Special Hearings — Armed Forces Hearings — 1997-10-10

MARY BURTON: Thank you Chairperson.  My question is prompted really by my experience serving on the Human Rights Violations Committee and working our way towards making findings because we find that there's blurring of a distinction between the population as a whole and combatants, sometimes raises questions in our minds
when we look at the whole question of finding people to be violators, perpetrators of human rights abuses and also for those whose rights were violated.  Are they victims?  Are they also legitimate targets of the operatives of the State?  I take Mr Kasrils example for example of the 800 homes of policemen attacked between I think it was '84 and '86 and it's a story which we hear often in all parts of the country.  
 Now among the attackers there might be some trained personnel or there might be local people who were mobilised into a unit or there might be local people simply motivated by their own political experience, their own experience of living in that area, their own political awareness of the mass resistance that was happening in the country, but probably not trained, not anticipating what the consequences might be of their actions, if they are shot or killed or injured are they not victims of the situation as much as they are of the action taken against them?  Are they combatants?  Are they victims?  
 How do we find in these situations where the distinction is so blurred?

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: I think that you've got to - the question of victim or perpetrator is a very difficult one because it keeps shifting and it's tempting to want to go to the original cause or the original sin, but it doesn't answer the question completely.
 I think General Ismail made a very interesting point.   The regime's forces would hear that there's a problem in this township, maybe people are not paying rent or they are demonstrating at the rent office, but using its understanding that that could not be normal activity by people, it must be incitement by some agitators, and using this spectre of the ANC as a foreign, communist dominated terrorist force there must be an agitator amongst them.  What they did was to go and bomb them all. Now what it does then, if you ask victim, perpetrator, combatants, I think there is a problem there if people went to the rent office protesting against having to pay rent, there's no way, Chairperson, that we can caste them into the combatant role.  It's a legitimate right to protest.   So no way can we just put combatant therefore and shift it to a military terminology.
 But what they did, as General Ismail says, is go and bomb all of them.  But worse for something that happens in Sebokeng they go and bomb Gaberone.  So it's not even those people that are involved on the rent boycott that are attacked and bombed it's somebody else in another country. That gives us some bearing to this problem.
 The other side of it also, is that Mr Goosen has been asking me by looking at the statements made in 1985 by the President after Kabwe, let's look at what we were consistently saying even after 
Kabwe as we mobilised for people to stand up and fight and engage in people's war.   1987, January 8 statement, and this I must explain Chairperson, January 8 statements were always major statements of the ANC, guiding the entire national liberation struggle.  Activists inside and outside the country, people opposed to the system would look at it carefully, what is it's guide, January '87 the statement says:
"Our combatants must continue to distinguish themselves from the apartheid (...indistinct) forces by the bravery of its combatants, its dedication to the cause, its refusal to act against civilians both black and white".
That is in our submission page 53, the first one.
" '88 August - The National Executive.  The ANC..."
again a public statement to the people -
"The ANC hereby underscores that it's contrary to our policy to select targets whose sole objective is to strike at civilians".
So it's not just one statement at Kabwe. 
 But if you look at the other side what it was doing, every form of protest was cast in the mode of an MK operation inciting the masses and therefore attack the masses.  That's the mindset that will give us a chance to work through this problem and realise that 
it's not just the original sin problem, it's the dynamics of the situation that has to be accepted, and then challenged in terms of the interpretation that the apartheid regime's forces put forward.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Maharaj can I just take this one step further.  General Viljoen was before this panel earlier this week and in the course of his presentation he made a very strong point, which we have been skirting around, that the security forces had no alternative but to step up their attacks, if you like, on the - flowing from the attacks which they interpreted and in the townships and he used this phrase, which is not his, it's an ANC phrase I think, but you can correct me if I am wrong, he said
"That the call to make the country ungovernable led to the destruction of schools, churches, shops, houses, people being killed and/or injured and as a result of that the security forces had no alternative but to move in and to oppress or suppress the uprising as you have described it".
Do you want to comment on that?

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: Well I have great respect for General Viljoen as a military strategist but it illustrates, very graphically, the problem in looking at this apartheid history of our country.  It is looking at the mandate given to the security forces and taking a political problem and seeing it as a security problem, solely.  That is why he is simply a military leader not a guerilla leader.  He doesn't bring humanity into the reckoning.  He hides behind that humanity.
 That raises a very interesting problem, because it may be that General Viljoen put their problem that way because they are betrayed by their political leaders, because the political leaders should always be explaining to the security forces how they should be acting in terms of a constitution and in terms of human rights.  But the regime never gave them that guidance, and where it did it told them blacks have no human rights.
 The destruction of schools didn't start with the call of the ANC to make the country ungovernable.  The shops were burnt, councillors were killed long before the ANC made its ungovernability call.  Now General Viljoen, by casting it in pure military terms, and removing the political dynamics cannot see the chicken in the egg.  That's pure simple rationalisation, denuding himself of any humanity when he acted as a military leader, and that's very unfortunate for our country.
 Chairperson then I can take you chapter and verse, dates, from Sebokeng and before, where people in their anger spontaneously seeing many of the institutions and buildings as symbols of apartheid and of oppression, destroyed them.  Where they were forced to study Afrikaans, not their language and then compelled in the schools and that was one of the major and immediate sparks of the '76 uprising.  That's long before the ANC made the call for ungovernability.  
 But he takes ungovernability and very opportunistically makes it the cause of that destruction.  And then having made it the cause of that destruction says they had no option but to save that property and to stop the deaths.  It's completely wrong, it doesn't stand up to the facts.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Modise.

MR MODISE: Thank you Chairperson.  I think General Verwoerd, ugh General Viljoen (laughter), pardon me, I think General Viljoen should have gone back to his masters and said to them, give the people their freedom and then there will be no reason for ungovernability.  That's what he should have done.