Stefaans Brmmer
DEPUTY Defence Minister Ronnie Kasrils this week joined in condemning the South African Defence Force’s (SADF) submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as “arrogant and disappointing” – but said there was very little the ministry can do to force military generals to reveal more.
However, commission deputy chair Alex Boraine said if the generals of old failed to provide satisfactory answers to follow-up questions, the truth body would approach Kasrils and Defence Minister Joe Modise to ensure senior officers who served in the SADF and who still serve in the new South African National Defence Force (SANDF) are put under pressure to tell the truth.
Major-General Deon Mortimer, former chief of staff logistics, presented the SADF submission to the truth commission on Monday. He said the submission, which attempted to give broad details of apartheid South Africa’s security strategy, the SADF’s perspective on the “revolutionary war” and defence strategy and operations, was facilitated by the SANDF.
But Mortimer said the SANDF could take no responsibility for the SADF submission, as the SADF was defunct.
Boraine immediately dismissed the 81-page submission as “breathtakingly one-sided and almost arrogant in that no responsibility at all was taken for any events. The defence force emerges as the knight on the white horse.”
Kasrils this week told the Mail & Guardian he was “angry” and “extremely disappointed, to say the least, at the insensitivity and arrogance of the presentation”. Kasrils said the defence ministry had facilitated the mechanism (a “nodal point” in the SANDF) to secure the co-operation of SADF elements with the truth commission.
But he said the ministry, like the SANDF, was a 1994 creation which had neither the knowledge nor the power to force the truth from old SADF personnel. “There is not much we can do except to make the right inputs in the right places.”
Kasrils agreed many senior officers in the SANDF had been inherited from the SADF and former TVBC state forces, but said the ministry had to be “sensitive to the nature of the transition” – a process in which President Mandela had decided to appoint General George Meiring, also a senior officer in the former SADF, as chief of the SANDF – to ensure stability.
Boraine said the submission would be carefully studied. “Where there are omissions and where we think it was not at all balanced, we will contact the head of the SANDF… If we don’t get satisfaction there, we will go to Modise and Kasrils and get them to ensure those [personnel whom the SANDF inherited from the SADF] will come forward, although we realise they can’t do everything …
“General Meiring himself must have some information and knowledge on what happened in the past. It is simply not good enough to say there was a raid and not say there were women, there were children, and that there were never any mistakes – and what about the much more sinister aspects?”
Boraine pointed out recent testimony by police officers has indicated deep military involvement in organised human rights abuses, and that the Civil Co-operation Bureau, also a military creation, had never been adequately exposed. “We will certainly be in touch with Meiring … If we have no satisfaction, we will go to the ministry.” Boraine said subpeonas also remained an option.
Former police officers Jack Cronj and Roelof Venter this week told the truth commission, during their amnesty applications on multiple counts of murder, that SADF special forces and military intelligence representatives had served on a top-secret committee together with police representatives to select targets for “elimination”.