Eddie Koch
Evidence at the Eugene de Kock trial this week provided insight into the tremendous psychological pressures members of the police death squads at Vlakplaas operated under — and the therapeutic effects offered by their opportunity to tell the truth.
“They beat me up to the point of submission, to the point of death and after that they used me as an informer first. So I had to salvage my life. I had to do as these people commanded me to … I was acting against my own will and made a killer machine against my own people,” said former Vlakplaas operative Joe Mamasela.
“If I did not become productive by killing these people [people he murdered while working at Vlakplaas], I would have been killed. I have no doubt about that, The police used me against my own people so when I have the opportunity I need to stand up and put the record straight once and for all. This is not vengeance. This has nothing to do with witch
Mamasela is a former Umkhonto weSizwe guerrilla who became an askari — a “turned” security policeman — after being arrested. He was being cross-examined this week after giving evidence against the Vlakplaas
He told the court how members of the Vlakplaas unit came to both admire and despise the police officers they worked under — and his testimony indicates that a strong desire for relief from the psychological strain of these contradictory emotions is likely to push many of his colleagues into the truth commission.
At the same time, however, Mamasela says he came to respect, even revere, some of his white superiors. Talking about his relationship at the time with the Vlakplaas officer who first handled him, named in court as Cronje, Mamasela said: “It was a father and son relationship. Even today I still respect him as a father.”
He went on to describe how some of these white officers conspired to kill black members of the unit who had become unreliable and inefficient. His close friend, Brian Ngqulunga — also a turned ANC member — was murdered at Vlakplaas in 1990 after he had become mentally unstable and tried to shoot his pregnant wife.
Mamasela told the court how De Kock had instructed him to infiltrate an Umkhonto weSizwe cell on the East Rand and then issued him with booby-trapped hand grenades to circulate among members of the unit. Eight students who died and others who were injured after trying to use these devices were described by De Kock as “one-armed bandits”.
The former operative also described in detail how senior police officers “schooled” members of the unit to lie before the Harms Commission that was set up to examine renegade police captain Dirk Coetzee’s expose of death squad operations from Vlakplaas.
Mamasela claims that General “Krappies” Engelbrecht, then a brigadier, gave Ngqulunga and himself each R1 000 after the hearings as a reward for performing well and not compromising the police.
Ngqulunga was murdered a few months later, after De Kock found out that he was thinking of releasing true details about the Mxenge