Special Hearings — Political Party Recalls — UNKNOWN

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: No they would not continue to happen. Yes we gave crash courses. There's one of two ways that you could choose to go but we went across the board. We took out people for training, but the necessities of the struggle required that they needed to be turned round quicker because if a person had stayed long outside the country they had lost contact with the conditions on the ground. So we had to turn them around first. But if you move towards crash courses you have to send in more of the leadership figures to be in command on the ground, and our record shows that that's a direction in which the ANC was working. But in general what we were drawing attention to in this paragraph is that crash courses were given both outside and inside the country and they too differed in the calibre of what was given.
We have indicated the other type of problem that a unit comes in, begins to operate in the country, it needs a support base. It utilises a person to drive today but in three months time, as a result of that performance, the person is given phased training, and it depends at which point in the person's training something happens. So training is not a terminal process when you are looking at that situation.
I actually believe that Comrade Chris Hani in his response on the question of necklacing states a very interesting proposition. In principle there were developments at home which we did not condemn, because he said we have a problem. When something happens in the country which appears, at that time he stated it more categorically in the context of it, as
"....something devised by the oppressed people to defend themselves against repression. How do you exercise your political responsibility and your leading role?".
We had to do that by first looking at the problem, getting reports and discussing it with our cadres inside the country by long roots of communication, to get that understanding of the problem and then to discuss it through.
But in the case of the necklace, for example, a point was reached where President Tambo personally chose to meet a very important delegation who had gone to the Children's Conference in Harare, to meet the people from home at all levels to specifically address them on this problem, and to say this is a form of action that we need to desist from. So we took steps. We took steps in different forms, first quietly which would never be observed, but one thing we did, we did not want to abandon the role that fell on us as the leading political organisation of this country to guide the people in the struggle.

CHAIRPERSON: Hanif.

MR VALLY: Thank you Archbishop. I still want to tackle this issue of necklacing. We in the TRC have been told a number of times by people who have made presentations to us that a certain climate was created by the ANC which condoned the practice of necklacing. Examples give to us, for example, was the statement by Mr Tim Ngubane, the ANC representative to the United States, 10th of October 1985, I quote,
"We want to make the death of collaborators so grotesque that people will never think of it".
Statement made on the 13th of April 1986 by Mrs Winnie Madikezela-Mandela, and I quote
"Together with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country".
Statement made by Mr Alfred Nzo, 14th of September 1986, and I quote
"Whatever the people decide to use to eliminate those enemy elements is their decision. If they decide to use necklacing we support it".
The practice of necklacing was later outrightly condemned. I am not sure of the exact date, I think late 1986 or early 1987 by the then President Oliver Tambo of the ANC.
The question remains, why did it take the ANC so long to condemn the practice of necklacing? We have been given figures by General Magnus Malan, for example, where he says there were 406 people necklaced between 1984 and December 1989. We've also got a number of applications for amnesty by ANC members who were involved in necklacing in the 1980's.
And there's a quote in one amnesty application, because of the climate created around the issue of necklacing, because there wasn't an outright condemnation of this method, and I quote
"As beginners in the struggle against apartheid we had a copycat mind whereby we used acts which were used by other comrades in the late eighties, acts of necklacing, when we thought it was the right way of dealing with culprits".
I am going to add one more bit to this question because - then we can move in bigger chunks forward. There is an argument to be made that a just war encompasses two elements, not just the end result which must be just, but the means to that end result must also be just. If necklacing was at any stage part of the struggle doesn't it, in itself, defeat the idea of a just war? Thank you.