Special Hearings — Mandela United Football Club Hearings — 1997-11-24

FRANK CHIKANE: Chairperson of the Commission, commissioners and honourable guests, community leaders who are here, and the public, recently there have been confusing reports about what exactly this Mandela Crisis Committee is all about and who belongs to it.  And we'd all sorts of names which have been listed, put together as part of the Mandela Crisis Committee, and our submission is meant to explain and put on record once and for all what this committee is  all about.   Similarly, the submission of this now defunct, because it is a defunct committee, should be seen in its correct perspective, that the submission of the committee is made with the sole purpose of helping the Commission in its quest to understand the activities of the Mandela Crisis Committee in respect to the matters raised by the Commission in the letter sent to us. And the third thing we would like to say, Chairperson, is that there are aspects in the letter that has been sent to some of us which we can not account for in terms of our knowledge collectively.  The Commission therefore wishes to submit that it has no knowledge of the circumstances or facts surrounding the murder of Dr Abu-baker Asvat in 1989 and the abduction and imprisonment of Katiza Cebekhulu in 1991.  We just want to put it on record because we don't have, you know, first-hand information we can actually provide to you in that regard.  The fourth thing we'd like to say is that the committee is also in no position to discuss the activities of the Mass Democratic Movement as a collective in the matters raised above connected with the Crisis Committee.  Our function was very limited and we actually stuck to that as a collective, notwithstanding the fact that our members here were individually involved in various other committees, but we thought it's important to put that on record.  The submission contained herein represents, and we'd like to emphasise that, the best possible attempt by members of the now-defunct Mandela Crisis Committee to recollect the events which are relevant to providing an understanding of the context this Commission is looking at.  But before we give details of this submission, we would like just to express, and I would like to express that myself, our condolences to all the families affected in the matters which you are dealing with, and we take this sitting of the Truth Commission as of grave, we take it very seriously, and we feel it deals with people's lives and with people's future, with people's experiences and families.  And we'd like to treat it in that way that we give as much information as we can give the Commission in this respect.
 Chairperson, I would not read the submission because it has been submitted.  We just want to put the formation of the committee within context.  Now firstly I got a call that Mr Mandela's house was on fire, and once I got the call I remember I was leaving that very day on a break, on holiday, and I was called and I went back and went to the house, found the house burning, and I knew the consequences of the house of a leader of that nature and the family, and for that reason I then called people who were strategically placed within the community who could assist in managing the consequences of the burning of the house so that we would not have deaths and destruction, which could follow out of it, and as the submission shows the people who then came - well, at the end of that day were Mr Aubrey Mokoena, and I want to just say, because people have been associating the committee with various other people, he's a member of parliament now, he chairs the committees in parliament, but he was the national co-ordinator of the Release Mandela Campaign during those days, and a member of the national executive of the UDF, and Mr Sidney Mufamadi is now Minister of Safety and Security, and he was General Secretary of Cosatu, and now a member of the MEC of the ANC and a member of the Central Committee of the Politburo, and Sr Bernard during those days she was president of the Federation of the Transvaal Women's Organisation (FETWO) and now she is a member of parliament.   And Dr Beyers Naude has been former General Secretary of the SACC and former Director of the Christian Institute, and he has been a very, very valuable member of the community to make a contribution in this regard.  And the sixth person who's not present with us today, it's Mr Cyril Ramaphosa, who happens to have a meeting that he could not get out of, but he is now Deputy Chairperson of the National African Investment Limited, Chairperson of Johnnic, and he was former Secretary General of the ANC, former chairperson of the Constitutional Assembly, and former Secretary General of the National Union of Mineworkers.  Those six people are the ones who then came to be known as the Crisis Committee or the Mandela Crisis Committee.  We say in the submission that we were christened thus.  We never called ourselves a Mandela Crisis Committee ourselves.  In fact, if you looked at the Annexure 1 of that submission, you will realise that at the end their submissions says, "released by the following community leaders involved it the crisis related to the burning of the Mandela house".  And so we really never called ourselves a Mandela Crisis Committee.  The media christened us, and we ended up ourselves calling ourselves thus.  
 Chairperson, I would like to say once we had dealt with this matter of the house, which meant talking to leaders that night, and I remember up to two o'clock in the night we were knocking at peoples' houses to make sure that no violence happens in the community.  And the next thing that we did was then to look at how we restore the house to the state in which it was before because the community was angry about it, and we got involved in a process of doing that and the community assisted us in that regard.  I just want to say that this Committee was purely meant for that purpose, and what made us to stay longer is because the reconstruction of the house and repairs took longer, and we had to also take care of the accounts and the security arrangements which needed to be done at that particular time.  
 We'd like to also submit, Chairperson, because of that that other issues arose affecting the family, and because we were close at that time in dealing with the issues involving the family, we then were drawn in various other issues like the Robert Brown controversy you'll remember during those days and Mr Mandela's illness - I remember that Dr Beyers Naude was the one who wrote a letter on our behalf to President Botha during that time on that particular matter, and various other matters which arose.  
