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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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... One of the reasons being that I had a problem with nepotism, which was actually a form of incest so to speak. And there are some of the Koevoet members who would support me in this. The withdrawal of funds, the construction of weapons stockpiling locations where funds would be taken ...
... Black Cats somewhere, another one would surface in Welkom and always it would be in the context of fomenting black-on-black violence. The role of Koevoet. The Witdoeke in the Western Cape. The Crossroads conflict. Now all of them there is one common thread portrayed as black-on-black ...
MR HATTINGH: And he was an experienced Commander, in the sense that for quite a number of years he was a Commander in Koevoet, is that correct?
... Afrikaans, I could only hear the voice of a man saying skiet (shoot) and it may be upon that assumption that one would assume that it’s a certain koevoet operation. That’s what comes into my mind I must ...
MR BOSCH: Yes, Chairperson. Because I know - Col de Kock could perhaps help me out here, but that thing actually we got from the days of Koevoet in South West, quite a long time.
MR HATTINGH: Initially in his statement, Mr Potgieter says that he has a clear recollection of yourself and van Niekerk together and he specifically remembers van Niekerk because he saw him the last time in Koevoet. Where were you and van Niekerk together in the presence of Colonel Potgieter?
needed and he was a highly qualified source analyst, he had handled sources with the Diamond Section and he was a person who had rendered service in Koevoet, he had good combat record which he built up in Ovamboland. We had a qualified person if I may put it, as such, he was an ...
I will just add, one quick thing I can throw in is that the whole Vlakplaas operation was something that was transplanted from outside and brought inside. That was Koevoet that was brought into South Africa and it had a role and a function outside which was naturally just continued internally.
MR VAN DEN BERG: They knew each other since their Koevoet days.
MR ROSSOUW: You were a member of Koevoet.
... as if not having authorised the specific actions. It is submitted that the actions of units of Vlakplaas, Koevoet and other counter-insurgency units were silently if not directly authorised by the government, and were used outside the normal system to form part of the government’s ...
very well. Capt Van Zyl was drafted into the Eastern Cape in the early 1980s to come and assist to deal with the troublesome activists. He was from Koevoet in Namibia - according to his own admission to myself - and a Capt Sakkie du Plessis and a team of security policemen which included Black ...
... the lifeof a conscript as Craig Botha told us about; and Ian Liebenbergand Johan Hattingh; the terrifying picture which John Deegan toldus about Koevoet and Oshakati the pictures which he pasted intoour album. There was my classmate, Neels du Plooy, who showedus the photograph of a military ...
... aspect of the CCB's modus operandi was the use of cash as an incentive to produce. Thus like other hit squad or counter-insurgency units such as Koevoet and C10 CCB members were provided with a positive inducement to undertake actions would could and often did result in a gross violation of ...
... associated with the political objective, you set out your background on page 174, from when you joined the police, from where you joined Koevoet in 1980, you returned in 1984, you worked under Craig Williamson and until up to where you left Vlakplaas at the end of 1987. Do you ...
... us on the tours. They said: why could we not be good like the Afrikaans press or some of the tamer newspapers like The Citizen? I came back from a Koevoet tour and wrote that it was a ruthless killing force. And Lothar Neethling threatened to shoot me. He said: 'How can you call it a ruthless ...
... 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 ...
... 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 ...
MR LAMEY: You would also like to place it on record that you were with Colonel De Kock in Koevoet in the struggle in the former South West Africa, and that you followed De Kock to Vlakplaas more or less a year later, and that the continuation of the struggle at Vlakplaas, or you saw that as a ...
Unit of the Security Branch of the South African Police at the time of this incident.  He was ordered by his commander at Vlakplaas to go to the Koevoet Base at Oshakati to collect firearms, mostly AK47 assault rifles and to bring it to South Africa for purposes of training and ...
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