Howard Barrell
The Democratic Party has thrown its weight behind one of its MPs, Richard Pillay, who has been denied security clearance to serve on Parliament’s watchdog committee on intelligence, calling his exclusion unjustified and malicious.
Pillay is a former member of the African National Congress who alleges he was tortured by ANC security personnel at the former liberation movement’s notorious Quatro camp in Angola in the 1980s.
DP leader Tony Leon was summoned to see Frene Ginwala, the speaker of the House of Assembly, on February 16 to be told that Pillay had failed a security clearance conducted by the National Intelligence Agency.
Leon was given reasons for the refusal. According to DP MP James Selfe, the reasons given are not of a political nature. He declined to disclose them to the Mail & Guardian.
In a strongly worded letter delivered to Ginwala on February 24, DP chief whip Douglas Gibson wrote that his party regarded the refusal of security clearance for Pillay as “based on gossip and hearsay, activated by malice and a misuse of power by the authorities”.
Gibson added that there could be no connection between what Pillay was alleged to have done and his suitability to be a member of the committee. “Given the lurid backgrounds of many in the security establishment, the current action to deny Pillay a security clearance on the grounds of smears and allegations, is extreme indeed,” Gibson said.
The DP would get Pillay the best legal representation at a special hearing to review the refusal of security clearance – if matters got to that point, Gibson added.
There was speculation in parliamentary circles late last year over whether Pillay’s fall-out with the ANC might affect his application to be the DP’s sole representative on the joint standing committee on intelligence. The job of the committee, which has a large ANC majority, is to oversee the work of South Africa’s intelligence and security agencies.
Pillay is one of a number of former ANC members to level serious charges of torture and abuse at the hands of the ANC’s security personnel in exile.
He was one of three former ANC members who testified about the former liberation movement’s alleged mistreatment of detainees in a court case heard in the high court in KwaZulu-Natal in which another former ANC detainee, Muzi Lombo, is suing the ANC for R2,3-million. Judgment has not yet been delivered.
Pillay is a key figure in the Unemployed Masses of South Africa, a job-seekers’ organisation allied to the DP. He has recently brought several hundred ANC members across to the DP.
Pillay, a former member of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, who says he was tasked with infiltrating the South African police inside South Africa in the 1980s, was held in detention by the ANC from 1986 to 1989. He spent 13 months in solitary confinement at Nova Installasou and then Quatro camp in Angola, before being moved to a communal cell and later being transferred to an ANC prison camp in Uganda, known as Bokoloda.
ANC security personnel alleged he had been turned by apartheid security forces and was working for them.
The ANC released Pillay in 1990, shortly after its unbanning. He was approached by the late Chris Hani, then chief of staff of Umkhonto weSizwe, who said the ANC had made a mistake in detaining him. Hani arranged for Pillay to go on a counter-intelligence course in Eastern Europe to help him get over the trauma.