EMSIE FERREIRA, Cape Town | Tuesday
IN one of the most unexpected scenes to unfold before South Africa’s truth commission, hardened apartheid assassin Ferdi Barnard has begged for – and received – forgiveness from a man he tried to kill, Transport Minister Dullah Omar.
Barnard also revealed that the military had tried to sway the outcome of South Africa’s first all-race elections by orchestrating violence and blaming it on the African National Congress (ANC).
Barnard said he personally recruited criminals and double agents to go on the rampage during ANC rallies and marches, assaulting bystanders and smashing cars and shop windows. He also linked the state to the bloody pre-election violence between the ANC and the Zulu-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party.
He had come to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to ask for amnesty for stalking Omar and plotting to shoot him in 1989, but ended up making a clean breast of his many other apartheid-era crimes.
Last week he sobbed in the arms of Omar’s wife, Farieda, after telling the TRC she had shamed him into confessing by showing him kindness.
Barnard, who worked for the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a secret army unit of hit-men, said it was Omar’s wife who unwittingly stopped him from pulling the trigger because she was with her husband when he lay in wait to kill the then anti-apartheid activist outside their house.
A former crime boss and cocaine addict who once beat a man to death with a baseball bat, Barnard said he could not shoot Omar after seeing the grief of the lover of David Webster, an anti-apartheid academic he shot in 1989.
Barnard last week for the first time confessed to killing Webster, though he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, and also told of plots to kill three other current cabinet ministers. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting to kill Omar.
Like his cronies who have come clean, Barnard has said his orders came from the top ranks of the security forces, who have denied the charges and distanced themselves from the assassins.