Peta Thornycroft
It’s been a long time coming, but Dirk Coetzee has had enough. He now regrets having spoken out in 1989 about killer squads in the South African Police.
His confession six years ago about his own role in sanctioned murders and his breathtaking exposure of the rot deep in the South African security police has brought him little but grief. When he first told Vrye Weekblad reporter Jacques Pauw his story, both he and his claims were ridiculed in much of the then mainstream media. He had to spend four years in uncomfortable exile, in constant fear of being assassinated.
And the propaganda machine within the South African Police, and the remnants of that machine which is still functioning, has pursued him relentlessly. This week was the final straw.
His old colleague, National Police Commissioner George Fivaz (who probably owes Coetzee at least a good lunch for alerting the African National Congress that he was “untainted” and therefore probably the best compromise to be the future National Commissioner), chose to ignore him and go public with another man’s accusations against
Fivaz decided to endorse a version of events given to him by another former security policeman Inspector HT Moodley: Moodley claims Dirk Coetzee told him he was under orders to bug senior policemen at a meeting at National Intelligence Agency headquarters six weeks
Coetzee scoffs at this. His version is that Moodley, “a pleasant fellow” visited him at NIA HQ and asked him to make a statement about the assassination of ANC lawyer Griffiths Mxenge in Durban in 1981. Mxenge’s brother had decided to ask the police to charge Coetzee after participating in a Yorkshire Television documentary in which Coetzee once again repeated his confession, that under orders from his superiors in the security police, he sent his men to kill Mxenge.
Coetzee says he told Moodley at the “relaxed” meeting he would not make a statement to the police, but he would be telling the Mxenge story, for the last time, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Coetzee, uncomfortable in his NIA job as a “spook”, says he has neither access to “bugging” devices, nor has he ever been involved in bugging operations in his life, and that he is in the wrong department at the NIA to do any bugging, even if he knew how. He also claims that nobody in the NIA asked him to do any bugging, ever.
According to Coetzee neither Fivaz nor anyone else, including his bosses at NIA, asked him his version of the bugging allegations contained in a report by Independent Newspapers’ investigative unit, Spectrum.
Coetzee learned of Fivaz’s statement early last Thursday morning when a friend phoned him to tell him the newspaper reports were being aired on radio news bulletins.
Coetzee is bewildered about why he was the last to find out, and said: “Let me and Moodley have a lie detector test.” Moodley refused to talk to the M&G, and referred us to
Coetzee is not supposed to talk to the press. He would far prefer to be back in the police, which he left on “medical grounds” after a disciplinary hearing in 1986.
He’s an unconventional, outspoken wild card for the new government. In an interview with Tribute magazine before the elections he accused the ANC intelligence community of incompetence, and that didn’t do his career much good. And he’s not sure, after this week and his outrage in the press, what his job prospects are like with the NIA.
And he’s deeply hurt that some men who covered up and lied about the hit squads are generals in the police, while he is ill-placed in the state spy shop. Coetzee is not an angel, but so far he has never been caught in a lie.
l Fivaz told the M&G late on Thursday he had at no stage commented on the veracity of the allegations against Coetzee. He said he had discussed the bugging with intelligence boss Mo Shaik, who had decided to let the matter