Cover-up of atrocities (on both sides) continues

Forty years ago, a group of 200 black men sweated in high humidity through the strenuous routines of basic military training, under the command of a group of implacable, eagle-eyed white “security company” staff, deep in what they thought was Israel.

Today, the impunity for apartheid-era atrocities that the training of those men created is being dismantled by the Khampepe commission. It is inquiring into a conspiracy by former ANC deputy presidents and former South African Defence Force (SADF) generals to prevent prosecutions flowing from the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

Those black trainees were from Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party. Instead of being in Israel, they were deep in the bush of the Caprivi Strip of what was then South West Africa (now Namibia). And they were being clandestinely trained by officers of SADF Special Forces “Recces” and military intelligence’s Directorate of Special Tasks Region 2 (DST2) as a paramilitary force for Inkatha to combat its ANC/SACP rivals.

In the bloody internecine warfare in KwaZulu, Inkatha — with its ill-prepared KwaZulu Police (KZP) — was at a distinct disadvantage against the ANC/SACP and their United Democratic Front (UDF) associates, with many of their cadres trained in the Soviet bloc, and with arms pipelines running in from Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

On December 19 1985, military intelligence director Maj-Gen Tienie Groenewald sent a staff paper, apparently authored by DST2 chief Brig Cor van Niekerk, to defence minister Magnus Malan. It stated that Buthelezi “wants the ability to effectively oppose the ANC and UDF. He himself refers to his lack of an offensive ability to act against the ANC. He further refers specifically to a need for a paramilitary task force.”

Groenewald warned: “It would be practically impossible to grant immunity from prosecution for actions against members of the ANC and UDF to such a large group.” He argued that the SADF must have proper oversight and a degree of power over the paramilitary task force, yet also that cut-outs should be established to ensure that anyone examining the task force could not trace it back to the SADF.

Immunity from prosecution and plausible deniability are core elements of the principle of impunity currently being shredded at the Khampepe commission.

In the event, after a State Security Council (SSC) meeting under president PW Botha, with Malan, SADF chief Gen Jannie Geldenhuys and future president FW de Klerk present, Inkatha got its company of 200 men. It was commanded by the grandson of ANC Nobel laureate Albert Luthuli, Daluxolo Luthuli, who had defected to Inkatha because of ANC attacks on Zulu leaders.

Nobody knows how many deaths were caused by the Caprivi company before most of its men were absorbed into the KZP at the end of 1988, to continue operating as small-cell death squads within the police.

But at least one mass killing is known in great detail: the KwaMakhutha Massacre of January 21 1987, when the house of UDF youth activist Victor Ntuli was shot up, with 13 dead and four wounded, most of them women and children. Ntuli himself was not at home.

In the watershed “trial of the generals” in 1996, Malan, Geldenhuys, Groenewald, Van Niekerk, KZP chief SM Mathe, Inkatha chief MZ Khumalo and 14 others (though neither PW Botha nor Buthelezi) were tried for the KwaMakhutha Massacre. It would prove to be the only time alleged apartheid perpetrators of general staff rank faced trial.

Observers believed the case to be strong, as it was one of the few instances in which clear evidence established a chain of command leading from PW Botha and the SSC at the pinnacle, via Malan and his generals, directly to operational commanders such as Cor van Niekerk, down to Operation Marion trainers (and confessed KwaMakhutha killers) Capt JP Opperman and Sgt André Cloete, and the lowliest Caprivian death-squad gunman in the killing fields.

And, in parallel, the month after the trial started, the TRC itself under Archbishop Desmond Tutu began its first public hearings into gross human rights violations, so circumstances for attaining justice for past horrors seemed propitious. But prosecutor Tim McNally failed to underline the offensive purpose of the “Caprivi 200”, so the case collapsed and judge Jan Hugo acquitted all the accused on October 11 1996.

This arguably enabled the flowering of a culture of impunity that has bedevilled attempts, over the three decades since then, by apartheid victims across the political spectrum to get justice and closure for the damage done.

On July 14 1997, former war generals Malan, Geldenhuys and Constand Viljoen publicly called for a general amnesty for all perpetrators on all sides, as had been granted previously in Namibia. It was a bold move against the statutory status of the TRC, whose amnesty committee operated rather on the principle of granting amnesty on a case-by-case basis for full disclosure.

