Special Report Transcript Episode 27, Section 2, Time 00:10

‘I was in the heart of the whore.’ These were the words security policeman Dirk Coetzee used exactly seven years ago to describe his role as the commander of the Vlakplaas death squad. And this week Coetzee and two of his colleagues told their horror stories to the nation. They were in the heart of the whore. We have a full report on the amnesty hearings of Coetzee, Almond Nofemela and David Tshikalanga. And we go behind the scenes and talk to the men and their victims’ families. We also visit the killing fields of KwaZulu-Natal where the depths of hatred and brutality again surprised this past week. And we remind you that human rights violations were not the monopoly of the apartheid state. We hear the story of one man’s suffering in the ANC’s camps in Angola. But we start with Dirk Coetzee at the amnesty hearings in Durban. I met Coetzee in 1989. He was angry and disillusioned. He was an officer of the security police elite, in fact a pioneer of the apartheid state’s new aggressive strategy of torture and kill in the name of PW Botha’s total strategy. But Coetzee was a hard headed maverick and became unpopular with his bosses. They tried to walk over him in the typical arrogance of the time, but they didn’t bargain on his stubbornness. Dirk Coetzee became bitter and turned on his former superiors. He told the incredible story of the wild Vlakplaas men to several opposition politicians, but they either didn’t believe him or they were too scared to do something about it. Because Coetzee’s story was explosive. The National Party government he said, sanctioned a band of cruel men to hunt down opponents of the apartheid state, all in the name of Christianity and civilization. Coetzee even went to journalists with his bizarre story but could find no newspaper who would print it. It was almost as if opposition politicians and newspaper editors sensed that this story would crack the façade of white rule. That it would inevitably lead to a total exposé of what apartheid really was, a violent, evil ideology. I was the editor of a struggling, independent anti-apartheid newspaper at the time with the name of Vrye Weekblad. In October 1989, my colleague then - who is again my colleague at the SABC now - Jacques Pauw, brought Coetzee into the office where I heard his story for the first time. There was a part of me that wished I had never met Dirk Coetzee, because we knew we simply had to publish Coetzee’s entire story, although it could mean the end of our newspaper. We knew the power of the Afrikaner establishment and of the apartheid state. In the end, the Coetzee story was the reason the newspaper had to close down. Of course the government and the police denied every word Coetzee had said. They started a smear campaign against Coetzee and they were ably and enthusiastically assisted by the then SABC and many mainstream newspapers.

Notes: Max du Preez