Special Report Transcript Episode 63, Section 2, Time 00:14

Hello. Welcome to the 63rd edition of the Truth Commission Special Report. On tonight’s programme we look at the brutal racial slays of white people by the PAC’s army APLA during 1993. We talk to victims, survivors, killers and politicians in KwaZulu-Natal and we show you a conversation with the last jail master of Robben Island who is now guarding the memories of our past. We start with the so-called ‘Year of Great Storms.’ During the early nineties when most political players were sitting at the World Trade Centre negotiating their way towards change the Pan Africanist Congress was playing a different sort of game. While liberation armies like Umkhonto we Sizwe laid down arms, the PAC was arming and training young cadres in the townships to intensify a ‘people’s war.’ For the PAC this meant targeting white areas and farms as well as the army and police. In 1993 in particular the country was rocked by the seemingly senseless attacks on the St. James Church and the Helderberg pub as well as the Highgate Hotel in the Eastern Cape. In Bloemfontein in 1993 on the same day as the St. James massacre there was an attack on a white farmer and his wife by members of the PAC’s military wing. The farmer, John Smith was stabbed to death and his wife Rene shot and wounded. The six young men responsible for this attack are now asking for amnesty from the Truth Commission’s Amnesty Committee sitting in Bloemfontein.