BOTHA, JJ

Alright, Benedict you wanted to come in? // Benedict from Special Report, SABC. Why have people like PW Botha not been subpoenaed to come to the TRC? // Well they don’t have to be subpoenaed. You see, I think the whole idea of subpoenaing people is only for purposes of investigating and ...

was given to me in Springs by Gen van der Merwe, and he specifically told me that the order came from Minister Louis le Grange and that President PW Botha as well as ex-commissioner General Johan Coetzee knew about it. And approved it. ...

to the airfield from which the planes would take off. It was coincidence, but you had a Reagon government, you had a Thatcher government and you had Botha coming in at about the same time. And that set us up for the eighties. And they obviously had a fairly sympathetic hearing in the sense that ...

We stay in KwaZulu-Natal for our next report and the names Andy Taylor and Hentie Botha come up again. In 1988 police said three terrorists had accidentally blown themselves up at the Phoenix Railway Station. No names were given. The police simply said they were terrorists. Tonight we can tell you ...

There is not the slightest question as to its authenticity. There are even notes pasted by themselves at the back of this document in the handwriting of members of the delegation or members who attended the meeting. These are obviously notes as it’s only normally done at meetings of this nature ...

Did you know that there were no tigers in Africa? // If there were, you wouldn’t have been one of them.

Neither the international community at large nor any particular state will dictate to us what the contents of our political programme should be. We have to live in this country. We have nowhere else to go, therefore we ourselves shall find solutions to our problems and we will make them work. Let ...

All the decisions were taken to cabinet. You were not dealing with State Security Council decisions; you were dealing with cabinet decisions. Cabinet, it can be proved. Not only factually, but that is the constitutional position. So the cabinet was governing. The State Security Council was a ...

Dames en here [ladies and gentlemen], can you all hear me? Those who can’t hear me put up your hand and salute me. I stand by everybody who executed legal government orders on our struggle against revolutionary communist onslaught against our fatherland which had to lead to anarchy. I stick to my ...

‘Elimineer,’ eliminate, ‘neutraliseer,’ neutralise, ‘uitwis,’ obliterate or wipe out.

‘Torture and Killing: Stanza Bopape’ // ”Bekamp,” fight against, curb, control, ”stuit,” arrest, stem, ”uit die samelewing verwyder,” remove from society.

Now where do you take it from now? I ask myself, I can’t ask my colleagues. Everyone must speak for himself. I said to myself, not for the sake of this meeting but here this man, should I not have done more?

We prepared ourselves for an onslaught against our people and on the morning of the 9th of October 1980 I heard on SABC news that a group of about 30 black people clad in PAC T-shirts had attacked whites on the Durban beach front. Since we’d already declared war against the National Party and as ...

Massacre has become a cheap word in South Africa. There have been too many instances where a dozen or more people were killed in one incident of political violence. But there is no other word for what happened in the Natal midlands in 1990. 200 people died in the single biggest massacre in our ...

I want to help build the new SA. I was a destroyer now I want to be a builder.

‘Ambush and Killing: Cradock 4’ // ‘Vernietig,’ destroy, ‘opspoor en vernietig,’ track down and destroy, ‘houvas breek,’ break their grip.

‘Third Force: Operation Marion’ // Now how did it happen, why did it happen?

This one guy he was just so bossies, he was actually amusing. I mean whenever you heard helicopters, I mean this is Voortrekkerhoogte; it’s like a military town, helicopters going all the time. This guy heard a helicopter, he would shoot under his bed and he would go into … this guy was … his ...

The Seychelles, a tourist heaven. For years holiday makers have flocked to these islands strung out like jewels in the Indian Ocean. But in 1977 trouble came to paradise. Seychellois President Sir James Mancham was ousted in a coup led by Albert René. Mancham had been a friend of apartheid South ...