Amnesty Hearings — Klerksdorp — 1999-05-11

MR RUDOLPH: I am not an electrical engineer but I do understand how electricity works.  Allow me then to just start at the beginning.  At the offices of the AWB, there was a person, a certain Mr Stoekie.  In the court case Mr Stoekie alleged that a discussion between the leader and another leader was heard regarding the lights which had to be switched off.
	I personally was confronted regarding a discussion six months later when a reporter asked me how I saw the struggle of the Boer people in future and I said that we would have to do it not from the public stage but under cover of darkness as liberation fighters do it throughout the world.  This was held against me in the court case that I was supposed to have put off the lights.  I know nothing about putting off the lights, but the man who said that he was an enemy of Mr Terre'blanche and he heard him talk to another member regarding putting off the lights, was as far as I know also an informer of the South African Police, because what had happened was that the police went to the power station and waited there for people, but as fate would have it a funeral procession from the Transkei passed by at that specific moment when the struggle was erupting and they entered Ventersdorp and when they saw these masses of white people - because you know this is the problem we have in South Africa, I hope this will disappear that white people are afraid of black people and black people are afraid of white people, and when these poor people entered Ventersdorp and they saw these masses of white people, then one of these taxis drove into a power box.  At one stage - the police were there at that stage and Mr Terre'blanche, accused number one, went there to see if he could rectify it and see why the lights were off, but that this fuse box had been knocked over and resulted in an electrical power failure.  He was unaware of this and while he was there he was found there by policemen who asked him what he was doing there and in the process arrested him.
	So, if there was a calculated attempt at putting the lights off I cannot tell you, but I can tell you that there were circumstances which indicate that the knocking down of the fuse box could have been the cause of the short-circuit or power failure.
   I can also just explain that the person who worked at the office, Mr Stoekie, was also the man, the first witness who was called by the State as an accomplice, and he testified before the magistrate in that hearing that I wanted to shoot down the helicopter of Mr F W de Klerk and that the meeting had stopped me from doing this.  While General Malan who was not in favour of me testified that no-one could have known that Mr de Klerk, that evening at Ventersdorp, would have arrived there in a helicopter.  I am just telling this to show to you as to what the attitude was of people that evening at Ventersdorp.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  Ms Patel?

MS PATEL: Thank you Honourable Chairperson.  If you would just grant me a moment I think there is just one other point, one final point that I wanted to raise.

ADV SANDI: Sorry, Ms Patel, if I can just ask Mr Rudolph something whilst you're paging through your paper.
	Mr Rudolph you mentioned something about people who were coming from a funeral in the Transkei, was there a clash, any conflict between your group and these people who were trying to go past here, what happened?

MR RUDOLPH: Commissioner, the situation or my situation rather, was when that incident took place I had already been arrested.  So what I am now telling you is total here say, but what happened is that these people were on the way from the Transkei, with a corpse to a funeral and these masses of people, it was not near the hall where we were, they drove into them and in the process a person was knocked down and that person later died as a result of his injuries and this sparked the conflict in that process and that is how the fuse or distributor box was knocked down in the process.  It was not done on purpose.  I do not think that these people wanted to injure anybody but at seven thirty on a winter's evening in a small town, I can just imagine that if you are in that state of mind, you are on your way to a funeral, you are a black man and you enter a town where there are signs of teargas, then I would have said that I would have been worried myself.  As regards the confrontation, I cannot be of much assistance.

CHAIRPERSON: Ms Patel?

MS PATEL: Thank you Honourable Chairperson.  If I may just confirm the applicant's version that he was in fact arrested before the shooting in the subsequent accidents in which people had died had taken place, that that is in fact so that he was in fact arrested almost at the very start of this incident.  I just can't find however the ...

CHAIRPERSON: I will ask Advocate Bosman if she wants questions, you carry on looking and if you find what you want to ask you can do so later.
   Advocate Bosman, do you have any questions you would like to ask Mr Rudolph?

ADV BOSMAN: Mr Chairperson if I could just confer with you for a minute I know I ...
MACHINE SWITCHED OFF

ADV BOSMAN: Mr Rudolph, if this Committee should afford you or grant you amnesty, then we must identify the different victims of this incident.  Can I ask you to page to page 113 and 114 and then ask you whether you are able to tell us which of these victims are known to you and what their affiliation was on this specific evening.  I am not asking whether you knew them well personally, but whether you can identify them as belonging to a specific group.

MR RUDOLPH: Commissioner, I must say to you that I was given information during this hearing.  Not one of the people was known to me.  Perhaps Mr Terre'blanche can be of more assistance, but I do want to say that not one of these members or one of these people were members.  I am now firstly referring to page 113.  Those people, Messrs Badenhorst, Conradie and Koen are known to me as members of the AWB.  These were right-wingers, they were supporters of political parties etc.  On page 114 the persons who were injured testified in court and I heard about the injuries.  I do not know any of them.  My own name appears there as one who was injured.  I won't take the situation any further.
	The other people of the black people who were there and who were injured, many of them did not appear at court, so I did not have the chance to ever listen to them or to know how they had been injured.  There were people who had testified in court that they had been thrown, stones had been thrown at them, but I do not know any of them personally.  And as I say, I do not know of a single member except for myself who was a member of the AWB and who was injured there.

ADV BOSMAN: Thank you Mr Rudolph, I think you assisted us greatly.  Then there are a few things that I want to ask you just for purposes of clarity.  Did I understand you correctly that you were aware of the tension that evening?

MR RUDOLPH: You did Commissioner.

ADV BOSMAN: And that you could foresee that there would be a possible conflict.

MR RUDOLPH: Yes, we knew the police and we knew the National Party and these kinds of action.  We did envisage this, but the whole week before the meeting there were media statements from the National Party and from other organisations and the letters which came from the Town Council of Ventersdorp and which was sent to the police and the Defence Force in order to defuse this tension, but there was just no stopping it.