Ann Eveleth
many of the 20 accused in the Magnus Malan trial this week dropped their erstwhile stoicism and began to fidget nervously when a slight, bookish ex-soldier, Johan Pieter “JP” Opperman (38), took the stand on Tuesday.
Former defence minister Malan’s jowls worked constantly during the proceedings in a bizarre facial exercise routine, while Inkatha Freedom Party deputy secretary general Zakhele Khumalo shifted around on the cushioned bench, and Caprivi camp commander Major Gerhardus Jacobs shielded his face from view.
Starting with his 1986 recruitment into Operation Marion by Jacobs, and ending with his 1994 resignation from the South African Defence Force after he heard Caprivi political commissar Daluxolo Luthuli had started “frequenting the African National Congress offices”, Opperman’s testimony led inevitably to the massacre of 13 KwaMakhutha civilians on that fateful night in January 1987.
Confident and unruffled, Opperman detailed the path from the SADF’s Caprivi base, where he said 206 soldiers who believed they were in “Israel” received training in “housecleaning” and other techniques to “fuck up the ANC”; to the dry river bed outside Ulundi where Staff Sergeant Andre Cloete took 10 offensive group members through “dry runs” of the KwaMakhutha massacre; to his and IFP liason man Khumalo’s “horror” at the death of women and children and, finally, to his own disillusionment when the SADF refused to “help” him leave the military with a retrenchment package to avoid exposure.
Judge Hugo’s brow furrowing deeper with each twist in the sordid tale, Opperman told of the rise and fall and eventual rebirth of Operation Marion as orders from above shifted. He claimed “KwaMakhutha was the first and only operation” resulting from Operation Marion.
But Opperman also testified to discussion of a “cell system”, allegedly modelled on the ANC, in which “two or three members would do an operation without other members knowing (so that) if that cell is exposed they can only expose two or three members”, suggesting a possible cover system to divorce future Caprivi operations from the military.
Opperman alleged his authorisation for the KwaMakhutha attack was handed down from Military Intelligence Colonel Cornelius van Niekerk, who later opposed further offensive actions on the grounds that such actions were “halsmisdryf” (hanging crimes). He said the offensive side of Operation Marion began to wind down, until a “strongly worded signal” arrived from the Ministry of Defence on August 30 1988, “instructing people from Military Intelligence … to make sure Operation Marion was done or carried out the way it was supposed to be”.
“The signal became the authority for the full implementation of Operation Marion in Natal,” Opperman testified.
He alleged that he and former Ferntree base commander Dan Griesel, who had provided the weapons for the attack, then moved to Natal and sought a base to house the trainees. He said Khumalo found the Mkuze camp near Ghost Mountain in northern KwaZulu-Natal. He said 10 defensive members trained separately at a base in Port Durnford.
As Von Lieres leads the seven defence teams into what is likely to be a lengthy cross- examination of Opperman, his clients will be haunted by the spectre of the next witness — – the Caprivi’s offensive instructor Andre Cloete, who is likely to link the five Caprivi trainees to the murders, bringing to 16 the number of accused bound into the ever-moving snowball.
The most senior military officials, Malan, former army chief Kat Liebenberg, former Military Intelligence director general Tienie Groenewald, and SADF chief Johannes Geldenhuys are all linked by the State Security Council documents and the Liebenberg report, whose implementation is alleged in detail by the state’s key witness.
Only introducing six witnesses from the massacre scene so far, McNally’s economical use of witnesses will make it difficult for the defence, which has so far been relegated to finding inconsistencies between the distraught 10 year-old incident reports of survivors and their courtroom testimony.