Special Report Transcript Episode 68, Section 1, Time 00:23

Good evening. A warm welcome to the new-look Special Report on Truth and Reconciliation. Thanks for remembering that we have moved from eight o’clock to six o’clock. This is where we will stay for the foreseeable future. On tonight’s programme you will meet the man they call ‘prime evil,’ Eugene de Kock and he is not at all what we thought he would be like. We also introduce you to a woman who explains what solitary confinement does to the human mind and we tell you more about the poisoning of activists by the police and their army in the late 1980s. And at the end of tonight’s report we respond to Winnie Mandela’s attack on this programme. But we start with the amnesty hearings in Port Elizabeth this past week. On 14 December 1989 three security policemen died in a car bomb explosion near Motherwell outside Port Elizabeth. The police blamed the ANC, but in 1996 five former security policemen were convicted for these murders; one of them was Eugene de Kock, the commander of the Vlakplaas unit outside Pretoria. This week he spoke publicly for the first time since his trial. It was almost like a Vlakplaas reunion in Port Elizabeth this past week when De Kock and eight other policemen applied for amnesty from the Truth Commission.

Notes: Max du Preez