up in situation reports which were sent through on a daily basis to my head office. The procedure was that further reports with this information would then have been passed on to the State Security Council. Events which took place under my command in the Security Branch in Pretoria were, therefore, passed on to Head Office and must have been taken up in reports to the State Security Council … I do not believe anyone in my Head Office could have been so naive as to believe that the ANC were killing and attacking their own people. They must have known what the true facts were. (Johannesburg hearing, 21 October 1996.)

362. Applicant Craig Williamson, who was a political appointee on the Preside n t ’s Council in the late 1980s, commented:

Once it got up to the NGBS (NJMC), it became the political control level where a deputy minister then received the information from the civil service below – and when I say civil service I include the security forces – and this information was then fed up via the [Work Committee] and the State Security Council and on a political level I believed directly either to Cabinet or to the State President … Once the information had arrived at the NGBS and then to the State Security Council, the information was in political hands. (Pretoria hearing, 14 September 1998.)

363. At the same time, the clandestine and covert nature of much of the Security Branch’s work meant that, while certain information circulated and was discussed in formal forums, other mechanisms operated to ensure that sensitive information was kept under wraps. It became clear in many matters before the Amnesty Committee that, while the fact of an incident was passed on, in terms of covert rules, the detail in respect of Security Branch involvement was not.

364. On another level, of course, this is nonsense. A number of the people who were killed were extremely well-known and their deaths could hardly have been ignored. For example, Brigadier Schoon testified he had first learned of the death of Ms Jeanette Curtis Schoon and her daughter Katryn Schoon in the newspapers and at the morning ‘Sanhedrin’. Asked who would have reported it, he replied ‘The desk that dealt with that same file, that would be the A Section’. Williamson testified that some time after that he had organised for an explosive device to be put into an envelope:

[T ] h e re was an intelligence report to the effect that there had been an explosion … in the office of Ruth First and that she had been killed and at the next … Sanhedrin when this point was just noted, Brigadier Goosen looked up, looked at me, nodded his head and that was it. (Pretoria hearing, 14 September 1998.)

365. Not only would these incidents have been reported but, unlike most victims of MK action, most of these victims would have had Security Branch files, requiring an entry. For example, where members of the Soweto Intelligence Unit or the Northern Transvaal Security Branch were involved in attacks on individuals’ homes, the attacks but not the authors were reported. However, to use the Northern Transvaal Security Branch as an example, it would have been inescapably evident to Group B at Security Branch Headquarters that the homes of some forty to fifty activists had been attacked by ‘unknown perpetrators’ between February and May 1986.

366. It is extremely unlikely that security and intelligence forces would have made no effort to know who was assisting them in their task, especially given the general policy to promote divisions. Asked whether people attending the ‘Sanhedrin’ could ‘have believed that forces other than their own were ... responsible’ , Williamson replied:

During my time in the Security Forces, I certainly … didn’t believe that it was the fairies … I believed that there was a co-ordinated counter-insurgency strategy being applied. (Pretoria hearing, 16 September 1998.)