TRC Final Report

Volume 2

Chapter 5

Subsection 12

78 As homeland forces struggled to cope with the rising tide of mass resistance, an ever increasing amount of money was funnelled into homeland policing. The following tables chart the dramatic annual increases that characterised expenditure by homeland police forces.

Police budgets in three of the independent homelands (in rands)³

79 Police budgets in the self-governing homelands rose steadily as well, as the following table indicates.

Police budgets in self-governing homelands (in rands)

80 In accordance with their increased size and expanded budgets, homeland forces played a significant part in this period’s intensifying repression. As examined in greater detail in the section below, gross violations of human rights statements received by the Commission confirm the central role of homeland police forces in security operations. In a period that recorded the most gross violations of human rights, almost half of all perpetrators identified by victims were affiliated to a homeland police force.

81 As homeland forces expanded in size and assumed a larger operational role, they became increasingly politicised, focused on counter-insurgency, alienated from local communities and aloof from independent restraint. As South Africa’s ‘securocrats’ turned to strategies of counter-revolutionary warfare in the mid-1980s, these characteristics were further enhanced. This process is aptly demonstrated by developments in the KZP.