David Beresford
It was one of those definitive moments in South African history, a moment that Eugene de Kock had long been waiting for. His five heavily armed bodyguards had taken up nervous positions around the courtroom. PW Botha was sitting in a well-padded chair, placed next to the dock in vague acknowledgement that he was the accused.
The deputy attorney general of the Cape, Bruce Morrison, lobbed the question, a barely disguised invitation to De Kock to get it all off his chest: sentenced to spend the next couple of centuries in jail, what did he have to say about his predicament?
Botha glanced at the former police colonel through gold-rimmed glasses. There was a momentary pause and then, with the apparent lack of emotion with which he used to murder the state’s political opponents, the former assassin began blazing away.
They were cowards, he said. They were cowardly politicians, especially those from the National Party, who had sold out the police and the army. “They want to eat lamb, but they do not want to see the blood and guts.”
The politicians had told them they were fighting for volk and fatherland. But it was a sham. They were only fighting for 5% of the people, for the incestuous little world of Afrikanerdom. “We did well. We did the fighting. I am proud of that,” declared De Kock.
But the politicians did not have the moral fibre to accept responsibility for the killing. So he, a lowly colonel, was doing it. “I am an Afrikaner,” he said. But it was as cowards that God would deal with the politicians.
Botha stared straight ahead. Wearing a grey suit, grey cardigan and grey shoes, he was banality incarnate. If he was the groot krokodil, he was one who had inescapably passed his prime, his collar loose on his scrawny neck as he nursed his partially paralysed right arm – a reminder of the stroke that has robbed him and, ultimately, his people, of power.
The magistrate, Victor Lugaju, listened impassively, his black skin speaking loudly of the new authority in the land.
In even tones the retired assassin told the story of the three bombings: the African National Congress offices in London in 1981, Cosatu House in 1987 and the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches, Khotso House, in 1988.
He had received the Police Star for Outstanding Service for the London bombing, recalled De Kock – an award previously reserved for generals, which could only be made by the president himself, then Botha.
De Kock said he had been “extremely surprised” at the order to bomb Cosatu House, because it represented an act of “major terrorism”. When he was told by a police general that Botha was getting impatient with his delay in attacking the building, he had retorted: “If PW Botha feels he can do it better, he should do it himself.”
He described how he was called in to blow up Khotso House after another sabotage team had fouled the job: the supermarket shopping bags in which they had packed the mines they were planning to use split open, sending the explosive devices rolling down a road in central Johannesburg.
He had used a back-up team armed with grenade launchers, sub-machine guns and automatic rifles. They had orders to kill any policemen who stumbled across them, to prevent their identification. It was state terrorism that had not gone completely unopposed.
Earlier the court had heard that South Africa’s spy chief during the apartheid era had confronted former police chief Johan van der Merwe and the head of the former South African Defence Force, Jannie Geldenhuys, with allegations that their men were murdering the government’s political opponents.
The executive secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Paul van Zyl, told the court the confrontation between the country’s spy chief and the security force commanders had emerged from in-camera testimony given by the former head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), Dr Neil Barnard.
Barnard had told them his agency had become aware that political figures were being murdered and that this was being approved at executive level. “We were very upset and worried about that,” he quoted Barnard as saying.
The head of the NIS had challenged Van der Merwe and Geldenhuys, who had demanded whether he had evidence. When he said he did not, they promised they would investigate. He had also raised the issue with Botha himself.
“He said he was also very worried about it and would deal with it at a political level,” Barnard had told the truth commission.
Truth commission chair Desmond Tutu told the magistrate he was appearing “with the greatest possible reluctance” and was “filled with considerable distaste” at the prospect of testifying against Botha. “I believe this is something that should not have happened,” he said of the prosecution.
The ex-president was “my brother” and the day would come when “God will ask me what did I do to help his child”, Tutu said.
The case is proceeding.