Maj-Gen Dirk Marais was convenor of the Contact Bureau, an entity created to co-ordinate SADF responses to the TRC. If what he told me in a 2019 interview is true, President Nelson Mandela himself asked his deputy, Thabo Mbeki, some time in late 1997 to approach Viljoen to see what could be done about the generals’ call.

As detailed by Marais to me, and by Viljoen and Mbeki’s Namibian businessman friend Jürgen Kögl to German lawyer Ole Bubenzer, from then until early 2003 the retired generals and serving ministers met secretly yet cordially over drinks to discuss how to prevent any prosecutions arising from the TRC. These meetings took place first under Mbeki, then under Zuma.

It was an astonishing attempt to secretly undermine the public objectives of the TRC. Bubenzer and I have both produced books touching on the matter, Post-TRC Prosecutions in South Africa (2009) and Death Flight (2020) respectively. We have both testified before the Khampepe commission as to what we learnt of these talks aimed at institutionalising impunity, creating what I term a multipartisan “Impi of Impunity” for perpetrators of all stripes.

Mbeki and Zuma, as the most implicated ANC seniors in the conspiracy, have fought tooth-and-nail to prevent the commission from proceeding

In Bubenzer’s book, he laid out why the ANC, by then in power, would engage in such an unseemly conspiracy in the first place.

First, there was “the still very volatile political situation in KwaZulu-Natal”; second, according to Kögl, there was the potential for continued Third Force destabilisation posed by still-hidden SADF arms caches; third, the ANC was concerned at the low level of SADF participation in the TRC; fourth, neighbouring countries might demand compensation for damage by SADF raids; fifth, the government was wary that a purge of the new SA National Defence Force (SANDF) would undermine its military effectiveness; and sixth, the government preferred reconciliation over prosecution.

Marais added a very telling seventh reason: the ANC was terrified that if it started war-crimes trials against the generals, the same could be done to its own leadership.

Bubenzer’s testimony highlighted that while the SADF had its Contact Bureau, the SAP had its own separate initiative, the Foundation for Equality Before the Law, aimed at managing SAP veterans’ responses to the TRC. It established its own parallel set of secret talks between Sydney Mufamadi for the ANC and former SAP commissioner Gen Johan van der Merwe.

The Khampepe commission has conclusively, to my mind, established that there were indeed secret talks between ANC ministers, under first Mbeki and then Zuma, with the SADF generals to prevent post-TRC prosecutions. The commission has now turned its attention to the ANC’s allegedly seditious interference with the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) after the talks collapsed on February 17 2003 — because the generals could not get their desired blanket amnesty.

From the outset, Mbeki and Zuma, as the most implicated ANC seniors in the conspiracy, have fought tooth-and-nail to prevent the commission from proceeding, notably in their high court challenge to force its chair, retired Judge Sisi Khampepe, to recuse herself because of her background working with the TRC and NPA.

But on March 6 this year, in a Kafkaesque turn, President Cyril Ramaphosa, who appointed Khampepe last year, entered the fray on the side of the ex-presidents, claiming disingenuously in an affidavit before the court that he had no knowledge of Khampepe’s background when he appointed her and that he wouldn’t oppose any court order that she step down.

Patently obviously, Ramaphosa initiated the commission only in order to forestall the landmark R167m constitutional damages suit brought against the government in January last year, by the Foundation for Human Rights and 25 families of victims of apartheid for failure to prosecute atrocities of that era. The creation of just such a commission was a key demand of that suit.

But now, Ramaphosa has revealed his hand: he has publicly joined forces with the reactionary Impi of Impunity.

(This week the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg struck down the Mbeki/Zuma attempt to remove Khampepe because they had not obtained prior consent from the Chief Justice before implementing the review proceedings. The court statement also slammed Zuma and Mbeki for what it termed “direct attacks” on Khampepe’s character and integrity.)

Michael Schmidt is an investigative journalist and the author of Drinking with Ghosts: The Aftermath of Apartheid’s Dirty War (2014), Death Flight: Apartheid’s Secret Doctrine of Disappearance (2020), and Ziggurat: Magnus’ Military State (forthcoming, 2026)