The faces of apartheid’s feared security police were on display at the truth commission this week, writes David Beresford
They are unlikely combatants, but long-time adversaries; the almost theatrical figure of the lawyer George Bizos and the stocky, hawk-faced former police commander, General Johan Coetzee.
They have faced each other on previous occasions across the country’s courtrooms, but there was an air of finality about the duel being fought out between them in a Pretoria conference centre this week.
There are eight former policemen applying for amnesty before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the 1982 bombing of the ANC’s London headquarters.
In many respects they represent the different faces of what was in its time the world’s most notorious police force: Coetzee himself, head of the security branch from 1980 and national police chief from 1983 to 1987 – some of the bloodiest years of what has been described as South Africa’s “dirty war”.
There is Craig Williamson, whose gargantuan girth gives him more the appearance of a trencherman than a policeman and whose taste for personal betrayal won him the tag of South Africa’s “superspy”. Eugene de Kock, “prime evil”, who has become the personification of the professional hit man.
Grey-faced Vic Macpherson, the one- time chief propagandist whose obsession now is untangling the skein of lies in which he once wrapped the force. Gerry Raven, the state bomb- maker …
Coetzee was the first to take the witness stand before the amnesty tribunal, headed by Judge Andrew Wilson. By the end of his second day of cross-examination by Bizos, the most senior policeman to apply for forgiveness for crimes of the apartheid era was looking exhausted.
Bizos seemed to be energised by his own indignation and the silent presence behind him of the three Slovo sisters – come to see the murderers of their mother, Ruth First, killed by a parcel bomb sent to her by the police in 1982.
The general denied responsibility for that murder and any others, which was the cause of Bizos’s indignation. “I knew her well, sir,” Coetzee told his persecutor earnestly. “It should never have happened,” he said of the bomb.
“I never gave an instruction that someone should be assassinated, or killed, inside, or outside the country.” Exasperated, Bizos made the general read an account from De Kock’s recently published autobiography of a 1986 police raid into Swaziland in which they had killed three people and seized some African National Congress documents.
De Kock described how the triumphant police unit had reported back to Coetzee personally at his Pretoria home. Coetzee, by then national commissioner, had given them coffee and, wearing a dressing gown, had shaken everybody’s hand.
“When he got to me he said he did not know whether he should touch my hands since they were covered in blood,” recounted De Kock.
Challenged with De Kock’s account, the general said he remembered that a Brigadier Willem Schoon and other policemen “woke me up one morning and he made a report to me and he had documentation”. It was the first he had heard about the operation.
“He told me there had been a fire- fight,” recalled Coetzee. “It wasn’t reported by Schoon to me that it happened in Swaziland.”
Wilson: “You mean he came to tell you at 5.30 in the morning about this fire-fight and the documents they had recovered and they never told you where it was ?”
“As far as I remember, Mr Chairman, it was somewhere on the Swazi border,” replied the general hurriedly. Remorselessly Bizos listed ANC officials in neighbouring countries and ANC suspects inside the country now known to have been killed by the police under Coetzee’s command. Adamantly the general denied any knowledge of them.
“Did you ever suspect the deaths of so many ANC people inside and outside the country may have been [the work of] members of your police force?” demanded Bizos.
“I did not suspect the police force was involved,” said the general.
Bizos: “If you drew up a list of suspects, who would be number-one suspect, organisationally?”
“I don’t know, sir,” said Coetzee dolefully.
“You are one of the most experienced policemen the country has ever produced, general. Please tell us!”
“It could be anyone. It could be an outside agency, that was involved in the East-West situation. There were very many allegations made, for instance, against the CIA …”
“Did it come to your knowledge that the ANC Swaziland representative was blown up [in 1982]?” demanded Bizos.
“Yes, it must have come to my notice.”
“Who did you think was the fairy godmother who got rid of yet another ANC chief representative in a neighbouring country?”
The hearing is scheduled to last three weeks.