Rian Malan’s article on Boipatong, “A question of spin”, in the South African Institute of Race Relations publication, Frontiers of Freedom, is a piece of research long on detail and counter-conspiracy and short on substance and context.
Malan has clearly spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the myriad versions and contradictions in testimonies, allegations and counter-allegations related to the massacre of June 17 1992.
Apart from the uncontested fact that several hundred Inkatha Freedom Party supporters from the KwaMadala hostel attacked the people of Boipatong, killing 45 men, women and children and injuring hundreds more, Malan admits he has failed to determine what really happened that night. He claims, however, that the allegations of direct security force involvement in the massacre and findings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in this regard are implausible.
The massacre, he purports, was a “spark clearly necessary [for the African National Conress] to rekindle flagging struggle passions”. Allegations of security force involvement, he argues, were part of a deliberate conspiracy. The ANC was aided in this endeavour, albeit unwittingly, by politically biased violence-monitoring organisations.
I cannot agree.
Organisations such as Peace Action, the Independent Board of Inquiry and the Human Rights Committee reported on what they saw and heard directly after the massacre. Their work is testimony to the dedication of a select few who tried, in extremely difficult circumstances, to do something about the carnage that engulfed the Reef and other areas during this period. To suggest other agendas is inaccurate, dishonest and contemptible.
In the charged atmosphere that followed the massacre, reports of security force involvement, often exaggerated and sometimes seemingly baseless, were made by a wide range of commentators. Their origins, however, were the people of Boipatong and not the ANC.
Violence monitors who received calls throughout the night of June 17 1992 were the first outsiders, apart from the police, in the township. They arrived before the ANC leadership. These monitors recorded the first allegations.
Residents of Boipatong were unequivocal in their animosity towards the police. The air was thick with allegations of their complicity. A week or so later, the situation remained so tense that a Dr Waddington, the British expert called in to investigate the police response to the massacre, opted not to use police escorts when in the township for fear of being seen as partisan.
Between June 1990 and June 1992, there were 51 major massacres in the Vaal Reef. Several thousand people were killed and many more injured, most guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. IFP supporters were also murdered, but the vast majority of victims came from ANC- aligned communities, and IFP casualties, albeit significant, were limited.
Many attacks were attributed directly to hit squads operating out of Iscor’s KwaMadala hostel, where several hundred refugees aligned to the IFP had sought refuge during the second half of 1990.
In the townships, many innocent people were rounded up, detained, beaten and tortured by the police in their efforts to neutralise UmKhonto weSizwe and self-defence unit elements they claimed were responsible for the violence. Police bias was evident as stronger action was taken against those opposed to the IFP than IFPsupporters, and the police routinely chorused IFP allegations that the ANC alliance was primarily responsible for violence in the area.
While Malan argues that security force involvement in the Boipatong massacre cannot be substantiated on available evidence, he fails to acknowledge and account for other facts that have recently come to light.
The police were routinely accused of collusion in the violence by a range of monitoring organisations. The police argued that the real cause of the violence was political rivalry between the ANC and IFP, and systematically denied these allegations. The IFP vehemently denied it conspired with the police.
Cracks in the edifice of this blanket denial, however, have begun to emerge. Eugene de Kock and other Vlakplaas members have applied for amnesty for providing weapons and ammunition to the IFP in the Witwatersrand and KwaZulu-Natal between 1990 and 1994. The recent discovery of arms provided to Phillip Powell must now dispel any doubts about these allegations.
Senior IFP officials have been implicated. Among these is Themba Khoza, IFP MP and former chair of the Transvaal IFP Youth Brigade, who now faces charges of gun- running. Vlakplaas witnesses claim Khoza became a paid security police informer in 1990 and was issued with a Nissan Sentra paid out of secret police funds. De Kock and former Vlakplaas member Brood van Heerden allege that they gave Khoza the guns and handgrenades used in the massacre of 19 people at the Sebokeng hostel in September 1990.
On the morning after the massacre, when he was still at the scene, Khoza was surrounded by thousands of hostel and township residents. He was rescued by the police, who subsequently arrested him and 137 IFP supporters after an assortment of weapons was “found” in the boot of his Nissan.
