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Koevoet

Explanation
a police counter-insurgency unit set up in South West Africa in 1979 by members of the SAP Security Branch. It comprised recruits mostly from the local population who were trained as a mobile unit to gather intelligence, track guerrillas and kill them. Koevoet (Afrikaans for 'crowbar') soon gained a reputation for brutality, largely because of its methods of interrogating and torturing local people and for its heavy-handed presence in the operational areas. In the early to mid-1980s, at the height of its war with SWAPO, Koevoet claimed a kill rate of around 300 to 500 people a year, for which its members were paid a bounty per corpse.

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MR VAN DEN BERG: They knew each other since their Koevoet days.
MR LOADER: ... whom you say you believed to be an ex-member of Koevoet and was a Mozambican, came to fetch you at Vlakplaas. There's already been some dispute at a rather later stage following the evidence of Mr Pretorius, as to whether or not Mr Olifant went to collect you or whether he didn't. ...
... ourselves in investigations and exposing the role of the South African Defence Force in human rights violations in Namibia, in particular the Koevoet Battalion. We started and sponsored the New Nation Newspaper, as a means of allowing the voice of the oppressed people to be heard. The ...
MS LOCKHAT: You are an old Koevoet member, Mr Pienaar, is that correct?
... Later that morning we went to Cradock. One of the members of the PE Security Branch accompanied us. He went in his own car. He had come from Koevoet and I assumed that it was - that Sakkie van Zyl at that stage was a Captain. In Cradock we went to Henry Fouche who was the Security Branch ...
MR POTGIETER: That is correct. I was the Information or Intelligence Officer of the Koevoet Unit.
... in Durban. We had a discussion and he told me to write down my story and to come back after a couple of days. He also told me he had been a Koevoet member. Furthermore he gave me his telephone number. I cannot remember the name of this police officer but I gave the name in a statement ...
... took place in 1983 and at that stage Mr De Kock, to the best of my knowledge, was not yet in South Africa, and he was still affiliated to the Koevoet Unit in South West Africa. In Mr De Kock's submission he says that he is clearly being implicated here to an operation that happened in 1983 ...
MR SNYMAN: Yes, those are the arms that came from Koevoet's bases.
MR MOERANE: When you say you saw operations in South West-Africa, were you part of the Koevoet Unit?
... that but what's even more revealing was the fact that when Mr de Kock was asked about the strong personalities and the endurance abilities of koevoet members and Vlakplaas members, that he said Willie Nortje for instance, whom he regarded as one of the toughest operators, when he was put in ...
... LAMEY: I'm asking you this question with the objective on future proceedings but my position is that a man like Mr Nortje who had been a soldier in Koevoet in Ovamboland that his capacities were applied at Vlakplaas and that he never underwent any reorientation programmes or received the sort of ...
bring it back to the client whom I represent and the footsoldiers, it is that if he had a perspective due to previous operational experience such as Koevoet and thereafter was transferred to Vlakplaas he would have held the view that his operational experience and application with a unit such as ...
... like,for instance, select units and battalions in the Namibian bushwar. A good example of this is for instance 32 battalion, specialforces and Koevoet as far as the police was concerned. ...
MR JANSEN: You came from Koevoet in the former South-West Africa at that time, in other words you were already part of the South African Security Police when you joined C1, is that correct?
MR JANSEN: In your history at Koevoet and later on at Vlakplaas, did the authorities ever monitor in a structured or organised manner, the number of combat situations or exposure which the individual members had to conflict situations?
... where it was necessary for me to plant these weapons on the scene. As standard procedure I did have a Makarov with me and I was also attached to Koevoet and some of the weapons came back with me. For a long time I worked in Bophuthatswana where in one year we arrested 18 ANC members and some ...
ADV FORD: Were you ever a member of Koevoet Mr Van Rensburg?
... in annexures for your convenience as Commissioners. In April 1992, we had the 32 Battalion deployed in the area. The 32 Battalion is known to be Koevoet, people who do not know what a human being is. The difficulty that we had is explained in Annexure ...
... phrase, by the South African government, when being arrested as a so-called illegal immigrant into the military. That eventually sent him off to Koevoet, which eventually sent him off to the Police Intelligence System and as he explained, by that stage he was in a position where if he tried to ...
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