Gaye Davis
THE South African-born British Labour Party MP Peter Hain is to ask the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate whether South African security police framed him on bank theft charges in London in 1975.
Hain, who was a driving force behind the sports boycott of South Africa during the apartheid era, is in the country as the guest of the African National Congress to take part in a parliamentary workshop for ANC whips. While here he will approach the commission, armed with new evidence of South African security police involvement in his arrest and trial, which he reveals in his forthcoming book, Sing, the Beloved Country: The Struggle for the New South Africa.
“I will be asking the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine the relevant records and call as witnesses the officials in charge at the time and those who would have been involved. Someone, somewhere, knows all about it,” Hain told the Mail & Guardian.
The case involved the theft of about 490 from Barclays Bank near his home in Putney. Hain was acquitted after a two-week trial on grounds of “mistaken identity”, but evidence has mounted over the years that he was framed by the South African secret service, then known as the Bureau for State Security (Boss), apparently working in collaboration with British intelligence agents.
Hain said he was implicated in a call made to Scotland Yard which emanated from British intelligence operatives. Former Boss operative Gordon Winter referred to South African involvement in his 1981 expos, Inside Boss – “but at the time he was not seen as credible”, Hain said.
Yet former British intelligence agent Peter Wright later described in his book, Spycatcher, a right-wing faction within MI5 at the time which was collaborating with the South African security apparatus. And a former Northern Ireland British intelligence agent, Colin Wallace, told Hain independently the Scotland Yard tip-off had come from British intelligence. “This gave it credibility,” Hain said.
He understood that the commission was overburdened with work. “This is partly why I have never pressed it before. However, the case does open the book on illegal dirty tricks the old South Africa played abroad and in which many South Africans suffered and lost their lives.”
Active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement from 1967, Hain became Labour MP for Neath, South Wales, in 1991 and is presently a Labour shadow employment minister.