N’WA-MUKANSI, (first names not given)

This episode starts with a report back on the Amnesty Committee hearings of five former security policemen (Jack Cronje, Roelf Venter, Jacques Hechter, Wouter Mentz and Paul van Vuuren), which continued this week in Pretoria. This episode focuses on the murder of police sergeant Richard Motasi and ...

But this week for the first time, Adriaan Vlok and the top commander of the police force admitted our men may have murdered, killed, tortured and bombed in the line of duty. // This highly confidential letter was delivered to the Truth Commission this week. // 22 former and serving policemen want ...

Sophie. // Commissioner Ntsebeza, still on the issue of transparency, will the Commission reveal the name of the spy that the five policemen spoke about, because that is in the public interest, the right to know also has to be respected and the constitution. // Now, the first thing that I must ask ...

Mashikane said the townships are sitting full of informers that want to be integrated into the communities and we don’t provide them with the opportunity. // In this proper context, can I just indicate the process that we possibly will follow? One, we will subpoena these people, because there’s ...

Dumisa Ntsebeza, let me ask you the first question. We’ve had a lot of policemen in front of the Amnesty Committee, we’ve heard a lot of evidence in the human rights violations hearings about the police and security police, where is the military in all this? Why haven’t we made a breakthrough ...

‘Meeting Madiba…’ // When they came in I quickly went up the stairs to wait for them and I must tell you that when an important man like this comes in my tradition you have to sing his clan praises and I didn’t know Madiba’s clan names except ‘Madiba.’ And I had to phone my mother in ...

It will certainly be a welcome change to hear a version of the past from perpetrators rather than victims. And we’re going to have a good dose of it. Apart from the secretive six policemen convicted, Trust Feed killer Brian Mitchell will tell his story and name names in two weeks’ time. The ...

Our policy has five components to it and we really would like people to see it within the context of those five components and not focus simply on the money, which I think what has been happening over the last eighteen months. // ‘Urgent Interim Relief’ // This is for people who can’t wait ...

Pedro had a letter with the names of his contacts in Lesotho. Benzien wanted those names, badly. // I was given instructions to carry a letter which I should not open until such time as I’d cross the Lesotho border and then I would find out who these people were and where I was supposed to meet ...

Is there a problem from the side of perpetrators, former members of the security forces that they want to have a guarantee of amnesty before they come? // Yes. // And can that be resolved? // No it is a problem and many of them have asked that and we’ve had to say to them there can be no ...

Could there possibly be ANC cabinet ministers and senior government officials who spied on their comrades for the apartheid police? The claim was first made during Jacques Hechter’s evidence and then amplified by his legal counsel, Roelof du Plessis. // There are people in the current ...

The headline of the Pretoria news today is that these people are actually probably going to refuse. They are feeling that they don’t want to give the names and we may well get to a situation, even if they are subpoenaed, according to the lawyer who represents them, that they don’t want to ...

Do you think that this was a well planned murder? // Yes. According to the docket it seems like that. // Have you ever come across in any of that docket the name of a BOSS agent, I don’t know his name, but his nickname was Rooibaard? // There were names mentioned but I can’t disclose 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 ...

The names of Eugene de Kock, Dirk Coetzee and Joe Mamasela have become household names in South Africa the last few years. So has the name Vlakplaas, the farm where these efficient killers had their base. The secret of the so-called successful death squad was the use of a group of men and women ...

On Friday we met with Robert McBride in the gardens of the Union Buildings where he now works. // This particular operation cannot be seen in isolation to what the state was doing. It was after a period of a number of cross-border raids in which men, women and children, mostly not even members of ...

I think monuments can be live monuments, they can be dead monuments. And a dead monument is something that’s got no vitality and meaning in itself, it’s just a big pile of stones. And I think of all the ceremonies you find in Europe and other countries where there had been many dead, they’re ...

The Truth Commission has got a mission to unearth the truth, whether the truth be in the offices of Government or in the graveyard. They have a responsibility to unearth that truth and the families which are here today are very happy that they know the truth about what happened to their sons. And ...

Reference book, pass book, dompas, stinker, different names for the same thing. The hated document that determined the life of every black South African for decades, where they could sleep, live, work, visit and for how long. The main aim of the pass laws was to control the movement of black South ...

We know what unbelievable mechanisms of repression, of forgetting, of distortion perpetrators use of justification in order not to remember what they have done. When the victims come and tell their stories it reminds, it can remind the perpetrators of what they have done and it is a very difficult ...