Jan Taljaard in Pretoria
THE rightwing has stashed away arms caches containing a Buccanneer fighter aircraft, G5 and G6 cannons and several nuclear warheads, if a report this week by Britain’s Channel 4 is to be believed.
Said to be behind these arms caches is the once shadowy Volkseenheidskomitee (Vekom) of general Tienie Groenewald, now a Freedom Front senator. It is exactly on this point that the new allegations tend to fall
Rightwingers found themselves bewildered as the allegations reached South African shores. Some even called it part of a “communist plot” to discredit the rightwing in the run-up to the October local elections.
A Weekly Mail & Guardian investigation into the allegations indicates the allegations may be nothing more than a concoction of urban legend, some fact, and rumours that were circirculating prior to the 1994
Channel 4 also listed people it said were members of Vekom: for instance, the Herstigte Nasionale Party’s Jaap Marais and the Boere Weerstandsbeewging’s Andrew Ford — neither of whom would be seen dead with real Vekom members such as Groenewald.
It is true that Doctor Wally Grant, once intimately involved in South Africa’s secret nuclear weapons programme, is a member of Vekom. As far as can be ascertained, this fervent volkstater’s involvement in Vekom has never been more than purely political.
It is also true that the BWB once attempted to establish an arms cache after having stolen equipment from a Pietersburg military base. This cache was unearthed within days and contained no such hardware.
At that stage the rightwing was indeed preparing for war but the battle plans, as reported in the WM&G at the time, revolved around a rural insurrection using the Boere Krisis Aksie, and urban insurrection using the AWB and a split in the ranks of the SADF, that would effectively neutralise the South African National Defence Force’s Rapid Deployment Forces.
Hardware that was going to be used in the insurrection was to come from an envisaged split of the SADF once the insurrection had started.
The ill-fated incursion of rightwingers into Bophutatswana shortly before the election, put paid to all these plans.
Allegations of nuclear warheads that had fallen into the hands of rightwingers were discounted by the Atomic Energy Corporation’s Doctor Waldo Stumpf who termed these allegations as “totally false.”