David Beresford
It was j’accuse flavoured with a dash of mea culpa when Adriaan Vlok this week appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to explain how he contributed to “law and order” by blowing up office blocks and cinemas.
Vlok, who was minister of law and order between 1986 and 1994 – the most bloody phase of the anti-apartheid struggle – appeared before the commission in support of an amnesty application for three covert bombing operations carried out by police on his instructions.
He was forced to seek amnesty after his former police commander, General Johan van der Merwe, had publicly accused him of issuing orders for the attacks.
Looking like an accountant in a suit and gold-rimmed glasses, Vlok offered a moral balance sheet which, by his accounting, concluded that the country could count itself fortunate – and be grateful to the security forces – for having been saved from communist dictatorship.
Apartheid was “unbearable and morally indefensible”, he conceded. But the “sour fruits and injustices” were not the intention of those who had formulated the ideology.
“We only had the best of intentions for ourselves, for the rest of South Africans and also for our country.” But, he said, “we planted the tree and we have to accept the moral and political responsibility for its fruits.
“We did not start the war in South Africa, we just participated in it. The actions of the security forces were in reaction to the attacks launched on the government by the revolutionaries.”
If they had not fought back, present-day South Africa “would be a poor, backward communist country in the same pattern as East European countries.” Instead, it was “an economic giant on the continent of Africa”.
The anti-communist struggle had been confused by the role of some churches, which Vlok said were “in the pockets of international communism”. It had been an “undeclared war” out of which a war psychosis developed, leading individuals to commit acts which in normal circumstances would have been unthinkable.
“We got so de-sensitised that this sort of thing became more and more normal to us.” As a “moral and political leader” he could not distance himself from the men who committed such acts, although he did not carry “direct” responsibility.
Challenged as to why expressions like “eliminate” and “take out” had been used in government documents if ministers did not mean the security forces to murder activists, Vlok said the phrases were to be found in documents submitted to the politicians, but not drawn up by the politicians themselves.
To the politicians such phrases meant detention. But, he conceded, to the man in the street it meant “kill” and the politicians had been at fault for failing to correct that perspective.
Turning to the crimes for which he is applying for amnesty, Vlok said the decisions to blow up Cosatu House, headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and Khotso House, home of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), were taken because there was no legal way to deal with the revolutionary threat they posed.
He said a demand for “action” from former president PW Botha had led to his decision to blow up the headquarters of the SACC in 1988. Botha had taken him to one side after a meeting of the state security council at his official residence in Cape Town and urged him to act against Khotso House.
The president had told him: “You must make that building unusable,” recalled Vlok. “He did not say what had to be done. He said something had to be done … I had no doubt that some irregular action had to be taken.”
Twenty-one people were injured in the blast which Vlok subsequently blamed on a social worker, Shirley Gunn, although he knew her to be innocent of the crime. He said he had falsely accused her to protect the police.
She would have been detained anyway, as a suspected African National Congress guerrilla, but he was nevertheless “very sorry and truthfully regret” the suffering his false charges had caused her.
He justified the bombing of two cinemas which had shown Cry Freedom, Richard Attenborough’s film on black consciousness hero Steve Biko, on the grounds that it was “very good” propaganda which could have triggered revolution in South Africa.