confessions
Behind Johan van der Merwe’s brief confession at the truth commission this week lies a last-ditch effort by the amnesty applicants to escape prosecution, writes Eddie Koch
SOME city hall staff had to drag in a metal table from the kitchen so that all the lawyers in the house could be properly accommodated. Long-awaited confessions from five security police officers were held up while a messenger went in search of a machine to photocopy reams of paperwork for them.
The shambolic situation at the start of the truth commission’s hastily arranged amnesty hearings in a drab corner of the Johannesburg council building this week prompted cynics in the media room to predict the organisation would falter in its first real effort to extract information from security force officers about their role in past human rights abuses.
Then along came the former chief of police, Johan van der Merwe, who made some unexpected admissions about the bombing of Khotso House and booby-trapped handgrenades and suddenly the Truth and Reconciliation Commission lit up with the prospect of a breakthrough, even though it was in a bumbling kind of way.
To be sure, long after the general made his confession and bolted out of the city hall, some of the sceptics in the press benches were still arguing, and with good cause, that the truth body hadn’t come up with anything really dramatic.
Van der Merwe, they pointed out, had only admitted to two very specific crimes and he had done this simply because he knew that it was a question of time before some energetic prosecutors in the attorney general’s office would force a couple of his men to implicate him in court.
Why, they asked, did members of the amnesty committee not seize the opportunity to grill the general while they had him in the dock and try to squeeze out of him information about a whole range of other massacres and murders that the police have been implicated in, many of them in the early 1990s when Van der Merwe occupied the highest office in the police force?
Was it not possible that the former general, a trained lawyer and wily strategist, had stolen a march on the commission by admitting voluntarily to what the commission was bound to hear when the Transvaal Attorney General’s next big third force trial starts, and then sliding out of the hearing before the committee had a chance to cross examine him?
The truth of the matter is that this week’s hearing for the five police officers seeking amnesty for about 40 murders in the apartheid era was arranged with almost indecent haste by chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his deputy, Alex Boraine, because both of them are fairly desperate to show that their organisation is not a toothless organisation where victims come to express public grief while their tormentors stay in the shadows.
Word is that the hearings were arranged with the police officers’ lawyers even before their applications had been completed and processed by the commission. The commission’s investigative unit had been preparing a subpoena for Van der Merwe and a long list of questions to grill him with but in the rush to get the show on the road all this preparatory work was apparently ignored.
Some members of the amnesty committee were evidently disgruntled because they were called away suddenly from their task of dealing with hundreds of other amnesty applications so they could take part in this high-profile hearing. They were not briefed or prepared to grab the opportunity the commission has long been waiting for and the consequences may well be worse than a couple of attorneys having to suffer the indignity of sitting at a rickety old kitchen table during the hearings.
Tutu and Boraine are of the opinion that it is important to have a few high-profile amnesty rulings so that perpetrators can be encouraged to come forward and confess all before the December cut-off date for applicants. If this pressure induces members of the amnesty committee to make an early ruling in favour of the current applicants it will snuff out the attorney general’s criminal proceedings against the five and disarm the most potent weapon in the arsenal of the truth process.
Because, if we look beneath the rosy statements of conciliation suddenly being expressed by the five applicants, it is clear these self-confessed murderers came to the truth body at the 11th hour only because it was their last chance at staving off the prospect of being prosecuted by the same team that hounded Colonel Eugene de Kock to the edge of life sentence.
Despite the rhetoric from their lawyer – “we beg forgiveness … it is a time of reconciliation … we have full faith in the commission” – it is patently clear the police strategy is to use the truth commission, and also the undue haste by some of its leading members to hold a high-profile amnesty hearing, in order to undermine and complicate the state’s case against the accused.
That is why their smart young lawyer is demanding that witnesses in the impending criminal case be called to reveal at the truth commission what they are going to say in court. And that is why Van der Merwe nipped in, made only the admissions that were absolutely necessary in the circumstances, and then scarpered.
The real agents of truth, in this case, are the backroom boys in the Transvaal Attorney General’s office hellbent on sending the killers to jail and if this lickety-split hearing ends up quashing their efforts, the commission could end up defeating the ends of justice rather than fulfilling its mission to uncover the grim reality of the past.
Luckily for the truth body, though, the process is more complex and unpredictable. A team of six experienced lawyers, each of them representing the families of people who were murdered by the five amnesty applicants, is now sitting at the kitchen table in the city hall. They are armed with the experience required to interrogate these men and force from them details that may otherwise not have been forthcoming.
The amnesty hearings have also already created the first chink in the armour that South African Defence Force officers have thrown around themselves since their victorious non-guilty verdict in the Magnus Malan murder trial.
Evidence by Brigadier Jack Cronje, one of the five policemen seeking amnesty in Johannesburg this week, indicates the military was more deeply involved in covert operations than it admitted in its official submission to the truth commission on Monday (see accompanying story).
Cronje revealed the existence of a top-secret “counter-revolutionary information target centre”, known as Trewits, which had the job of targeting anti-apartheid activists who needed to be “intimidated or eliminated”. Military intelligence and the military’s special forces had participated in this centre’s monthly meetings.
Evidence about the 1986 murder of Dr Fabian Ribeiro and his wife, Florence, due to be given by Warrant Officer Paul van Vuuren, one of the amnesty applicants who participated in the killings, is also likely to show that members of the SADF’s Civil Co-operation Bureau were involved.
Then there is the psychological impact of Van der Merwe’s admissions this week. Even though he was economical about the dirty tricks in the spectrum that exists between the big bomb at Khotso House and the specific booby- trapped hand grenade attack on the East Rand, the former general’s behaviour and announcement that he will apply for amnesty may well encourage more security force officers to come forward.
Thus it may well be that this was the week in which students of the truth commission will be able to say with hindsight that Boraine – even though he and his colleagues didn’t exactly plan it properly – was right when he said the dam wall was about to crack.