John Grobler in Windhoek
Ironically, Wilfried and Molly Lubowski’s best hope to find the killers of their Namibian activist son now lies with Irishman Donald Acheson, the only man ever officially charged with his murder.
Despite clear evidence that the September 1989 assassination of Anton Lubowski, lawyer and activist of the South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo), was part of a bigger masterplan by Pretoria’s securocrats, the Lubowski family’s quest to find justice has so far been scuppered by Namibia’s policy of “national reconciliation”.
But last week Namibian prosecutor general Hans Heyman confirmed that Acheson, now 60 and believed to be living somewhere in the United Kingdom, has been approached to testify at the resumption of a second Lubowski inquest.
The inquest will be reopened on February 9 next year, after it ground to an inconclusive halt more than two years ago. Heyman said Acheson was being offered indemnity from prosecution in return for his testimony.
A nearly comical, but mostly sad fall guy, Acheson was arrested shortly after the murder but released on April 23 1990 after Namibian Chief Justice Ismael Mahomed – now South Africa’s chief justice – could not find any evidence directly implicating him.
When the first judicial inquest before now retired Judge Harold Levy was held in 1992, he named nine men of the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) Region 6 as Acheson’s likely accomplices: Joe Verster, Chappies Maree, Ferdi Barnard, Staal Burger, Johan Niemoller, Calla Botha, Abraham “Slang” van Zyl, Dr Wouter Basson and Charles Neelse Wildschudt.
But Pretoria’s palpable manipulations were still too far-reaching for the whole truth to be exposed. Red herrings were laid across the suspected killers’ trail, and efforts by the investigating officer, Deputy Commissioner “Jumbo” Smith, to trace the CCB line of command were frustrated by the insistence of then-Namibian inspector general Dolf Gouws that any investigations in South Africa would first have to be cleared with Gouws’s South African counterpart, then police commissioner General Johan van der Merwe.
Somehow in the dust kicked up at the inquest, the fact that Van der Merwe had been the commander of the South West African Security Police at the time of the assassination was lost from sight.
The second inquest, first convened in 1995 before Justice Nic Hannah, got no further, either – Acheson had fled and no warrants could be served on any of the named nine CCB suspects, supposedly because they could not be traced. At any rate, an extradition treaty between South Africa and Namibia was (and still is, largely) held as bureaucratic hostage by political horsetrading in the upper echelons of power in Pretoria.
To a large extent, the Lubowski family pinned their hopes on the truth commission, inundating its investigators and Minister of Justice Dullah Omar with a barrage of documentation unearthed by their lawyers or supplied by sympathisers.
With the Namibian government declining for political reasons to host its own truth commission – the idea was thought to militate against national reconciliation – members of Desmond Tutu’s team flew to Windhoek recently to locate some of the witnesses they believe can assist them in solving the riddle of why the riddle has never been solved.
Viewed in its totality, the evidence available to them via the Lubowski family is compelling, especially when seen against the background of evidence unearthed by Judge Richard Goldstone in his raid on another notorious apartheid dirty-tricks unit, Military Intelligence’s Directorate of Covert Collection (DCC).
Among the damning documentation recovered from the DCC’s headquarters outside Pretoria was a file marked “Region 6 and 9”, in which 100 names of people connected to the Five Freedoms Forum were listed, including that of slain Wits academic Dr David Webster as a member of its executive committee. Next to Webster’s name was a sinister arrow, pointing towards the name “Derek” in the margin. In the first Lubowski inquest, “Derek” was identified as one of the many aliases of Leon “Chappies” Maree.
Another document detailed a meeting held in CCB managing director Joe Verster’s Johannesburg office in May 1989 during which plans to disrupt the Namibian elections were discussed. The documentation listed three CCB cells: Region 2, commanded by one Pieter Botes, Region 6 (the so- called “internal” region) commanded by Staal Burger, and a Namibian Region, commanded by one Roelf van der Westhuizen.
In Jacques Pauw’s seminal book, In the Heart of the Whore, Pieter Botes – who by then had fallen out with Verster and was seeking to avenge himself on the CCB’s inner circle – detailed in an interview how he had been sent to Windhoek with five others on an assignment to attack the United Nations Transitional Authority (Untag) and disrupt the implementation of UN Resolution 435.
This is also borne out by evidence given by Wildschudt at the first Lubowski inquest, as well as crucial – but missing – parts of the CCB diary handed in before Judge Levy. For example, the pages of May 1 1989, August 31 1989 and September 12 1989 were all missing – dates which coincide, respectively, with the bombing of the Cape Town Early Learning Centre, the Webster assassination and the Lubowski assassination.
Botes’s Namibian mission went wrong, though. After a hand grenade was thrown at the Untag office in Outjo, killing a security guard but missing the target of assembled UN officers, Darryl Stopforth, Horst Klenz and Leonard Veenendal were arrested at a roadblock outside town in an Opel sedan stolen from a Windhoek doctor.
In a daring escape three weeks later outside Otjiwarongo, where they were held for still unexplained reasons instead of in Windhoek, the “Outjo 3” killed a policeman and escaped to South Africa, despite a huge manhunt in the sparsely populated Namibia.
However, all three were soon arrested in various locations across South Africa, along with a certain “Archer” and “Barker”, and were held incommunicado in terms of the notorious Section 29. No charges were ever pursued against them – but this also prevented Smith, the Namibian investigating officer, from pursuing them in his own investigation, as he needed the South African police commissioner’s explicit permission to do so.
Sometime prior to the first inquest, Smith however availed himself of a tried-and- trusted investigation method: he sent in a fink, one Barend Dawid Jacobus Verster, held in the low-security Johannesburg Central Prison, for a dishonoured cheque.
In a statement taken down in Smith’s handwriting, Verster related how he had gained the trust of, especially, the vain Veenendal and Stopforth, who told him that five CCB operatives had originally been dispatched to Namibia to disrupt Untag and get rid of Lubowski.
When their original plans were delayed after they were caught following the Outjo hand-grenade attack, Verster told Smith, the assignment was taken up by Klenz (they had escaped again by then), Maree and Acheson.
In a blunt statement, Verster related the crucial evidence: “Chappies Maree did the shooting while Acheson drove the car.”