OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Tuesday
THE rightwing assassins of South African Communist Party leader and liberation hero Chris Hani have launched a court bid to have their life sentences scrapped.
Lawyers for Janusz Walus and Clive Derby Lewis have asked the Cape Town High Court to reverse a decision by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), taken in April 1999, not to grant the men amnesty for the murder.
The men contend the reason they assassinated Hani had been to support the rightwing Conservative Party’s (CP) political struggle against the African National Congress-SACP alliance.
This reason was rejected by the amnesty committee of the TRC on the grounds that it was not CP policy to eliminate opposition political leaders.
The CP has denied ordering the murder.
Advocate Jurg Prinsloo told the court the RC’s amnesty committee had prejudiced the killers because it called on them to prove the murder was part of the policy of the CP, of which they were members.
The commission grants amnesties only to those who demonstrate repentance, make full confessions, and can prove their crimes were political.
Hani was gunned down outside his Johannesburg home on April 10, 1993 – a year before the country’s first all-race elections.
Prinsloo said: “The amnesty committee did not ask that as a prerequisite of any of the other killers who claimed that they had a political motive for murder.”
This allowed members of the leftwing Pan Africanist Congress to receive amnesty for killing American student Amy Biehl and carrying out a church massacre in Cape Town in a spate of pre-election violence, he argued.
The CP is funding the cost of the court application, as it has done with all the legal costs of Walus and Derby-Lewis so far.
Prinsloo said Derby-Lewis and Walus had had reasonable grounds to believe that they were acting in the course and scope of their duties with the CP in assassinating Hani.
He said the murder had been calculated to cause widespread reaction, and counter reaction from the rightwing and security forces, and ultimately a takeover of the country by the CP.
Advocate George Bizos will address the court on Tuesday on behalf of the TRC.
No TRC ruling has yet been overturned by a court. – AFP