David Beresford
THE Guardian has obtained documents which throw doubt on the explanations offered by the Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Exeter, John Lloyd, as to why he betrayed a fellow anti-apartheid activist to the South African hangman in the mid-1960s.
A letter by Lloyd the year after the execution of John Harris appears to contradict his account of torture he underwent before he agreed to give evidence for the state. A transcript of the judgment in the Harris case also suggests that Lloyd has understated his role in acts of sabotage and the importance of his testimony in sending Harris to the gallows.
Harris was executed in 1965 for planting a bomb at Johannesburg railway station which killed a woman. Harris was at the time a member of the African Resistance Movement, a group of radical intellectuals engaged in sabotage of inanimate targets in protest of apartheid.
In his explanations to The Guardian, Lloyd said he broke after being beaten and tortured. “I was made to stand on one spot … On the evening of the second day, a bomb exploded on the Johannesburg railway station.”
The bomb exploded on July 24 1964, a Friday night. But in a letter written in October 1966 — to a British journalist who was preparing a book on the Harris story — Lloyd says: “It still puzzles me that I was left unquestioned” in police cells “until about 10am on the Monday”. At another point in the letter Lloyd writes: “I did not on the night of the 24th implicate John with ARM. I can remember that on the Monday, when I did do so, I had to go through the draft statement and fill in the places where he was involved.”
In his article at the weekend Lloyd also characterises his involvement in sabotage as minimal. The judgment in the Harris case paints a different picture. Summing up the evidence, Justice Kudorf said Lloyd and Harris “had three projects in mind”, one of which was the station bombing which Harris was to carry out. Lloyd was to have carried out two other, simultaneous, bomb attacks, on the Pretoria post office and a parking garage.
Lloyd claims he refused to recant his evidence once in Britain because “such a withdrawal, I thought then and now know, would have been of no weight. I have since seen the transcript of the Harris appeal and my evidence was not cited once.”
Although the absence of any reference to Lloyd’s evidence suggests that Harris’ lawyers saw it as being of little help to his appeal, it was clearly of central importance to the initial trial.
The transcript of Judge Ludorf’s judgment shows that Lloyd told the court that he had warned Harris that the station attack “was fraught with danger to human life.
“Although (Harris) maintained that his plan would work and that nobody would be injured, Lloyd maintained that towards the end of their discussions the accused admitted that he could not exclude this danger completely and Lloyd added that the accused said that if a few lives were taken, this would be tactically advisable, because it would save so many lives in the future.” Harris, in the judge’s words, “stoutly denied this allegation by Lloyd”.
Judge Ludorf came down on Lloyd’s side. “Although he may have been induced by a motive of self-preservation to blacken the conduct of the accused and to whiten his own, he must have been, we think, also motivated by saying as little as possible against his friends. Life must go on. Whether here or abroad he must sooner or later face his comrades …”