Eugene de Kock’s evidence in mitigation of his sentence this week centred on his background and childhood, reports Eddie Koch
THAT the 1980s bush war in Namibia and Angola was South Africa’s Vietnam, a turning point in our history that left its mark in many different ways on the psyche of a generation of young men who went there, was reconfirmed by three different people I met this week.
One was a “pathfinder”, a commando dropped regularly behind enemy lines in Angola to do intelligence for South African Defence Force battalions that followed. On one sortie, he was shot in the shoulder with an AK-47. His helicopter unit abandoned him, another saved him and he woke up in hospital with a stutter that he still has. Today he spends his life writing about indigenous people of the kind he once fought.
Another was in the armoured-car column that invaded Angola soon after the Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola (MPLA) took power in the mid-1970s. Experiences there, including fierce battles and first-hand accounts of atrocities committed by his companions, resulted in him becoming a left- wing student and a vehement opponent of apartheid.
Then there is Colonel Eugene de Kock, whose testimony in court this week described why he and so many others who got embroiled in South Africa’s bush wars chose another route: to become brutal defenders of the system that caused all the turmoil.
Anna van der Hoven, a professor in criminology at the University of South Africa, presented the first complete life story of the man described as apartheid’s most accomplished assassin when she gave evidence in mitigation during De Kock’s murder trial in the Pretoria Supreme Court.
Drawing heavily on a 60-page autobiography written by De Kock in prison, she attempted to explain why the phenomenon she described as “combat stress” caused her client to respond to the trauma of war with violence rather than compassion.
She described how De Kock, born on January 29 1949 in George, was brought up on a plot near Springs. His father, then a state prosecutor, was vehemently anti-communist and a member of the executive committee of the Broederbond.
De Kock senior ran the family with a rod of iron. He used physical punishment regularly and made it almost a family motto that it was cowardly to cry or show emotion. He frequently told his wife, who was more liberal and supported the United Party, that she should keep her mouth shut when they went out on social visits in case she embarrassed him.
“The result was that the children learned never to question authority, always to obey,” said Van der Hoven. “He beat them frequently. According to the accused this sometimes amounted to assault. The father was unusually aggressive. He sometimes beat them with a cane until it broke. If they cried, he would hit them again. The result is that the children learnt to suppress their emotions and not to show their pain.”
There were frequent rows in the family. When Eugene and his brother were six and five, their mother climbed into her car and threatened to leave.
This is how De Kock described the incident in his hand-written story: “My brother and I, younger than I, were in the study and looked at the scene playing itself out in the window. He began to cry and was extremely anxious and I, although I did not cry, discovered a fear that we would both be alone. It was an unfamiliar fear and no other fear – not during battles, not during hand-to-hand combat, or any other situation – was so intense in my life.”
“The accused describes himself as an average student,” said the criminologist. “Because of a speech defect, he was reserved and his full potential, for example as a strong leader, was not realised at school. Because of the speech defect, he was mocked by the other children. He later went for speech therapy … which helped solve the problem.”
This and the insecurity that derived from his family, along with his patriarchal, right-wing upbringing, all contributed to De Kock’s decision to defend the political order of the day with an almost passionate commitment.
Much of Van der Hoven’s evidence described how the colonel suffered stress during his combat experience with the Koevoet counter- insurgency unit in Namibia. He drank heavily and, from 1983 onwards, regularly visited doctors to complain of nightmares, sleeplessness, stomach pains, dry mouth, an ache in the chest and “lips that felt dead”.
During the bush war, and after he visited the scene of the Church Street bomb in Pretoria while on leave from the operational area, De Kock developed a fanatical hatred for guerrillas from the African National Congress and the South West African People’s Organisation.
Quoting from the autobiography, Van der Hoven says: “He resolved to fight the ANC in every possible way so that `these kinds of monsters, the kind we saw destroy the Belgian Congo, should not be allowed to take over again’.
“When he was on his way to carry out an operation he prepared himself psychologically for it. He could not just kill people, but needed to have a reason for doing it. He started off from the point that people in possession of AK-47s were not coming over the border to look for work, but to come and kill. So they had to be eliminated. He learned to kill cold- bloodedly and with great efficiency.
“The accused describes the intelligence world as a `paranoid netherworld in which you are used, misused and abused. It is a world in which you have no friends. You were guilty only if you did not defend the public.’ “
Earlier in the week, Justice Willem van der Merwe asked the colonel if he used the time spent in his prison cell to reflect on those turbulent years because he regretted what happened or simply because he was no longer caught up in the turmoil of that time.
De Kock replied: “There were so many days when a person begins to wonder how it was possible that you could ever find yourself in such a situation. A feeling of remorse? Yes … It is a cross I will bear for the rest of my life. And if it was in my power, or any other person’s power, then I would will that all those people who are not here today were alive …
“Often when you rode away from the scene of a battle in Ovamboland in your Casspir, you would see the bodies of the enemy. It was strange. They alway looked as if they were smaller. They were not the same people you fought half an hour ago … And a man began to wonder if you met these people in another context whether they would have been your friends. I cannot tell you, I do not have the vocabulary or the language skills, to give you a description of the feelings of loss.”
Before the end of the month, the judge will have to consider whether such poignancy is heartfelt remorse or a clever ploy to obtain a reduced sentence. If it is the former, then there is hope for the generation that fought in South Africa’s Vietnam.