 One of those matters has to do with this alleged kidnapping of young people from the Orlando West Methodist church.  May I just say, Chairperson, that in the nature of the type of people we brought together, they were not always all together in dealing with specific aspects, and the submission does indicate that, but everybody else did so on behalf of the collective and acted in the absence of others, and the Commission will recognise that in the submission, and for that reason we are going to have a number of people then speaking on the specific issues.  I just want to say that, when the alleged kidnapping and accusations about sexual abuse were made, there was a concern in the community about where the young people were, whether they were okay, et cetera.  And we happened to be the people who were talked to say, can you deal with this matter?  And so we dealt with it by visiting the family and the submission, it's quite clear about the details there discussed with the family.  We were allowed to meet some of those boys who were there during that time, and at that time the only person we had not seen was Stompie. 
 And, Chairperson, we do submit that questions were directed to the young people who were alleged to have been kidnapped, and the answers they gave us were, no, they were not kidnapped.  We asked them whether in fact they were beaten or not, assaulted or not assaulted.  They said, no, they were not assaulted.  And you will see from our submission in paragraph 26 that, when members of the committee pressed the young people about apparent injuries which were seen from them, they denied they were actually ever assaulted and they said that they incurred those injuries, I mean they suffered those injuries by falling from trees, and that was the answer they gave at that particular moment.  We asked about the whereabouts of Seipei Stompie, and whether or not Stompie was assaulted.   They replied that they did not know of his whereabouts.   They all told the committee that at no stage were they assaulted while they were at the Mandela residence.  
 After this assessment, the committee was of the view that it would be wise to persuade Mrs Mandela to let the leadership of the community to take over responsibility for the youth instead of her keeping them because of the allegations which were made.   The committee also considered the Mandela Football Club as a security risk to Mrs Mandela and her family, as the committee strongly suspected that the club was infiltrated by elements of the apartheid security establishment.   As a result, the committee advised that the club members be removed from Mrs Mandela's residence, and that alternative arrangements be made for her security.  On the 24th January 1989, I then left the country on a mission which was involving the WCC, the World Council of Churches.  On the day of my departure I raised on  behalf of the committee with the Mandela lawyers to convey an urgent confidential message to Mr Mandela in prison to apprise him about that situation, as well as to ask him to intervene to resolve the crisis.  Basically what we were trying to do was to get the club out there because we believed there was a problem there, and Mama believed that she's a social worker, these children are needy, she can't get them out of the house, and we were concerned about her security and various other issues that were involved in it, and in particular we then indicated the aspects which we thought Mr Mandela could help us in.  In the same way we also at the same time, around the same time, after I had left, communicated with Mr Tambo, the then president of the ANC, to assist us in dealing with this matter because it was a complicated matter as people who were there were members of Umkhonto weSizwe, some of them, and therefore we thought it would be helpful for the ANC to be involved in assisting in this regard.   
 Chairperson, a report was sent to Mr Tambo, and after that report a public statement was made, and all those documents are attached there, and members of the committee will speak on these matters.  But on my return, which will conclude my submission now, and I will ask members of the committee to speak on this, on my return, Chairperson, on the morning of Saturday the 18th February 1989, I received a call from Mr Tambo, the then president of the African National Congress. In this call Mr Tambo expressed his concern about the continuing reports of missing children.  At that time, I think, it was Cebekhulu who was still unaccounted for as far as the public was concerned, and asked me to visit Mrs Mandela and ask her to hand over Cebekhulu to myself so that we can in fact say to the public here he is, he is alive, et cetera.  And Mr Tambo had talked to Mrs Mandela at that time, and so when I went in that discussion had already happened, and after a long discussion, which was made difficult because of the reports to President Tambo which was then made public by the newspaper media now those few days before I went to visit - oh, the same Sunday before I visited Mrs Mandela.  It was difficult because there was a view that reports were sent in without consultations, and we had very serious discussions about it, but after those discussions we then agreed that we would then get Cebekhulu, who was then handed over to me, and I went to the press and announced that in fact he was there, and I took him to the hospital because at that time he was showing indications of ill-health which required medical attention.  
 And in conclusion the attention of this Commission is once more drawn to the statement made by this very committee in 1992 which we annexed as Annexure B.   That statement was made because there were certain allegations about the committee, and that there was knowledge of certain issues which the committee had not declared, and we made that statement.  We called again the collective, although it didn't exist as a collective of that nature, and reviewed the events of the past and wrote that statement, and that's the closest to the events at that particular time.   And the second report of course is the one that was sent to Mr O.R.Tambo.  The committee also stands ready to elaborate orally on all these issues contained in our main submission, as well as the documents annexed hereto.  And I'm going at this stage, Chairperson, to ask Mr Sidney Mufamadi to speak on some of the issues.