John Grobler
The tangled skeins of apartheid’s past in Namibia got yet another knot this week when a former security branch policeman claimed that as many as 2 000 former Swapo guerrillas were at one stage held in the camps from where Dr Wouter Basson’s 200 victims were allegedly selected.
Former security branch member Linus Neumbo told the Mail & Guardian that a hugely succesful counter-insurgency operation, called ”Operasie O”, run from the early 1980s until as late as 1988, had picked up about 2 000 South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) guerrillas and sympathisers.
None of them were ever charged, as court proceedings would have blown the cover of the operation, Neumbo said, and all suspects so detained were all held in several remote, rural police stations spread across the country.
”We constantly had to move them around, to prevent anybody [in Swapo] finding out about the operation.”
Neumbo, now a private investigator, said the 200 Swapo guerrillas injected or throttled and dropped off the Skeleton Coast were all taken from these camps and jails, which ranged from official detention centres like Keikanachab, police cells in Seeis to Osire, now Namibia’s official refugee camp.
”The first 30 we picked up during this operation were held at an old house in Windhoek, inside the grounds of the old works department [now the ministry of transport],” Neumbo said.
Operasie O was run from Windhoek and made use of askaris, former Plan (People’s Liberation Army of Namibia) members captured and turned by means of torture or blackmail, to identify and arrest any guerrilla attempting to infiltrate the then-South West Africa.
Early in 1983 the security police and army installed one-way windows at Oshivello, the entry gate into the so- called Owamboland and official ”operational area” from where Swapo traditionally draws it political support.
”They caught so many guys coming in, it eventually became a problem,” Neumbo said. Initially, all prisoners were kept at the old Windhoek prison in the centre of Windhoek, keeping them away from common criminals held in the larger and more modern Windhoek Central Prison.
Later, the more ”sensitive cases” were held in isolation at various rural police cells, from where Neumbo believes many were handed over to former Military Intelligence (MI) operative Johan Theron to dispose of.
Others were caught by small teams of former Swapo guerrillas and their security police handlers infiltrating townships and identifying Swapo infiltrators, who were then arrested with the askaris to deflect suspicion.
Neumbo said he personally led several such sorties, criss-crossing the country in powerful Ford bakkies supplied specifically for this purpose.
”It worked very well, because when a guerrilla stopped reporting back to the leadership, eventually they would get suspicious of him or her,” Neumbo said. ”Going back then became impossible – they would probably face much harsher treatment from Swapo, and be regarded as a spy anyway.”
Two other former policemen largely confirmed details, but with an uncertain political climate rising in Namibia, neither were willing to go on record.
But Basson’s deadly plane trips only account for part of the thousands of former Swapo members, and many cases remain unresolved.
One such case is that of former Koevoet askari Petrus Josef, gunned down in his house in September 1989 by another Koevoet operative, Sergeant J McMaster, allegedly because Josef had started drinking and talking too much.
The case, heard as an official inquiry under the auspices of the United Nations Technical Assistance Group by Judge Bryan O’Linn, found that McMaster had used ”excessive force” in shooting Josef nine times. Judge O’Linn ordered that possible murder charges be investigated against McMaster and his masters, but no investigation ever took place.
Josef, said Neumbo, was just one of many such victims – many people were taken to a police-owned farm just outside the northern mining town of Tsumeb, never to be heard of again. This, he said, was all part of an order from Pretoria to get rid of those detainees whose numbers posed a security risk – the same charge that Basson now faces.
Neumbo’s allegations would appear to support evidence led at the Basson trial about the South Africans’ participation in the elimination of Swapo guerillas. But they do not answer the question of what happened to Swapo’s own detainees, hundreds of whom disappeared without trace – the victims of what many believe to have been a vicious internal power struggle within the liberation movement.
The International Committee for the Red Cross still lists 2 616 as officially unaccounted for from Swapo’s camp in Angola.