Jan Taljaard reports on this weeks bizarre Pretoria murder trial of two young white supremacists
IT had all the ingredients of a larger-than-life suspense thriller: a gang of youthful revolutionaries; a two-month crime spree which veered between arms thefts from military bases and cold-blooded murders in which people were slaughtered like sheep; a car chase through the desert, ending in a bloody showdown among the dunes; an attractive young Frenchwoman; and a warped white supremacist ideology that kept it all together.
But it was bizarre fact, not fiction, that unfolded in the Pretoria Supreme Court this week, when two young men were sentenced to long terms in prison.
Cornelius van Wyk (24) was sentenced to three life terms and an additional 49 years imprisonment for the murder of three people in Louis Trichardt and seven other counts relating to theft, robbery and the illegal possession of firearms.
The court found that Van Wyk and two other members of the National Socialist Partisans (NSP) had been involved in the brutal slaying on October 14 1991 of Maria Roux of Louis Trichardt and two of her employees, Wilson Dobani and Makwarela Dobani.
In a statement admitted as evidence, Van Wyk said the two employees had been shot and then their throats cut, and a praying Roux had been shot through the door of the cupboard in which she was hiding. Van Wyk and three others had launched their assault in an attempt to steal weapons.
Van Wyks co-accused, Jean Prieur du Plessis (24), the NSPs political leader, received an effective 12 years imprisonment for theft, robbery, housebreaking and unlawful possession of firearms.
They were the survivors of the group: a day before their arrest, two other NSP members involved in the murders, Jurgen White and Jurgen Grobbelaar, were killed in the Kalahari in a shootout with police after a high-speed chase.
Van Wyk and Du Plessis were arrested in Pretoria, where they were sharing a flat in Sunnyside with Frenchwoman Christine Beaussart (24).
Beaussart entered South Africa in 1990 with French neo-Nazi Oliver Mathieu. They were met by people who, four years later, would allegedly be involved in harbouring a gang of German nationals purportedly on a mission to destabilise the April 1994 elections. (The plans of the German gang came to an abrupt end when one of them, Thomas Kunst, was killed in a shootout with police. Two others, Horst Klenz and Tephan Rays, have since appeared in court.)
In 1991 Beaussart was working as a waitress at the Hansa restaurant, owned by Dr Pol Doussy, widely regarded as one of the most powerful driving forces behind the neo-Nazis in South Africa. Doussy also owned the building that housed the restaurant on Pretorius Street in Pretoria.
Other tenants included a bookshop managed by a former Nazi SS officer who had spent years in a Russian detention camp and specialised in books like Mein Kampf and the banned The White Mans Bible — and a meeting place Doussy made available for the Church of the Creator (CoC).
Earlier this year, Doussy ran into financial problems and lost the building; the South African head of the CoC, Jan Smith, emigrated to New Zealand; and the church folded. But the legacy of its teachings of hatred and white supremacy reverberated in the Pretoria Supreme Court throughout the trial of Van Wyk and Du Plessis.
In sentencing the two on Monday, Mr Justice Grobbelaar took into account that the crimes committed by the two highly talented men were committed against the background of CoC ideology.
Meetings of the church were held on the first Sunday of every month, with attendance strictly by invitation. Members, sympathisers and potential members were cordially invited to these meetings, where lectures towards the best interests of our race were presented.
The CoC, white supremacists without a god, called their belief a powerful religious creed and programme for the survival, expansion and advancement of the white race.
Originally founded by American Ben Klassen — in the hierarchy he is known as the Pontifex Maximus – – the South African chapter had been headed since 1979 by Smith, who holds several degrees in the sciences, including a PhD in nuclear physics.
Smith has translated The White Mans Bible (a lengthy, largely anti-Semitic tome written by Klassen) into Afrikaans.
Excerpts from Klassens writings read as follows: We must realise that we are now in a dire and crucial crisis in the life span of our race and we must dedicate ourselves to winning this crucial battle for white survival at all costs, no matter what the price or sacrifices are required.
We are natures finest, and in accordance with the highest law of nature — survival of the species — we must and will use any and all means to secure the survival of our species…
Smith is also no slouch when it comes to hitting out at Christianity or races other than white. Know that our race is our religion, he wrote in a document to members. Know that what is good for the white race is the highest good; and that which is bad for the white race is the highest evil…
Know that the biological and cultural heritage of the white race is threatened by our deadly race enemies, Jews, kaffirs and the mud races.
Referring to Christianity as Christenism or the evil Jewish-Christenist fable, he wrote: Our view about this god is simple. The thing does not exist at all.