MONDAY, 5.00PM
THE Pan Africanist Congress will not apologise for its liberation struggle activities during the apartheid era, although a few military mistakes had admittedly taken place, PAC secretary general Michael Muendane said on Monday.
Muendane also revealed for the first time why the PAC’s armed wing, the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, targeted St James Church in Kenilworth, Cape Town, in 1993, when 11 worshippers were killed and 58 injured in a grenade and machine gun attack. He said the organisation had received incorrect information that a high-ranking military officer was going to be in the congregation on the day of the attack.
“Without checking the veracity of what the now-dead commander considered to be genuine intelligence information, he struck,” Muendane said in Johannesburg. The only person to have been jailed in connection with the attack, Gcinikhaya Makoma, testified at his amnesty hearing that he had no idea why St James had been chosen as a target. Makoma admitted firing indiscriminately on congregants.
Two co-applicants also testified that they had not been told the nature of the target by unit commander Sichumiso Nonxuba until they arrived outside the church.
Muendane said the PAC, like many other liberation movements, had its intelligence service infiltrated by military intelligence during the armed struggle, and this led to wrong information being given to the organisation.
Muendane said the organisation wanted to clarify certain operations carried out by Apla, such as the murder of American exchange student Amy Biehl in August 1993, the St James Church massacre and the 1992 King William’s Town golf club attack, in which four people were killed and 17 wounded. “Both Amy Biehl and St James incidents were military mistakes, pure and simple, in the same way that an American guided missile in the early 90s mistakenly shot down an Iranian passenger airline that it initially claimed had strayed into hostile air space,” he said. Muendane added the King William’s Town golf club incident was also a military mistake because of wrong information received that some military personnel were going to be at the place.