Special Hearings — Caprivi Hearings — 1997-08-06

MR LYSTER: 3A offensive capacity referred to in subsequent military documentation.  In short, it is my submission that the references to an offensive capacity and offensive actions refer to an ability to carry out pro-active actions against enemy targets.  This resulted in the committal of an unquantifiable number of extra-judicial killings.  It is my further submission that it is not only those who carried out the ground who are responsible, but those who facilitated the launching of the operation in the first place.  So my submission will accordingly highlight the roles of those who authorised its provision and those who requested it in the first place.  It is plain to see that these politicians anticipated that the supplying of an offensive unit together with arms and ammunition to a civilian organisation involved in an on-going violent conflict would result in attacks being launched against the political opponents of the organisation in question.  Although the South African Defence Force had withdrawn support for offensive operations by the end of the 1980s and this was because the military feared exposure of its own role following the arrests of trainees who were involved in offensive actions, it was always an aim of Operation Marion to provide Inkatha with a capacity of self-sufficiency to enable it to act independently of the SADF.  Now the security concerns that I have referred to led ultimately to the placing of most of the placing of most of the trainees into the KwaZulu Police during mid 1989 and hit squad activities continued under the cover of the KwaZulu Police through into the 1990s.  The Esikaweni hit squad which operated during the early 1990s is a case in point of this capacity of self-sufficiency being

MR LYSTER: /implemented

MR LYSTER: 3A implemented under the cover of the KwaZulu Police and while the political leaders of the South African Government and Inkatha may not have been aware of the individual actions carried out, I believe they are accountable for the murders and the atrocities that flowed from this project.  It will no doubt argued by representatives of those implicated that the "offensive" passages to which I have referred to earlier and I will come back to, ought to be excised from consideration, because they are out of place, a misinterpretation of what was actually meant or alternatively they are fabrications.  As far as I'm aware, the authenticity of these documents have never been seriously disputed.  The authors confirm their contents.  It is only their interpretation which has been the subject of much debate.  It will almost certainly be argued at this forum that the "offensive" term in Marion documents ought to be read as "protective" and that is in fact the view that was accepted by the Court in the trial of Magnus Malan and others.  In my view that was an incorrect finding.  While the offensive actions envisaged were aimed at preventing or stopping the ANC and UDF from carrying out attacks on Inkatha members, they were intended to be in the form of initiative-taking actions, in other words pre-emptive strikes.  Now seen from the perspective of Inkatha and the State, this objective can be described as "protective".  That, however, does not make such actions legitimate in terms of the law, no matter how noble the overall cause and I believe that is what the learned Judge in the Mbambo matter was referring to.  Those urging the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to let matters rest with the HUGO Judgment, may also wish

MR LYSTER: /the

MR LYSTER: 3A the Commission to rely on judicial findings of say the Harms Commission.  In my view these findings are not compelling and I would suggest that the Commission devote most of its energies in evaluating the enormous quantity of documentary and oral evidence before it.  Before dealing with Operation Marion in greater detail, I intend to set the scene or, as one of my learned friends said yesterday or the day before, to set the stage, to explain how projects such as Marion and others came into being.  Marion did not take place in a vacuum.  It was part and parcel of the State's counter revolutionary programme that was in place at the time and it is necessary to examine this background in some detail.  So I now move to the chapter called "Context" and under the sub-heading, "Counter Revolutionary Strategies".  During the 1980s the State Security Council, which I am going to refer to as the SSC and its superior and subordinate bodies devised several strategies for deployment against the UDF and the ANC.  The government adopted the guiding strategies of Counter Revolutionary Warfare principles.  These principles involved tactics aimed at destroying or annihilating the insurgents and revolutionaries while winning the hearts and minds of the population.  Key tactics included the use of terror in certain circumstances and the establishment of "counter guerilla" or "middle groups" to mobilise politically and to act violently against revolutionary forces.  Now this is evidence from a number of documents.  A State Security Council meeting held in July 1985 a number of Counter Revolutionary Warfare principles were adopted under item 8.  All these principles coincided with "lessons" and

MR LYSTER: /principles

MR LYSTER: 3A principles set out by writers such as General C A Fraser of the SADF and J J McCuen to whom I will refer to shortly.  During 1986 P W Botha, the State President at the time, circulated a document to all those involved within the Forces and the government in the counter revolutionary struggle.  The document was a paraphrasing of General Fraser's paper titled, "Lessons learnt from past revolutionary wars".  I shall refer to this document as the Fraser document.  Now both the Botha document and the Fraser document referred to the careful weighing up of the use of force before it is used.  Fraser's original document which was uplifted from the Defence Force's own records, specifically related the use of force to acts of terrorism in this particular chapter.  Terrorism was referred to as a particularly appropriate weapon since it aims directly at the inhabitant.  Now Fraser was at pains to caution against the indiscriminate use of terror.  He argued that it was counter productive in most circumstances, but he did put up one exception and given the value of terror in certain circumstances, he said, "if you are going to use it", and I quote -

MR LYSTER: "... the use of terrorism by government forces must be decided upon at the highest level, and it must be so applied as to avoid it boomeranging".

MR LYSTER: Now just moving on to another aspect of counter revolutionary war, the Botha document also referred to a classic counter revolutionary write up by the name of J J McCuen, an American.  His book was paraphrased and distributed within military and security structures.  In that particular paraphrasing there was a little chapter

MR LYSTER: /referred

MR LYSTER: 3A referred to as "Counter Guerillas", or the creation of "Counter Guerillas".  The development - and I quote directly from McCuen here ... (intervention)

MR LYSTER: "The development to of a counter-revolutionary guerilla force which is employed according to guerilla tactics to annihilate revolutionary guerillas and take control over the population".