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people's warExplanation Here we found the war overnight or within a couple of months completely transformed. The protection was our responsibilities. We could not send our troops in uniform into the townships because if you send a man in uniform there they are immediately seen. So we had to find some other ways of ... In war there are two aspects that are involved, if not three. One is the physical involvement where people are stabbing or shooting one another. Secondly is the question of the moral or spiritual involvement where your heart or your spirit will tell you that you’ve got to do this. So the trend ... ... after the unbanning of the ANC, SACP, PAC and other organisations the AWB started flexing its military muscle and threatened the government with war if the ANC ever came to power. // ‘The intention of the ANC is to destroy my people, to destroy everything in sight. My message to the ANC ... It’s very difficult to know how many deaths are on the hands of these people and that’s because of the very nature of the secret war. The conflict in Matabeleland cost between 5 and 10 000 lives and at least one of the people who is in Chikurubi now as a convicted prisoner was very directly ... ... die, could be tortured, could be abducted, could be buried and many of them; and people like yourself and others just didn’t know, weren’t aware of that these people were acting unlawfully or illegally or misunderstood. Help us, I mean how is it possible for that to take place? // I think ... ... of ideology, of power structure, almost every one of us could become to some extent a perpetrator. Aspsychologists, especially we became aware with the years that this need to create a character which is a typical perpetrator is too simple an assumption and we have to think about that ... ... thousands of people in the street in a matter of minutes. They took seven hours in what could only be described as declaring a residential area a war zone. I am convinced that if the will was there Anton could have been gassed out, starved out if it took seven days. The impressions created by ... ... place and shoot the people, whether they were students or not was not the criteria, whether they were black or white. We were not fighting a racial war. Nobody was written on the forehead whether he was a white oppressor or black oppressor, an oppressor has no colour, no ... ... who took part in the KwaMakhutha killing were not members of the VIP unit, they were members of the offensive unit and they were not involved in a war situation as you earlier described. They attacked a house and they killed 13 people, most of whom were women and children. // Therefore they were ... one we need to learn a lot about in our country because the parallels are very dramatic. Some things do seem to make it worse, being in an unpopular war, an unpopular conflict is a problem. Our men had a problem worse even in some ways than Vietnam in that I’ve seen a number of people who talk ... ... about the conflict between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress in KwaZulu-Natal. More than 10 000 people have died in this war since the early 1980s. During the past few weeks the Truth Commission has paid special attention to KwaZulu-Natal with two amnesty hearings and a ... …because people wanted to make war, they’re fighting us. We were only SRC students, students speaking out, and now they were fighting us. So we had to retaliate. BMW was the Youth League of MK; we were the ones who did the fighting in Bonteheuwel. one we need to learn a lot about in our country because the parallels are very dramatic. Some things do seem to make it worse, being in an unpopular war, an unpopular conflict is a problem. Our men had a problem even worse in some ways than Vietnam in that I’ve seen a number of people who talk ... In war, truth and morality are the first casualties. In South Africa the brutalised sometimes became the brutalisers. // Teddy Williams, a former member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, was sent to the ANC’s Quatro rehabilitation camp for taking part in a camp mutiny. // What traumatized me most is to see ... ... in this country, because he’s talking peace. People wanted all the time the image of chief of staff to remain on him so that he must be a man of war, betrayed forever, but Chris died for peace. How shall we convince people about ... I don”t want to be involved in a semantic level regarding the meaning of certain words in this document. I want to emphasise that words like ”eliminate” and ”take out” for the members on the ground, who were in a war situation, referred only to killing people. Shaun and John who fought this war were told they were protecting their country and their people against the threat of communism. The church and its chaplain said they were fighting for the Christian faith. The politicians said they were killing and dying on foreign soil because their country ... that many South Africans haven’t taken proper notice of, the tens of thousands of young white men who were forced by military conscription to wage war in neighbouring states and against their fellow citizens in the townships. Until then, good ... In 1988 the war came back to Gaborone. The SADF raid left people dead once again. // The four people killed in the raid were buried today. // This year the South African Defence Force made a submission to the Truth Commission acknowledging the Botswana raids. // The following external operations ... Zambia they’d pass through Botswana but without the Botswana government’s knowledge. We had to do this, we had no other alternative, because the war was not waged in Zambia, it was not waged in Botswana but it was waged inside the country. And so we had to find ways of infiltrating these ... |