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Mungo Soggot
The National Intelligence Agency (NIA)destroyed key state documents as late as November 1996, complementing the wholesale destruction of state records undertaken by the previous government from 1990.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC)final report says in a section on South Africa’s gutted archive that the NIA destroyed records from the intelligence services of the former homelands between April 1995 and November 1996. The report says the NIA’s top management must be held accountable for the destruction.
The TRC says the former government and its security apparatus embarked on a systematic destruction of records from 1990. Up until then, the government sanctioned the erasure of “sensitive” records, a practice deemed legal according to legal opinion obtained by the state president in 1991.
The TRC said responsibility for the post-1990 destruction rests with the head of state of the time, but that the pre-1994 National Intelligence Service carried a heavy burden of responsibility for managing the destruction.
“The mass destruction of records has had a severe impact on South Africa’s social memory. Swathes of official documentary memory, particularly around the inner workings of the apartheid state’s security apparatus, have been obliterated.”
The commission made special mention of the “complete destruction” of records confiscated by the security branch – “what may arguably have been the country’s richest accumulation of records documenting the struggle against apartheid”.
Meanwhile, the report deals at length with the former government’s foreign operations. The report said the bombing of the African National Congress’s offices in London in 1982 was executed by the South African police on the direct instructions of former state president PW Botha.
It said the attempt to overthrow the Seychelles government was an “operation undertaken by senior operatives of the National Intelligence Service and the Department of Military Intelligence with the collusion of elements within the SADF [South African Defence Force]”.