Ann Eveleth
While most South Africans were preparing for last year’s elections, an ambitious group of right-wingers was plotting to sieze control of KwaZulu-Natal, the Estcourt Regional Court heard this week.
AWB member Freddie Steyn testified that he and five right-wingers on trial for illegal possession of weapons, explosives and poison had planned to seize control of Durban’s South African Defence Force Recce base after the elections by poisoning the base’s water supply. Police say they confiscated three plastic bottles containing a cyanide-based powder from the car of the accused last June.
Steyn — a State witness who tipped-off the Goldstone Commission about the group’s intentions — told the court the group had planned to “isolate” KwaZulu-Natal from the rest of the country through acts of seizure and sabotage with the help of Inkatha Freedom Party members.
Steyn testified that the group planned to sabotage main transport routes linking the province with South Africa by destroying roads, bridges, railways and petrol depots, as well as both provincial harbours at Durban and Richards Bay. Durban’s Louis Botha airport was also targeted.
Steyn said accused Gerrit Anderson was instructed to implement the plan in April 1994 when he attended a meeting of senior AWB members at a game ranch near Magaliesburg.
Anderson was ordered to form a network of AWB members in the province and — to swell the ranks of the insurgent force — to enlist the support of the Inkatha Freedom Party.
A plan to arm “200 000 Zulus” and provide them with combat training via 200 members of the French Foreign Legion was also discussed. (Accused Patrick Rousseau is a French national.)
Steyn said he, Anderson and a Frikkie Vos had subsequently returned to KwaZulu-Natal, where they made contact with Returned Exiles Committee founder Pat Hlongwane — who told them he could make available 15 000 ex-MK soldiers — and another IFP member, John Milligan and two other accused, Sheron Hattingh and Allan Nolte.
Rousseau and the fifth accused, Gerald Veltman, arrived later from the Transvaal with a supply of explosives, homemade guns, commercial firearms, ammunition and cyanide.
Steyn said he and Nolte later buried the cache in the sand on an Umdloti beach — not far from the flat rented by Anderson’s girfriend, where the group plotted their next move. Steyn subsequently informed the Goldstone Commission about the cache, but the five accused had allegedly unearthed it.
Steyn is the first of a string of “secret” witnesses expected to be called by Prosecutor Ian Cooke over the next two weeks. Cooke told Magistrate Barend Willemse in his opening statement in June that the accused had transported the weapons to KwaZulu-Natal from the Orange Free State on May 17, 1994 before proceeding with “various plans to destabilise” the province.
Defence attorney Dion Roder suggested while cross- examining Steyn that the plot was a “fantasy”. Roder asked how 200 000 Zulus could be trained and armed with “a dozen homemade pipe-guns and 20 rounds of ammunition”.