Special Hearings — Trojan Horse Hearings — 1997-05-20

CHRIS EVERSON: As I recall, they were quite large cardboard boxes or wooded boxes, not unsimilar to the boxes that were used on the Trojan Horse operation.
 I didn't really put two and two together at the time, which looking back now, I consider it rather stupid, but it was only after the incident became known as the Trojan Horse that I cast my mind back to that incident and realised that that is precisely what we witnessed that day.
 The day of the Trojan Horse was the same day as most others for us.  We lived in this rather strange situation where we were normally staying in a hotel on the far side of the mountain and getting up in the mornings and getting into our car and driving to this side of the mountain and sort of dropping into situations of something completely different from where we had woken up and we spent the day running around and dodging things and generally being scared out of our minds and hoping for the sun to go down so that we can go back to that side of the mountain and have a beer.
 On that particular day we were responding to some - we all carried pagers and we were often paged and notified of incidents taking place at various parts of the Flats and other areas and on this particular day we responded to an incident in Grassy Park.
 We all hurtled down there, there was a number of journalists there and TV crews, including two crews from CBS, the network that I represented.
 The other crew was a cameraman by the name of Vim de Vos and his sound recordist, Anton van der Merwe, who - Vim de Vos was actually shortly thereafter expelled from South Africa.  He wasn't a citizen from this country, he was a Dutch citizen.
 We were at Grassy Park and there was the usual scene going on with kids and stones and caspers and policemen firing rubber bullets, tear gas and I was in the vicinity of another journalist when I heard this pager go off saying that there was trouble in Thornton Road.
 Which was not unusual, there was usually trouble in Thornton Road or Belgravia Road or this area, of one description or the other.  But since no one really responded to it, I decided to - my sound man and I got into our car, first of all informing the other CBS crew what we were doing and we headed off to Athlone.  I can remember we drove down from Klipfontein Road, down Thornton Road and actually through the crowd of people who were gathered on the scene and we travelled some distance further on and got out of our vehicles and set up the camera on a tripod.  
 We were in those days, the foreign press and - not only the foreign press but the press in general, were blamed for instigating a lot of scenes, you know setting situations up and people responding to cameras and throwing stones as a result of cameras being at a scene, so we were quite cognisant of that and we were some distance away to make sure that we were there because of the incident and not the other way around.
 We filmed a number of vehicles going passed us and it seemed there was a crowd of - oh, I don't really remember, the crowd is maybe 60 or 80 people of which a small sections were throwing stones at vehicles that were driven either by Whites or vehicles that were government owned.
 Obviously government owned, like I can recall a vehicle going passed, it was a yellow vehicle, it was road workers of some description, they were sitting underneath a little canopy at the back and that vehicle was stoned and we filmed it as it went by us.
 And then a few other vehicles went through and got the same sort of treatment and then this yellow truck approached from behind us, went passed, had these boxes on the back, it was a South African Railways truck and it had travelled down Thornton Road, away from us, towards Klipfontein Road.  It went through the crowd and was unmolested, nobody threw a stone at it and I thought, I remember thinking that was rather remarkable because it was clearly a Railways truck and they every other vehicle that had been apparently government owned, was stoned.
 But this one wasn't and it continued down Thornton Road into the bottom and we remained at the scene and a short while later I saw the vehicle coming back down the road towards us, from way off.  I have got an extended lens on my camera, so I can flick a little switch and I can focus a great distance away and I saw the vehicle coming towards us.
 There was only one person apparently in the vehicle, I had quite a close up shot of its windscreen as you may have seen the pictures.  Just prior to that, arriving back, my colleague  Wim de Vos and his sound recordist also arrived at the scene, stood on the little verandah of the shop on the corner of the road.
 And I filmed the vehicle coming towards and sure enough the stones flew at the vehicle, and the windscreen shattered and somebody was hiding below the dashboard,jumped up with a gun and I presumed (indistinct) all these policemen jumped out of the boxes and started firing, apparently pretty indiscriminately around.
 My colleague had another angle, he was on a verandah and he was filming it from a different angle so quite strangely there were two of us from the same network at the scene.
 After it was all over, I can remember walking around.  I can't really recall my state of mind, but I remember standing on the hand or the leg on one of the victims who was laying on the side of the road and I was - I guess I was a bit dazed by it all and I didn't see him and I stood and the police then came and chased us all away or we had to step back.
 We filmed all the aftermath and the other crew that we were with, took the video tape to the airport and shipped it off to Johannesburg where it was broadcast that night on our network.
 And obviously with quite a significant impact.  My sound recordist a little while after this incident, we were both arrested at a scene at UWC, Nick de la Kaza, this is and we were both locked up for a while and it was established that they had some problem with Nick de la Kaza's work permit and he was then expelled from South Africa, after being held in jail for a couple of nights.
 And I then teamed up with another sound man by the name of Kenny Garrity who joined me here in Cape Town.  The 1996 the following year, I don't remember the month, but the two of us - things had quieten down somewhat during that period and we were driving around this Athlone Mannenberg area and I noticed a blue vehicle with tarpaulins on the side and two White guys driving this vehicle and I followed it for a little while, found it a little strange.
 They looked like policemen, short hair and looked like blue sort of tops on and followed it around for a while and it behaved very erratically, it drove across the highway unto the other side, Heideveld Ii think it is and turned corners, seemingly going nowhere and we followed it from about 100 metres away and followed it for about an hour,  back and forth over the highway through all the areas that were notoriously areas where there had been trouble previously.
 Eventually we followed it to Mannenberg police station where we witnessed it driving into the police station and we stopped our car where we could see through the gates of the police station, as you are able to and saw all these policemen jump out of the back of the blue truck with weapons, it looked like shotguns.
 So it just appeared to me that it was still exactly the same sort trap which was trying to be set again, you know, having been - it struck as really quite outrageous considering the reaction of the Trojan Horse in October of 1985.
 We tried to get film of it all later on, there is a block of flats next to the police station, and we thought that if we got onto the top or onto one of the windows, we could film into the Mannenberg police station and actually get recorded on tape, but we discovered that all the police lived in that block of flats, so we didn't get in to there.
 We didn't get into that building unfortunately.  I didn't see it again, but it was three occasions where I am quite certain that the Trojan Horse modus operandi was applied.
 With the obvious results of the one in October 1985, but the other one, there was someone injured at the very least and perhaps killed, and the third one, the one that we witnessed, didn't come to anything.