Revelations by De Kock and others, however, have prompted three former Vaal policemen – JF Conradie (security police chief in the Vaal), AJ van der Gryp (an officer in the unrest and violent crimes unit) and J Jacobs (Vanderbijlpark murder and robbery chief) – to apply for amnesty for fabricating evidence to secure Khoza’s acquittal.
Statements were altered and arrangements were made to ensure that the weapons could not be linked forensically or ballistically to those arrested.
Khoza and several others were acquitted after a local magistrate accepted his explanation that he wasn’t even at the hostel during the massacre and that the weapons could have been planted after he had arrived to help resolve the situation.
This case illustrates the special relationship between the police and the IFP in the Vaal at this time and, more importantly, that such dirty tricks were not the preserve of the infamous security police. Truth commission investigations into Khoza’s arrest suggest that the fabrication involved many more officers from different units.
Van der Gryp and Jacobs were not members of the security police, but of units known to have routinely used torture, and accused by some commentators of “sweeping” operations. Both units were central to investigations into IFP vigilante attacks and Boipatong.
Van der Gryp, for example, is allegedly responsible for the destruction of valuable ballistic evidence in the Boipatong probe.
The question of whether whites and/or security force members were involved in the massacre is of central importance to the Boipatong amnesty hearings. More than 40 witnesses have alleged that they were there, but 15 IFP applicants vehemently deny this.
The 16th applicant, Andries Nosenga, who was not convicted for this massacre, said he was transported into the township that night with other KwaMadala inmates.
With little protection or apparent strategy from his legal aid attorney, Nosenga, who has virtually no education, was ripped apart on the stand during six days of questioning. Instead of being taken out to show the amnesty committee where he had been and what he had done – probably the easiest way of establishing whether he was telling the truth – he was made to point out and mark black-and-white photocopied pictures of the scene.
Nosenga has been in prison for six years. How could the commission expect any credible evidence from this line of questioning? At the end of the day, his credibility as a witness was in shreds. Malan and the IFP suggest that Nosenga was planted by the ANC and questions are raised about the origin of his amnesty application.
But Nosenga remains an enigma. His testimony that the notorious policeman Pedro Peens was present and participated in the massacre is partially confirmed by Peens himself, who admits that he was in a Casspir in Boipatong that night, but said he was not involved in the attack. This contradicts the police’s own investigation in 1992 that cleared the police of complicity and claimed to have accounted for all Casspirs working in the area that night.
Nosenga’s conviction for the murder of nine people in drive-by shootings two nights before the massacre also raises a number of questions. Arrested in February 1993, he confessed, allegedly under torture, to the killings and the involvement of the notorious IFP vigilante Victor Kheswa and other KwaMadala inmates. Although police records show that Kheswa was incarcerated at this time, the anomaly was never explored. Indeed, none of the implicated men were questioned, despite their arrest, about the Boipatong massacre. There is also no record of Nosenga in the Boipatong investigation docket.
Were the police involved? A number of those who allege this have been unable to sustain their versions under cross-examination. Malan accuses them all of being part of a big lie at the ANC’s behest. He ignores the fact that the only clear evidence of systematic lying has been the applicants who denied their involvement for six years and cynically used the argument of a third force in their defence. They now expect their version to be accepted, without disclosing any information about the relationship between the police and KwaMadala. This, I would suggest, is the conspiracy.
As with so many other “experts” on the political violence that engulfed the Reef between 1990 and 1994, Malan has selectively chosen his facts and hearsay to fit his own theory.
In the Boipatong case, it is clear that police investigations never pursued the charge of police complicity impartially. Within two weeks of the massacre, the investigating officer claimed he had proved the allegations of collusion “false”. One might have expected him to report that the allegations had “not been substantiated”, but his version revealed the biased nature of the investigation.
The truth commission in its final report admits to failure in adequately probing the violence of the 1990s. Its attention to the Vaal Triangle was minimal and we may never know the truth about the Boipatong massacre.
However, it is clear that police collusion cannot be ruled out. Conradie, Van der Gryp and Jacobs are the only three policemen from the Vaal to apply for amnesty. Given the extent of the violence, it is a fair bet that many more disclosures remain hidden. Whatever ruling the amnesty committee makes in this case, the grounds for further investigation into police complicity with the IFP are evident.
Piers Pigou is a former employee of Peace Action and the Independent Board of Inquiry, as well as a former investigator with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission