The discovery of minutes that expose how the National Party regime sealed the fate of Matthew Goniwe and three others could be the most important breakthrough during the past five years where discovering the truth about our grisly past is concerned. For the first time South Africans have been presented with concrete evidence that the politicians themselves – and not merely the police hit men who pulled the triggers – were party to political assassinations.
As we showed last week, it took only two days for the State Security Council’s instructions in March 1984 to get through to Craig Williamson’s killing machine, which immediately started planning, in meticulous detail, the hit that was eventually pulled off more than a year later. And why not? Williamson’s commander, General Johan Coetzee, was present at the State Security Council meeting.
It is unfortunate that these extraordinary minutes have come to light after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has wrapped up its work. For now that the truth body is no longer a legal entity it cannot reopen the special hearings that probed the National Party’s role under apartheid.
Nevertheless, there are ways in which this information can be used to flesh out the full truth. The truth commission has already signalled that it could reopen the amnesty hearings of the policemen who carried out the gruesome attack on the Cradock Four. If it does so its investigators will have the opportunity to probe further the links between the State Security Council and the men who laid the ambush for the Cradock Four in June 1985.
In the meantime, the truth commission’s legal advisers could also plot how best to use the minutes in its court battle with FW de Klerk, who was himself present at the Goniwe meeting in his capacity as minister of internal affairs.
De Klerk’s preposterous quest to go down in history as Mr Clean – by seeking to expunge the TRC judgment of him – may provide the TRC with the opportunity to test the Cradock Four minutes in the Cape High Court.
It is imperative, in fact, that these revelations are exposed to the type of probing examination that can only be achieved in a courtroom. De Klerk last week postponed his application in the Cape High Court to interdict the truth commission from publishing the section in the final report which accuses him of having perpetrated “gross human rights violations”.
The relevant sections have been temporarily removed pending the outcome of the case. So a second, less fruitful, option to introducing the minutes as new evidence would be to weave the Goniwe material into the section on De Klerk in the final report.
De Klerk cannot pull out of this battle, now without conceding his guilt. For a man who undoubtedly made a massive contribution to peace in this country, he has since behaved with shocking small-mindedness. His semantic gymnastics over the Goniwe matter have bordered on the absurd. “Verwyder”, the word in the minutes, does not mean “redeploy”, which De Klerk and Barend du Plessis claim was what they intended to do with Goniwe. It means “remove” or “eliminate”, which is exactly what happened.
Over the weekend De Klerk told the BBC that if the word had been misinterpreted by the security officials present at the security council meeting it was not his fault.
The murder of one of South Africa’s great leaders and three of his colleagues, we are then led to believe, was due to the securocrats misinterpreting the content of a discussion by politicians at a security council meeting.
If that was really the case, we have one question for PW Botha, De Klerk, Du Plessis and all those present: what did you think when Goniwe was murdered? Why did you not speak up when his burned and mangled body was recovered? You had the chance then to say then that you had been misunderstood. You had the chance during two years of truth commission hearings to come forward with what you knew. Yet you chose, and still choose, to remain silent.
Apart from these minutes we were also treated to more testimony from one of the more honest men to have come before the truth body, Eugene de Kock. The Vlakplaas commander in fact laid the ground for last week’s revelations about the security council by asking a rhetorical question: if “they [the politicians] did not know, why did they give his unit so many medals”? Minister Louis le Grange personally presented the highest police award for bravery to De Kock, Williamson and others only months before the murder of Goniwe, for blowing up the ANC’s headquarters in London.
The way is now open for the National Director of Public Prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, to consider laying criminal charges against some or all of the politicians who attended that security council meeting on March 19 1984.
Granting any form of mass amnesty to these men would make a mockery of the spirit of the truth commission.
They should not receive it, until they complete their side of the bargain and come clean about their role in our country’s past.