A growing number of readers have been demanding to know from the Mail & Guardian when Robert McBride is going to be released from the Mozambique prison where he is being held. Well might they ask. And it is not the only question which needs to be asked of the authorities where the McBride case is concerned. .
McBride has been in a Maputo goal for 52 days without formal charge. As we report in this edition (see page 2), it has now emerged that the main thrust of the case against him is based not only on the evidence of an agent of South African military intelligence, Vusi Mbatha, but his allegations amount to little more than an abbreviated version of the Meiring report which has already been discredited by three of the most senior judges in South Africa.
Even more scandalous is evidence that he is being kept in prison with the help of some dirty work at the crossroads on the part of the South African police. When we sent a reporter to Maputo at the end of last week to find out what was going on with the McBride saga he discovered that Superintendent Lappies Labuschagne – who was “suspended” from the inquiry earlier in the week following allegations he had been involved in cross-border assassinations – was in fact still working on the case.
In addition, it was found that the South African police had been deliberately feeding their Mozambique counterparts with a one-sided account as to how McBride’s arrest was being viewed in South Africa – holding back press reports, such as those carried by the M&G, which said he had been “set up” by the South African intelligence services.
These agents have also had a field day inside South Africa with so many gullible journalists eager to believe any sordid tale about McBride.
Yet it is the reaction of Nelson Mandela’s government that we find most puzzling.
Why has there been so little support for McBride? And why has the government shown so little interest in explaining to the Mozambicans what the contents of the Meiring report are and what it tells us about the ongoing attempts of the old guard to block transformation.
It is not as if the government is not aware of the odds. Deputy President Thabo Mbeki issued a timely warning last week to “enemies of change still among us”. He pointed out that the old guard had not gone away, had not left the country and had not changed their agenda.
“Some structures set up by the former government to destroy the movement still remain intact,” he told the annual congress of the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union in Durban. A few months ago he would have been accused of paranoia: now, after the McBride and Meiring report sagas, it is hard to refute his argument.
It is at times like this that one questions the value of reform in South Africa. Has the country not made a major mistake by attaching such weight to the need for reconciliation in the armed forces. Are the South African police – and the military – not simply irreformable?
Is it not time to simply clean out the “old guard” in the security services and start again with a clean sheet.
It would involve the loss of a huge resource in terms of experience. But when all we gain from that “experience” is the sort of travesty of justice we have witnessed in the McBride case, the temptation is to choose the lesser of two evils.
Sting in the tale
It is not without hesitation that we publish, in this edition, the allegations made by an impoverished convict against the National Party leader, Marthinus Van Schalkwyk.
We hesitated on a number of grounds. The first is the unease we have expressed repeatedly in the past about the public identification of a person facing unsubstantiated allegations of a sexual nature. Although it does not often happen, there are occasions when the accused in a sex case is the real “victim”; it is the nature of such cases. We would like to see the identities of all parties protected, until guilt is proven.
We also hesitated because we have doubts as to whether the “crime” complained of is in fact an offence. Although the law forbidding sodomy is still on the statute books – promulgated in the 1970s by none other than the NP – it would seem to be ultra vires under the new Constitution.
And finally we hesitated because we were ourselves approached with the story some months ago and, after putting considerable effort into corroborating the allegations, decided there was a real risk that we were simply being used to propagate a smear.
The determination of Van Schalkwyk’s accuser to go public with the allegations by laying charges against the politician make all of these considerations to some extent irrelevant. So we have published, taking some comfort in the rationalisation that as a former agent of military intelligence the NP leader is no doubt sufficiently acquainted with the art of smearing to be able to take care of himself.