Special Hearings — Political Party Recalls — 1997-05-16

GEN VILJOEN: Yes very much so, in fact there is no doubt that the part of the more conservative support group of the Afrikaner Volksfront, because of the mere fact that we were generals, expected the generals to make the war.  In fact many of them told us that look here, leave the politics alone and leave the negotiations alone now and get on with the job of making the war.  But they were uninformed people of this kind of war and fortunately we've had the experience to guide them away from this dangerous attitude.

UNKNOWN: The questions that follow are not intended at all to be requesting you to table with the Truth Commission the balance sheet of your party but it's just to enable us to know the workings of your party. If a different meaning is inferred from my questions, my apology in advance.
 My question is, how was this mass-action campaign being funded?  How was it funded?

GEN VILJOEN: The mass action campaign that you now refer to was not my Freedom Front Party, it was in the days of the Afrikaner Volksfront.  Part of our strategy was, as I say, to waken up the Afrikaner as to the threat being developed, developing against him. We had many meetings, a few hundred meetings countrywide and in those meetings we had told the Afrikaner that this is a new organisation that we've created and the Afrikaner became so enthusiastic about this that they contributed considerably in this regard. But we were never rich and we never had a lot of money to play around with, we had no outside sponsors, for example from international sources or from big business within South Africa.  It all came from the supporters of the Volksfront themselves.

UNKNOWN: General I want to ask if the funding that you got in this mass campaign ever, at any stage, included, with respect to you again, stolen funds as it was orchestrated then?  I may hasten  to mention to you that this information comes from an amnesty application by one of your members, but allow me to refuse to disclose the name as you know the parameters of our operations.  Would you say you didn't have some kind of stolen money that had to fund this?

GEN VILJOEN: I would easier say yes to the question about stolen arms and stolen explosives and so on, but certainly not for stolen money.  No, I know of no such - it was certainly not part of our directive.  The point I want to make is this is completely foreign to the make-up of the Afrikaner people.  We will suffer but I don't think we will steal money for the purpose of this.

UNKNOWN: So if it emerges.

CHAIRPERSON: General Groenewald.

GEN GROENEWALD: Could I just perhaps add that the cost of the mass action campaign was very low.  None of the members, for example the four generals, received any salaries.  None of the officials received any salaries.  There was basically the offices that had to be paid for and a bit of advertising.
 I would also like to stress that membership paid R10,00 to be a member and I know at one stage we had at least 100,000 members, so this is basically what funded, ja, the whole campaign.  Oh I might add there was one fund, Pieter Neethling Fonds, from which we received R40 000.

GEN VILJOEN: Maybe I can just add to this that the good about the Volksfront was the enthusiasm of the people.  We never told them that there would be a war.  I think many expected this to eventually end in a war.  I have an idea that they probably saw this developing in the same direction as the Anglo-Boer War and many of them you know would see us mounting horses you know with biltong and rusks in the knapsack and off we go to war.
 But I have consistently reserved the right to decide on violent action myself and I did so because we, few generals, were the only people that really had enough knowledge about the effects of war, especially within the revolutionary climate that at that stage existed in our country.  We were the only people that really could judge this and therefore we reserved the right.  So the decisions to go for war or to go for violent action all came from me.
 Can I just explain one thing very well. You must not confuse the Volksfront with the Freedom Front.   Do you know the difference?

UNKNOWN: Yes General I do.

GEN VILJOEN: Right, thank you.

UNKNOWN: Perhaps on a final note General, as you stated in your submission, you know when you made mention of having been tired of negotiations and when you decided now to take the stick that was also oraclely used by the other liberation movements, I'm on that part, that is on page 22.  Are you perhaps in a position to provide us with more detailed information on the planned use of the force by the Volksfront, you know that popular stick, if it was popular?

GEN VILJOEN: Ja I will quickly do this, it's a long subject.  I want to say that you must bear in mind that we had very little time.  Remember the referendum was in 1992.  I was only summoned to come to the assistance of the Afrikaners in March 1993, and I was not trained for this kind of thing.  This was completely new to me too.  I was called from behind the cows, and saddled with the idea of negotiation of a constitutional affairs - I was not as trained as my colleague next to me on constitutional law and we had to quickly come in.  And the four generals decided on strategies, including the stick strategy.   Whether we were going to use the stick is not really important.  If we had to then it was available.  But you had to have the stick, because I always tell the story of the wolf and the lamb.  The lamb arguing with the wolf and being rather cheeky and then the wolf killed the lamb, and the lesson behind this
is if you were in a lamb position you don't argue with the wolf without a stick.  Now this is the point.  We Afrikaners could not argue without a stick and we were arguing because we were also negotiating.  
 The ANC is a good example of this.  The ANC could swing the whole situation by going into mass action, and they did.  When they left CODESA situation because of dissatisfaction they went out and they went for mass action, and they forced the National Party into certain concessions after that.  This is what I call a stick.  So we had to develop a stick too, it was not as big as the ANC's stick but it was an important stick.
 Now how did we develop this.  We had voluntarily workers working through the whole of South Africa, covering the whole of South Africa working for months without a stop, leaving all their private businesses alone, organising a possible rise of the assistance that we could need for this kind of thing.  This is how we operated.  And it is these people for which I felt very sorry having to make the decision not to make war, but it was a complete collapse to their enthusiasm, but I had to make that decision because, as I said, in making such a decision you can't be emotional.  You have to clinically look at all the facts and you have to make the right decision.  
 In making that decision I also considered the Anglo-Boer War and I weighed up the devastation of that war compared to what was achieved, and I weighed up the effects that that war had on the Afrikaner people.  Amongst others the 26,000 women and children that we have lost.  And I realised that if we had gone for this kind of war in South Africa the destruction could have been worse than the Anglo Boer War.  And I am very happy to say I think the alternative will work.  I just hope that we can speed it up a bit.