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people's warExplanation 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 ... 1990. Ezikhawini outside Empangeni, a war zone. // It was terrible. People were dying like flies. People were dying. It was terrible. We were just sleeping in the passages, not in our beds, not at all. There was the sound of bullets all over. From six o’clock you must close the gate, close the ... ... the guerrillas, the booby trapping of portable radios given to black Zimbabweans and brutal executions. More than 55 000 people died in that dirty war. A real pity there wasn’t a truth commission in Zimbabwe after their liberation. This coming week there will be two days of hearings about ... saying sorry and that everyone in South Africa is ... the conflict between the oppressed people and the oppressor. Now that thing now, I think that war is over. Thank you. // Please no killings, that’s not necessary. I know she died not for nothing, so please don’t kill ... 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 ... ... with. It was a very messy situation and we had to, as we saw it, apply messy legislation without any particular crusading zeal to fight a just war or anything like that. It was a very unfortunate situation we landed ourselves in. ... 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 ... The tent was that side of the house, here; it goes along the fence there. It was so big that it can accommodate plus minus 300 people and most of these people were there and they were sitting inside. We went to the disco at about eight o’clock that night and it was Valentine’s night, it was supposed to be a special night for couples or married people. For years the people of Maokeng, the township outside Kroonstad in the Free State were terrorised by a brutal gang, called the Three Million Gang. The authorities, for their own reasons, turned a blind eye. And then the community dealt with it in their own brutal way. I was born in Potchefstroom. I can’t say the township, or the Indian township ... at that time it was just one area. And in a sense yes my early years takes place in that area because my grandfather, when he came from India, I imagine around 1920, 1921, many people actually then started moving ... For three days this week the Uitenhage town hall was filled to capacity as people came to observe and participate in the work of the TRC’s Human Rights Violations Committee. On Tuesday the hearing was dedicated to a single event: a massacre which took place at Langa township on March 21 1985 when ... This cocktail of God and fatherland was backed up at home with medal parades and military manoeuvres. The news was clinical and heroic. To keep the machine rolling and white South Africa’s morale up, the blood and guts, the dying and killing was not shown. Those who came back from the killing ... You were told by your commander that the reason why you had to infiltrate this group is because they were heavily trained and they were dangerous and they were destabilizing the area in and around in Cape Town. // That’s correct sir. I was instructed to train these people and when I reported that ... I was in the field with my animals, with the cows under a tree. While I was sitting there relaxing, and the cows were grazing, I just saw something like a car and when I looked at it I saw a group of people. I started to run away. I tried to, but they beat me and the others were screaming at me, ... As the TRC left Port Shepstone this week the question of a third force remained. Selvan Chetty of the Network of Independent Monitors has spent years investigating claims that a hidden hand has intervened to pit one side against the other. // I think if you really want to look at the hidden hand ... ... silence and then all of a sudden there was this swishing sound and everything just went bezerk. I don’t know, when I spoke to the bomb squad afterwards they told me it’s an impact, there is a fraction of a second or two seconds, before it actually takes everything away in its find. It ... ... to members from National Intelligence, Military Intelligence, as well as the other intelligence agencies and nobody seems to be able to come forward with any shred of evidence. We are investigating this case as a murder case, be it KwaZulu police involvement, the KwaZulu government ... ... we are going to have to say that people have a sense of responsibility for what happened. Because if we don’t say that, then I think as we go forward there are going to be many who say, well I can do these things because comrade x or comrade y did it and got away with it. And in finalising ... It was not our purpose to kill as many people as possible. Our purpose was to prove that if these attacks were launched against the Boer people that we would retaliate, that we would hit back. There’s no point in just shooting people at random, then we could have done that in Richards Bay for ... |
