Amnesty Hearings — Durban — 1998-12-01

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: For our own comrades in command, the people that I was dealing with, give them principles, that you want people who are highly disciplined, highly motivated, people who had political understanding of the situation at the end of the day.
	Not just a person who will say that he would like to go for defence in a community and then we take him like that.  I explained to them it must be a person who will be liable for whatever operational action that might have taken place.
	It was up to them to decide, our own comrades were in the communities.  We of course encouraged the taking over of certain comrades in those various communities, because they knew those communities better than any other person.
	If you take a person from another area, you go and deploy him in say from the northern part of Natal, you go and deploy him in Port Shepstone for instance, you will have problems.
	Those people have been involved in defence of their own communities, for him to adapt, there is a lot of risk involved.  So what I have said to my own comrades, it would be better if there are MK comrades in those areas, and if they are disciplined as we are saying, then you can actually incorporate them into the structures and make them to train people in the act of self defence.

MR WILLS: Yes.  So what you are saying is it would be an MK person who was coming from a particular area that would be encouraged to participate in the SDU activities of that area?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: The bottom line is that you are a member of MK and your conscience, will actually  even tell you, some of them will actually directly come to the ANC office, in MK structure now, and say chaps, people are dying there, we want to participate.  And we don't talk to them, we say yes, we are aware, because we could not betray the whole system of communication or the whole system of command.
	All that we will say is okay, we are aware.  But if our Commanders come, then we say so and so has been into the office.  Is it possible for him to participate and they must have their own assessment of the community in that area.
	It happens sometimes that a member of MK is ill-disciplined.  He can come to the office looking for whatever, because has probably heard that arms are coming from the office or what, but we are always guarding against those, because most of the time people can actually take weapons and use them for their own ends at the end of the day, not necessarily for the acts of defence.

MR WILLS: And those trusted comrades from MK that were assigned to the SDU's, they had a role in training the members of the community in the exercise of the firearms, is that correct?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: That is correct.

MR WILLS: With the operation of the firearm?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: Yes, not only on firearms but also in information gathering, which was very critical.
	Most of the acts that were supposedly to have been launched against our own communities, were not stopped by weapons.  It was stopped by getting proper information about an attack and actually exposing that before it actually happened.  Then it was not only just weapons that were used in acts of self defence, but a lot of things, like information which was very critical.
	If the enemy knows that people knew that they are coming, they will say hold it, and then we prevented a lot of things that would have happened, through just gathering information and training people specifically to be able to gather as much information.
	For instance, in some other areas a car, if a car just come with people with arms, with weapons, they are just shooting people indiscriminately, it happened in a number of areas, we say to the people, we don't want you to tell us about the car, that it was a white car that just went passed.  We want you to be in a position to try and recognise the faces of the people. 	
	If you can the number plates of the car, the proper description of a vehicle, so that if in case our own comrade needs to act against those people, they must act precisely.  They mustn't just shoot any other car that might have been passing  Part of the training was to actually in giving skills to people to be able to precisely identify the cause of violence in the area.  We will not be part of the genocide where we will tell our own comrades go and kill and kill indiscriminately, we wanted specific, zero in to the specifics, who is responsible for this violence.

MR WILLS: Your operations were partly to assist in the SDU structures in the province, but you also had MK responsibilities at that time, is that correct?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: That is correct, yes.

MR WILLS: Can you describe briefly to the Committee what your MK responsibilities were?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: One of the activities that faced me, to come up with a CPR list.

MR WILLS: CPR being?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: A certified personal register for MK operatives.  We came in during different periods.  Some came in August, some were inside the country when there was this unbanning.
	Some even came later.  There was a need for us to be in a position to have a list.  How many cadres are there?  Where were people trained?  Who, what was the people doing all along and to be able to prepare for purposes of integration.
	We had to compile those lists, we had to time and again, call conferences for MK.  They were political soldiers, they were not just mere soldiers.  They needed to be informed of the political decisions that had been taken by the ANC at various stages of conferences.
	Even if there was a preparation for a conference, we had to carry a mandate from them, as to what is it that they want said in the conference of ANC political structure.
	And also to prepare for our own conferences, we had a conference inside the country, Mpumalanga is one that I attended myself.  We had to organise them, organise them into their structures, so that we are in a position to actually report to military Headquarters that we have MK here, so many soldiers have reported, this is what they are doing, this is their plight at this point in time.

MR WILLS: You have also applied for amnesty in respect of your involvement in an incident which has been referred to by my colleague, Mr Hewitt at Golela.

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: Yes.

MR WILLS: As I understand it, some comrades were arrested at the Golela border post, that is on the border with Swaziland and they had certain, they were caught with certain armourments?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: That is correct.

MR WILLS: Can you, do you know what those armourments were first of all?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: Yes.  Part of their weaponry, two RPG7's, which the Honourable Advocate has been referring to.

MR WILLS: RPG7's being for the layman, the grenade launcher?

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: It is recoilless rocket launcher.  You can put it on your shoulder, and then you can shoot it, it shoots a shell.  A shell is divided into three, it has a shell, it's got a head, a propellant that you put it in it and then you put it in, once you fire with it, the propellant just moves out of the shell and it can actually cruise on its own, to its target.
	It was an anti-tank weaponry, or used against armoured vehicles most of the time.  It is part of what we call light arms, warfare.  It is not something that is heavy, you can think it is something bizarre.  It is just an ordinary weapon, classified as light arms.

MR WILLS: Okay.

SIPHO JOEL SITHOLE: Then you can go to what you call a machine gun.  Even the category, it is below that of a machine gun.

CHAIRPERSON: Would those two RPG's have ended up in some SDU?