Ann Eveleth
The leader of a right-wing plot to destabilise KwaZulu-Natal, Gerrit Anderson, launched a hunger strike this week in protest against an eight-year prison sentence he began last week.
Anderson (41) skipped bail in May after being convicted of illegal possession of 10 home-made pipe-guns in connection with an Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) plot to destabilise KwaZulu-Natal. He was rearrested in Bloemfontein in late July and was sentenced in the Escourt Regional Magistrate’s Court last week to eight years’ imprisonment.
Magistrate Berend Willemse found that Anderson was the leader of a group of right-wingers who plotted to destabilise the province shortly after the 1994 elections, in a bid to secure a white volkstaat.
He said Anderson had received his orders — which the court had heard included closing off KwaZulu- Natal’s borders with the help of 200 000 Zulus trained by 200 French Foreign Legion soldiers, poisoning the water supply in African National Congress-supporting townships and seizing control of several army bases —from AWB general Dirk Ackerman. Anderson received the 10 pipe-guns from Free State AWB general Kiewiet Roodt.
Anderson’s fellow plotters, Allan Nolte, Sharon Hattingh, Patrick Rousseau and Gerald Veltman received sentences in May ranging from two years’ imprisonment to a six months’ suspended sentence, for various charges of illegal weapons possession.
Rousseau, a French national, was deported after receiving a suspended sentence for illegally possessing a 9mm pistol he admitted acquiring during the ill-fated 1994 AWB invasion of Boph-uthatswana.
Although the group also possessed plastic bottles filled with a cyanide-based powder when police arrested them in Ladysmith in June 1994, no convictions were secured on this count as possession of such a substance is technically not a crime.
Passing sentence on Anderson last week, Willemse said he could not consider a probation sentence as the AWB leader had proved himself to be unreliable.
He had also attempted several times to delay the trial and had aggravated his crime by handing the weapons over to Returned Exiles Committee founder Pat Hlongwane, knowing that they could be used to kill people.
Hlongwane handed the weapons over to police and exposed the plot, but was not indemnified from prosecution as he was found to be an unreliable witness.