David Beresford
The master planner in the African National Congress’s liberation war came out from the shadows this week to defend his role in the most deadly phase of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.
Aboobaker Ismail, the ANC’s head of “special operations”, appeared before Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ask for amnesty for a string of bomb and rocket attacks in South Africa, including the notorious Church Street car bomb in Pretoria in 1983 which left 19 dead and more than 200 injured.
In one of the most poignant moments witnessed at the commission hearings, Ismail found himself face-to-face with a victim of the Church Street blast who had been blinded in the explosion. “This is very difficult. I am sorry about what happened to you,” said the bomber, looking into the sightless eyes of former air force officer Neville Clarence. “I do not hold any grudges,” replied the blind man.
Ismail was behind the most dramatic and horrific attacks perpetrated by the ANC’s guerrilla army, including the blowing up of a nuclear reactor outside Cape Town, a rocket attack on South Africa’s main military base outside Pretoria and the near destruction of three oil refineries.
He told the commission his commitment to the liberation struggle stemmed from a moment when his father confiscated a bag of sweets he had brought home from school. The master bomber recalled that he was seven years old at the time and had returned from school clutching his sweets, a flag and a medallion which had been presented to the schoolchildren to mark Republic Day – when South Africa left the Commonwealth.
“My father took these off us and threw them into the fire. He called us together and told us that we were never to wave these flags for a racist country, to eat the sweets. This was the start of my political consciousness.”
An aspirant medical student, he was forced, as a non-white, to enter a “bush college” instead of the university of his choice. Joining the ANC on the campus, Ismail left South Africa in 1977 to undergo special training as a military engineer in East Germany.
Ismail said the special operations unit was designed by the then ANC president, Oliver Tambo, to carry out attacks which would “simultaneously inspire the oppressed while weakening the regime and the country’s economic base”. The unit was directly answerable to Tambo.
One of their first operations was the surveillance of a Mobil refinery in Durban, to assess its potential as a target. The attack was vetoed after they concluded that it could trigger a vapour-cloud explosion which would kill civilians.
Instead they attacked three other refineries in more remote areas. The operations were so successful that special operations was made a permanent unit of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK).
Ismail said the notorious car bomb attack on the South African Air Force headquarters in Church Street – in which civilians were also maimed and killed – was “an extension” of ANC targeting policy approved personally by Tambo. The two guerrillas who planted the bomb were killed in the explosion, seemingly when a stray radio signal from an air force transmitter prematurely triggered the firing mechanism.
Under cross-examination by senior counsel representing three victims of the Church Street bomb who are opposing the amnesty application, Ismail said: “We wanted to show it was not only MK soldiers who bled. We knew the only way we could rip the apartheid war machine open was to hit the soft underbelly.
“I am proud of the bravery, discipline and selfless sacrifices of the cadres of special operations who operated under my command,” Ismail told the commission. “Many of them laid down their lives in the pursuit of freedom for all in South Africa.” They faced the risk of torture, or summary execution if they ever came to trial.
“I regret the deaths of innocent civilians killed in the cause of the fight for justice and freedom. The ANC has never been callous in its struggle. We never set out deliberately to attack civilian targets. We followed the political objectives of the ANC in the course of a just struggle.”