Amnesty Hearings — Pretoria — UNKNOWN

JEREMY CRONIN: I'll do my best to try and turn that into a question and then answer it and I think the answer lies in Hani's own words and I refer Ms van der Walt, to the top of page six where he says that
"Until we began to understand clearly what we were up against, it was impossible"
And he's referring to the kicking under the table if you like - the low-intensity conflict that was launched against Black communities.
"Until we understood what we were up against, it was impossible to develop an adequate counter-strategy to this low intensity warfare.  It's essentially a political strategy"
he said.
"And our counter-strategy has therefore also to be essentially political"
Now, you might think that he was a military man case in a military mould, he was a political activist, he was a communist, he was a socialist and his aspirations were moral and political.  He was only secondarily a military person and I think that this quotation underlines that point as many other do as well.
"Our counter-strategy has therefore also to be essentially political, not rushing back to arms, not getting into military ...[indistinct]  The key to countering low-intensity warfare in our specific situation, is to uncover it publicly, to smoke it out and in so doing raise the political price that the regime pays for deploying this strategy"
In other words, not to allow it to happen under cover, under the - ...[indistinct] to appear to be Nkatha or faction fighting or White on Black violence but to smoke it out and to show it for what it is, namely a fairly cynical strategy deployed by the regime at the time.  
	That was his attitude and that was why precisely he was not rushing off to arm himself or to launch an army, he was deeply committed and understood - he had the intelligence to understand that the kind of provocation that your applicants sought to unleash, was precisely to fall into the hands of those who didn't want to see a non-racial democracy in our country - he had the intelligence to  understand that.

MS VAN DER WALT: Mr Cronin, you testified and said that in particular with regard to the questions in respect of Vula, there was an uncertainty among the members of your Party regarding the unbanning of the ANC and the SACP and that is why certain people remained underground, is that correct?

JEREMY CRONIN: For a brief period, yes.

MS VAN DER WALT: And you also could not comment when you were asked regarding how the Conservative Party could - what their feelings were regarding communism and the unbanning of the SACP and ANC because you didn't have any knowledge thereof, is that correct.

JEREMY CRONIN: Yes, I certainly don't claim to be able to put myself in the shoes of the Conservative Party, so I have no ambitions to answer on behalf of the Conservative Party.

MS VAN DER WALT: And you also do not expect the broad public - and that includes everybody, to read what the Communist Party writes but you do not read what is said about the Conservative Party?

JEREMY CRONIN: No, no, I certainly read what I've said about the Conservative Party, believe it or not and I from time to time read Die Patriot as punishment but the - because I accept that not everyone in South Africa reads the African Communist - the official organ of the Communist Party.
	It's for that reason that Chris Hani and other leaders of the Communist Party go out of their way to address public meetings, to address small groups of people, to address White business people, to appear on public radio, on public television, because we understand that people are often confined to ethnic and ideological kraals in our country and it's very important to reach out beyond those. 
	And that's why Chris Hani spent so much of his time doing that in his last years, he wanted to break out of these and to get his message across.  As in the Robby interview - and this is one of many, many examples, he patiently listens to the questions of White listeners, seeks to answer them and Robby says: "Gosh you must be getting bored and tired with answering the same questions" and he says: "No, no, I understand why people are asking these questions".   No, I accept that people live in their delusions and it's very important to cut across them and to reach out beyond them.

MS VAN DER WALT: But don't you think Mr Cronin, that in the same way that the Communist Party was careful with regard to the unbanning of the Party and the start of negotiations, that in a similar manner the Conservative Party was also circumspect about - and the right-wing people in this country, with regard to the negotiations or the so-called negotiations which were still in an early phase, to deal with these circumspectly because they knew that from 1961 when the ANC and SACP took the military course there were many people who were killed by that Party in South Africa - just a few Whites but many Blacks and if a Party kills it's own people, shouldn't they then be dealt with circumspectly?

JEREMY CRONIN: The intelligent politicians are circumspect, my problem with politicians who confuse circumspection with principal is the chief problem that I would have.
	That certainly we were concerned and uncertain as a Communist Party - I don't want to speak for the Conservative Party, I'm not here to do that but I can speak for the South African Communist Party, certainly in a complicated transition period it's understandable that different components of the political spectrum are going to be circumspect in their approach.  
	But circumspection is one thing, change of policy - unannounced, fudged, confused, is certainly a whole different matter.  When the ANC and it's alliance suspended the armed struggle, we suspended the armed struggle, there was not circumspection about that, we were clear, we were suspending it.  
	There was no confusion, there was no rhetoric which gave our followers - you know, a nudge and wink that they might be at liberty to do what they like and that they could then claim that they were under some illusion that they'd been ordered to do so by Chris Hani or whosoever.  
	So, yes, we were circumspect, yes, we were uncertain about our safety, yes, we were not sure if the negotiations would produce peace but as we changed our policy in regard - for instance to violence, we said it very clearly and we committed ourselves as a leadership to that.
	When we were engaged in armed struggle, we were clear that we were engaged in armed struggle and we assumed full political responsibility for that, so if in this area of circumspection which you are trying to introduce into the question, you're trying to fudge a number of different things then I'd advise you not to because I'm very clear in my own mind what our attitude ..[inaudible]  
	We were circumspect about - we were concerned about people who were in the underground who might be arrested, our circumspection proved correct.  They were not waging an armed struggle - those people in that underground, they were not preparing an insurrection but they were survivors from an underground.  
	Some of them had not survived, some of their fellow members had died in detention - we were circumspect absolutely, we were concerned about their safety but in time and quite rapidly we were able to surface them as well.

MS VAN DER WALT: The ANC/SACP alliance - according to you, suspended the armed struggle but according to your own evidence I wish to state to you that the armed struggle continued in the self-defence unit which - as you had stated, went off the rails.