WEDNESDAY, 3.30PM
CONVICTED Hani murderer and former Conservative Party politician Clive Derby-Lewis continued his testimony before the truth commission’s amnesty committee on Wednesday by describing his extensive political links with foreign right-wing organisations.
Derby-Lewis and Polish immigrant Janusz Walus were convicted of the April 10 1993 murder of SA Communist Party and African National Congress leader Chris Hani. They were sentenced to death, later commuted to life improsonment. The pair are currently seeking amnesty from the truth commission for their part in Hani’s murder.
Derby-Lewis told the commission he had numerous meetings in the 1980s and early 1990s with international “anti-communist” groups, including the World Anti-Communist League, and was at one point the president of the Western Goals Institute, whose members included a prominent US major general, a CIA chief and a senior member of the British House of Lords. The Monday Club, a right-wing lobby group within the British Conservative Party, invited Derby-Lewis to address them in the 1980s. “I was given by the Monday Club a report which strongly clarified the western world’s dependency on South African titanium, platinum and other minerals,” Derby-Lewis told the commission. He added that he had held political meetings with West German Bundestag members and Swiss MPs regarding South Africa’s right-wing “struggle.”
In his testimony on Wednesday, Derby-Lewis also spent some time reading from the Conservative Party’s official mouthpiece Die Patriot, in an attempt to that the party had threatened to use violence to achieve its political ends. In one of the articles, he quoted CP leader Dr Ferdi Hartzenberg as saying: “In a freedom struggle for whites, the CP will focus on the leaders, and Nelson Mandela, the leader of the ANC, will be the first.” In an editorial on October 18, 1991, the newspaper said: “The moral right of self-determination must be backed by power which can include violence.”
A newspaper report published in June of that year quoted the CP general-secretary as saying: “If the government refuses a general election for whites it will create for the CP a moral basis for an armed struggle against the government.”