Ann Eveleth reports on the bizarre trial of KwaZulu-Natal rightwingers accused of a fantastic plot to take control of the province
THE white right wing wanted a volkstaat. The Inkatha Freedom Party wanted a Zulu kingdom. Pat Hlongwane wanted explosives. And the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging wanted to wipe out African National Congress township strongholds in KwaZulu-Natal.
These converging interests form the crux of a bizarre tale of apartheid-era fantasy and macabre bravado currently unfolding in sleepy Ladysmith’s old regional court.
It’s been 17 months since Durban police arrested five rightwingers at a Ladysmith petrol station and seized a small cache of weapons, commercial explosives and bottles of cyanide-based powder. Since then, a string of alleged co-conspirators have turned state witness. Now the five accused, state witnesses, a frustrated magistrate, two conservative defence attorneys and a staid prosecutor occupy the stage of a courtroom drama that belongs to a bygone era.
Twenty-odd African spectators fill the gallery, the once-faithful AWB audience having long since disappeared.
The state’s case, which began in July, carried on for a fortnight and then went into recess until the court reconvened three weeks ago, is almost finished. A lone fan rotates on the high ceiling as magistrate Barend Willemse lets loose on the witness. Right-wing militarist and Returned Exiles Committee founder Pat Hlongwane has just buckled under cross-examination by a defence attorney: “That’s not my indaba,” Hlongwane declares when the attorney tells him the accused would dispute his testimony.
Willemse growls: “It is your (pause) ‘indaba’. You are giving evidence and you are obliged to answer these questions.”
Three days into Hlongwane’s testimony, the magistrate is obviously at the end of his tether. Referred earlier to the court transcript by the defence attorney in an attempt to settle a dispute with the witness, Willemse, looking bored and fiddling with his nose, asked: “Was it before or after lunch?”
Hlongwane’s quarrelsome scene is a light interlude in this twisted comedy of errors. The conspiracy behind this trial — ; as alleged by two earlier state witnesses — offers a perverse insight into the right wing’s desperate last stand on the eve of the new South Africa.
On a worn provincial map presented as evidence, gold boxes mark the spots the conspirators allegedly planned to sabotage if the ANC won the election. They planned to cut off main road, rail and air links out of KwaZulu-Natal while sabotaging dams, bridges and ports.
Regions outlined by green magic marker on the map suggest strongholds and deployment routes which state witness Freddie Steyn said would be used by “200 000 Zulu soldiers” and 200 French mercenaries.
The court heard the AWB planned to employ this force in its quest for an Afrikaner volkstaat. Together they would isolate KwaZulu-Natal from the rest of South Africa, prevent the ANC from taking power in the province, and force an ANC-led central government to concede more of the country for the volkstaat. Or so the accused — and a group of AWB generals in other provinces — allegedly thought.
The court heard that the alleged alliance unravelled on June 8 last year when several conspirators, independently of one another, betrayed their colleagues. A tip-off led Durban police to a beautiful Umdloti beach, where the small cache of weapons, explosives and bottles of cyanide-based powder was buried — but police were too late. The accused had allegedly got word of the tip-off, unearthed the cache, loaded it into their car and headed “inland”.
Ladysmith police cornered the vehicle after it made a “pit-stop” at a local petrol station and arrested the five accused.
The AWB was under pressure throughout the country at the time, with several members arrested in connection with a spate of pre-election bombings in Gauteng and three AWB members — including KwaZulu-Natal leader Nick Fourie — summarily executed in Bophuthatswana.
Inside the alleged AWB conspiracy in KwaZulu-Natal, the plotters became unglued. Cracks in the alliance led several — including state witnesses Frikkie Vos, Steyn and Hlongwane — to give themselves up to the police and the Goldstone Commission of Inquiry.
Under cross-examination, Hlongwane looks nervous. He says the Gauteng bomb blasts made him hopeful and “the arrangements concerning the heavy machine guns that I was going to receive and also the explosives” allegedly promised to him had made him “so excited”. But he said he drew the line when he was told to poison the water supply in the Durban townships of Umlazi, KwaMashu, Clermont and Lamontville.
“That is what made me change my mind — to take instructions from a white man living in the suburbs to take poison to kill black people in the townships … I could not execute (the mission) because of the guilty conscience, thinking about those people who are not involved in our war. Small babies …” Hlongwane lamented.
Probed by the defence on what he intended to do with the cyanide while he waited “until the AWB comes to start the revolution”, Hlongwane buried his face in his arm on the podium and sobbed, forcing a recess.
Outside the court, a tall, distinguished-looking bearded man in a pin-stripe suit with a cellphone stood aloof from his fellow accused. “It’s none of your business,” he shouted at the Mail & Guardian and launched a lengthy tirade in Afrikaans. Gerrit Anderson, accused number one, has been portrayed by several witnesses as the alleged leader.
His first lawyer dropped the case, alleging his client had threatened him. His fellow accused made similar allegations, one charging Anderson wanted to shoot him in the leg to have the trial postponed. His new lawyer, Connie Geldenhuys, describing his client as “a nice guy”, is unfazed by the allegations.
Accused number three, Sheron Hattingh, a thin, drawn woman in her 40s sitting nervously on the bench, reaches for the cigarettes she says she only started smoking during the trial. Hattingh is a nurse and casts a knowing glance at Anderson’s departing back: “He doesn’t want to talk,” she whispers.
Hattingh and her partner Allan Nolte, accused number two — ; a wiry man with longish, curly, blonde hair, a missing front tooth and tattoos down both his arms — refused to speak to the
The court heard Hattingh and Nolte met Anderson through an IFP member, John Milligan.
The other accused — a bearded young Frenchman named Patrick Rousseau and an even younger man, Gerald Veltman — linked up with Anderson through AWB Free State “general” Kiewiet Roodt. The court heard earlier that the illegal weapons originated from Roodt’s Theunissen farm, south of Welkom in the Free
Rousseau, who has only been in South Africa “a couple of years”, says he once went to school “in Oklahoma”.
Back in court, the defence attorney gets into another tangle with Hlongwane, whom he accuses of giving evidence to shore up his credibility in advance of the truth commission.
“Sir, we now have truth and reconciliation in our country. It’s time to open up the tin of worms,” retorts Hlongwane.
The Ladysmith attorney smirks: “I don’t want to enter into a political discussion with you, but have you noticed that truth and reconciliation seems to be on one side only?”
The prosecution is expected to wind up its case today.