Eddie Koch
A KEY witness in the Magnus Malan trial has provided details of the close-knit relationship between military officers who ran clandestine supply lines to Renamo rebels in Mozambique and the covert plan to use Inkatha as a surrogate offensive force against the ANC inside South Africa.
One of JP Opperman’s rare outbursts in court this week about secret military operations outside of Operation Marion corroborates widely-held beliefs that support for Renamo and Inkatha were two sides of the same coin in the 1980s.
When he was told under cross-examination that the accused would deny his allegations, Opperman announced he wanted to tell the court that they could “deny as much as they like” but he knew they had lied to the National Party government and the South African public for years after the Nkomati Accord was signed with Mozambique.
Asked to explain what Opperman was getting at, Colonel Frank Dutton of the Investigative Task Unit said the witness had given the team an affidavit that describes personal involvement in clandestine support by special forces of the SADF for Renamo rebels in Mozambique in breach of the accord.
“He alleges that in the early part of 1988 he and others drove a military convoy through the Kruger National Park to a fence on the Mozambican border. He says they stopped there and that Renamo soldiers climbed onto the trucks and offloaded the supplies. Radio equipment was allegedly part of the equipment.”
Much of the information contained in secret military documents placed before the courts detail how Operation Marion was seen by its architects as a strategy to turn the Renamo option, which had brought Mozambique’s leftwing government to its knees, inside on the country.
The special forces unit that ran Renamo operations for many years after the non- aggression Nkomati Accord was signed with Mozambique in 1984, the Directorate of Special Tasks (DST), was the same unit that set up Operation Marion — named for its aim to turn Inkatha into a marionette or surrogate of Pretoria’s special forces.
The same men who ran Renamo operations from DST headquarters in Pretoria were responsible for implementing a State Security Council decision to set up Operation Marion. Three of the accused — Brigadier Cornelius Van Niekerk, Brigadier John More and Colonel Cornelius van Tonder — were directly involved in coordinating support for Renamo in direct violation of the Nkomati accord.
The DST was also in charge of training Unita soldiers in northern Namibia.
Opperman was the commander of seven Unita bases in the Caprivi Strip before he applied for a transfer to the base that had been set up in the same area for Inkatha’s paramilitary squads.
Atrocities committed by Renamo have been described by an American State Department report as worse than those of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. The cost of South African- sponsored wars of destabilisation in Angola and Mozambique has been estimated by the Southern African Research and Documentation Service in Harare at more than a million lives and between$45-billion and $60-billion since 1980.
Senior officials in the truth commission confirmed this week they will be monitoring testimony delivered at the Malan trial even if it is not directly relevant to the execution of the KwaMakutha massacre — and that violations of human rights and international law, committed outside South Africa’s borders, will be scrutinised by the commission.
So if the evidence presented at the trial shows that some of the accused were involved in facilitating Renamo’s abuses, described by some as among the worst committed in the world this century, it is likely they will be called to account regardless of the trial’s outcome.