Opinions about the appropriateness of the sentences passed on the AWB bombers run the gamut of the political spectrum, writes Stefaans Brummer
XOLISWA Falati stood at the bottom of the steps outside the Rand Supreme Court on Wednesday, holding aloft a poster denouncing the death penalty. She need hardly have bothered — that form of punishment is no more, and neither did Judge HCJ Flemming feel that was anything like the appropriate sentence for the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging’s election bombers.
A few steps from Falati, Winnie Mandela’s former friend who is now a stalwart of the South African Prisoners’ Organisation for Human Rights, stood John Keane, father of Susan Keane. She was one of 20 people killed in the right-wing bombing campaign around South Africa’s April 1994 elections.
Keane thought the sentences, an effective 26 years each for five men convicted of murder, was a “travesty of justice”. Susan Keane, an ANC candidate for Gauteng’s provincial legislature, was killed in Johannesburg’s Bree Street bomb days before the attainment of her liberation dream. She was Keane’s only child. “Would a black person have got the same [sentence]?” Keane wanted to know.
And then yet another perspective appeared at the top of the stairs. AWB members in military fatigues unfurled a banner as their leader, Eugene Terre’Blanche, emerged from the court building. “ANC bomplanters, moordenaars van Blanke oumense, kinders,” it read — “ANC bombers, murderers of white elderly, children.”
Jeered at by a largely black crowd, and followed by a large media pack, Terre’Blanche, who sat without emotion in the public gallery of court 4C as sentence was handed down, was whisked away, but not before his car lunged into another.
Judge Flemming, who is Transvaal deputy judge- president, had predicted from the bench shortly before that not all South Africans would be satisfied with the sentences. He even hazarded a percentage: “One in five people may not like a sentence, meaning they may find it too heavy, or too light.” Judging by the activity on and around the steps outside the Rand Supreme Court, his words were prophetic, even if the proportioning was wrong. South Africans do not easily agree about politically motivated crimes.
Nine AWB men — Jaco Nel, Nicolaas Barnard, Etienne Le Roux, Jan de Wet, Abraham Fourie, Abraham Myburgh, Johannes Venter, Petrus Steyn and Gerhardus Fourie — were convicted last Friday on charges ranging from malicious damage to property to attempted murder and murder, after a trial lasting the better part of two years. Four of them are on the run after they escaped from Soweto’s Diepkloof Prison last month, and were not sentenced.
Judge Flemming dismissed the defence argument in mitigation that the purpose of the bombing campaign was “noble” — the establishment of a volkstaat. “If that was so [that the purpose was to create a volkstaat], it is not clear to me why it was necessary to throw bombs,” the judge said.
But he did accept that political views could have had a bearing on their actions, and ordered that most of the sentences run concurrently. “The court will accept that in the minds of the accused, their actions could have been coloured by certain political beliefs.”
Five of the accused got 20 years for each murder and terms of lesser length for other charges. Five others, who were convicted of lesser charges relating to the bombing campaign, were handed sentences of a minimum 42 months.