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people's warExplanation ... 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 ... …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. [And in Cape Town today the PAC declared the following about the attack:] // ‘We think that this is the work of the third force, operating in this country to destabilize the transition to democracy. We are busy discussing the constitution here and it is no accident that this attack has occurred ... ... way of coming to terms with the past, but so many more white people in general and Afrikaners in particular have been openly hostile and critical towards the Truth Commission. One only has to read the Rapport on Sundays to realize how deep this resentment lies amongst Afrikaners. Now, many South ... But why? We asked Jerry Richardson’s defence counsel. // How convinced were you that Jerry lied to protect others? // I was convinced of it. I was convinced that he lied to protect the others. // How circumstantial was the evidence against him? // Nobody actually saw Jerry take Stompie away that ... I remember that my brother uttered a word to me that I will never forget in my life. I had visited him at the Garangua hospital. That’s where he told me and said ‘my own colleagues are going to kill me,’ so I then asked ‘what do you mean they are going to kill you? There is no way you as ... The name Sophiatown has become much more than a symbol of the forced removal of black people by the apartheid government. It was a magic moment in the history of the people of South Africa, a moment holding the promise of what South Africa could have been. This was a clear case; racism is not an acceptable political motive, but what of the seven young applicants this week? Lawyer Norman Arendse gives his impression. // It’s a matter of locating what they did in the political context at the time. And clearly the political context at the time was ... ‘On Hearings…’ // There’s always something that comes up, there’s always something that you don’t expect that comes up and it’s actually very difficult to keep control, because if you don’t keep control then it’s… I mean, we are not the important people; we’re merely the ... I made the arrangement that when I join the Truth Commission … I must be in the pulpit on Sunday, every Sunday. And it gives me strength. That is my basis of the strength. I ... the TRC things, I get tired, but I know that there is a spring from which I’m going to draw when it becomes Sunday, ... There’s one thing that I will have to live with till the day I die, it’s the corpses that I will have to drag with me to my grave, of the people whom I’ve killed. Remorse, I can assure you a lot, a hell of a lot. The six young men got life sentences for these gruesome deaths. Phineas spent two years on death row before his sentence was changed to 18 years imprisonment. This week he asked for amnesty in a bid to start a new life. // I’m sorry it ever happened. I can’t sleep ever since, there is something ... There was also some law which determined that while people of any racial group could rise to supervisory and management positions; they could only do this so long as those they supervised or managed were of the same racial group with the exception of course of whites. This meant that there was a ... In this regard Mr. Vlok issued a warning to the ANC and said it would not allow the organisation to kill or hurt the people of South Africa. // As I said they had a bottle of Old Brown Sherry, they basically danced around the corpses. They were walking around it making fun of it and for them it ... Vlakplaas was also at a certain stage then disbanded, when allegations became substantially, almost … you couldn’t prove, you could no longer say that it was just rumours and we then took steps as information came to the fore. The people who were involved in the assassination are before the ... They were guilty in that they were in Moscow in 1936 and the beginning of 1937. It was the peak of big terror. That time Stalin repressed and killed hundreds of thousands of millions of people. Wouter Mentz was a Vlakplaas policeman who had killed several people including one of his own colleagues and two deaf children in a Botswana raid. // I didn’t know that there were children, and if I recall they were two deaf-numb children. That was evil in killing them, because they caused no ... I was born in Boksburg, but have no memory of it, we moved to Pretoria when I was eighteen months old. My father is a Presbyterian minister, so I was brought up in a religious, spiritual household and although I am not a practicing Christian now I have a very strong sense of right and wrong and ... The court however found that these people were on the scene and associated themselves with the killing so strongly that they too were guilty of murder. It is this that the accused find hard to understand. They were simply not killers, they say. Evalina de Bruin said she did not understand that the ... White people were the privileged ones in the old South Africa, but there was one way in which the repressive apartheid government touched their lives: young white men were forced to join the army to fight fellow citizens and freedom fighters in neighbouring states. Wallace McGregor was one of many ... |
