allegations
Eddie Koch
AN investigations team at the Transvaal attorney general’s office is working around the clock to probe at least 50 incidents of violence and murder in which security force generals and former Cabinet ministers have been implicated by Eugene de Kock.
The barrage of allegations presented in De Kock’s testimony in the Pretoria Supreme Court is likely to place the attorney general’s office and the criminal justice system under severe stress as each of them has to be investigated and, if they turn out to be accurate, the suspects will be arrested and brought to court.
But each of the cases that flow out of the De Kock trial could take up to two years or more. This raises the prospect that the country’s criminal justice system – already straining under massive workloads and a haemorrhaging of senior staff – will never be able to punish many of the perpetrators mentioned in De Kock’s case.
The next case initiated by the colonel’s trial involve the arrest and prosecution of senior members of the Inkatha Freedom Party. This will be vigorously defended by the IFP, as indicated by the denials that have already emanated from alleged Inkatha warlord Themba Khoza, and is likely to take up as much time and energy as the trials of De Kock and those accused in the Magnus Malan murder trial.
The attorney general’s office will be hard- pressed to manage just this one trial and will be placed in an almost impossible position if its investigations team comes up with enough evidence, which appears likely, to warrant prosecution related to even a small number of the incidents mentioned by De Kock.
But the investigators are pressing ahead with their probes and are likely to interview a number of those implicated by De Kock when the supreme court takes its spring recess next week. Although officials in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are hoping De Kock’s revelations will pressure perpetrators into applying for amnesty, it seems most likely that the culprits will simply sit back and rely on the state’s lack of capacity to punish them.
Cross examination of De Kock at the end of this week was expected to focus on his days spent fighting with the police’s Koevoet counter-insurgency unit in Namibia in the 1970s. When the case resumes after the week- long break, a psychologist and criminologist are due to present insights into the mental make-up of the colonel who carried out some of the most notorious political assassinations under apartheid.
It is expected that Justice Willem van der Merwe will sentence De Kock on around 20 October and the ruling is likely to have a major impact on future decisions about whether the political environment and psychological pressures that dirty tricks operatives worked under provide valid extenuating circumstances for the crimes they committed.