Special Hearings — Media Hearings — UNKNOWN

MAX DU PREEZ: Thank you, Mr Chairman.  I feel a little bit like this is an amnesty hearing and I am applicant.  I am just very glad George Bizos is not here.	Mr Chairman, I would have spoken Afrikaans, but the interpreter said that he would like the afternoon off.  We have heard over the last three days from black journalists, from white institutions and racial divides in our profession. It was high time that we as professionals talked about that, and I hope we will see a fundamental transformation from now on. I will not concentrate on this part of our history in the media, but rather what we as journalists wrote and what we broadcast and what we omitted.	May I just say one thing on this topic. Journalism where race and colour are not dominant factors is possible. It has happened.  At least among the ranks of the alternative newspapers, and it is happening. It is happening right now inside the SABC, specifically the team that I work with, the Truth Commission Special Report.  The story we have to tell and the people we tell it to are far more important than our ethnic classification.  And talking about women in journalism, as you know, the Truth Commission Special Report has always been 80% female.	I want to talk today about the experiences of Vrye Weekblad. It was founded in November 1988 as an independent Afrikaans language weekly.  I was nominally the owner of it, because nobody else wanted to put their names on that, in case of court cases, and I was also the chairman of the publishing company called Wending Publikasies, although the bank manager laughed in my face when I introduced myself as the chairperson of a company.	Vrye Weekblad closed its doors in February 1994 after it lost an expensive defamation case, and we have no money to continue. That will, that part will be the end of my submission.	The other Afrikaans journalists involved with the project knew from the start it was a highly risky undertaking, and not only financially.  But we were so deeply frustrated as journalists and citizens with the way the printed media and the SABC molly-coddled the apartheid state, and praised the total onslaught government with faint condemnation, that we felt that we simply had to do something. I believe the treatment that Vrye Weekblad got from the previous government, their security forces and the legal system, deserve to be documented.  So also the scandalous role, the mainstream papers played during the total onslaught years and beyond, to keep critical information from their ears.	Vrye Weekblad's problems started before its first edition. Its registration in terms of the Newspaper Registration Act, was held back by the then Minister of Justice, "die groot verligte" Kobie Coetzee, pending a report by the security police.  In an official SAP document marked "secret", and this is it - given to me last week - Genl Basie Smit and Maj W van der Westhuizen reported -		"The influencing awareness raising role which the Vrye Weekblad played or may play in the target white Afrikaans-speaking population must not be under-rated. Furthermore, the degree of publicity, particularly of discussions with the ANC in the first and second editions of this newspaper, indicates the political approach."They demanded not the customary R10,00 for the registration of our newspaper, but R40 000,00. They knew we had little money. 	In another secret document, Col AZB Gouws reported to Adriaan Vlok, the Minister of Law and Order -		"On all the legal options open to punish Vrye Weekblad ..."He said -		"... declaring the paper an illegal publication in terms of the Internal Security Act or seizing it in terms of the state of emergency regulations, will probably be challenged successfully in court.  But ..."He reported -		"I could be sentenced to six months for publishing the paper before the Minister had registered it." We couldn't, because he was holding it back -		"That we could be charged for publishing a picture of Nelson Mandela, that we could be charged with publishing a version of the words of a speech by a listed person, and that we could be charged with publishing a document of the Harmse Commission without its permission."He said he would discuss all this with the local Attorney-General, Klaus von Lieres, who became an intimate friend of mine later on.  We were charged with most of these in due course.  	The relevance of all this is that there was a strategic decision by the Government in 1988 that banning or closing newspapers generated too much negative publicity; a new tactic should be used against the cash-strapped so-called alternative newspapers, harass them until they are tired and bleed them dry through the judicial system.	Shortly afterwards I was convicted on the Internal Security Act for publishing an analysis of a debate at an international conference which included the position taken by the late Joe Slovo.  The magistrate was unmoved by my submission of 11 newspaper cuttings of the time, which contained similar and even direct words from Slovo's speech.	In December 1988, former State President PW Botha sued us for R200 000,00 for defamation after we exposed his links with a Mafia gangster.  The case was dropped when he had a stroke.	In February 1989 Vrye Weekblad was charged under regulation 5(b) of Proclamation R99 that we undermined the system of national conscription.  One of the charges related to a straightforward report, factual report of a statement made in court by a conscientious objector, Charles Bester.  In September 1989, six charges under the state of emergency were brought against us and in November another one.  This time our crime was that we published a paid advertisement of the reception committee advertising a legal meeting.  Other newspapers who published the same ad were not charged.	On November 17 1989, Vrye Weekblad published the extensive confessions of the former commander of the Police Death Squad at Vlakplaas, Dirk Coetzee.  My colleague then, who is again my colleague now, Jacques Pauw, spent several weeks with him, checking and cross-checking facts before we published.  Coetzee's revelations were published world-wide, but not in South Africa.  Genl Herman Stadler of the SAP denied absolutely that such a unit existed and this denial was given prominence by South African newspapers.	Afrikaans newspapers started a campaign on behalf of the police to discredit Coetzee.  	On December 17 1988 Rapport had the banner headline, screaming "Hy's hier", with a story that Coetzee was half dead on a farm near Pretoria.  Coetzee immediately faxed them a denial in his name, with his handwriting from Europe.  But Rapport never corrected this.	Beeld wrote in an editorial that one has to be mad to believe Coetzee.  The Star's reporter handling these stories, was South African Police intelligence Capt Craig Kotze, a colleague of Coetzee who knew the whole story and history of Vlakplaas. He called Coetzee a psychopath.  Coetzee phoned the Sunday Times a week after he left the country, offering to give them a full interview.  The Sunday Times declined the offer and instead gave the security police all the details he had given them. I know this, because they said this on their front page that week.	The only newspaper that joined Vrye Weekblad in its investigations were the Weekly Mail and later New Nation. The SABC was leading the discrediting campaign against Coetzee.  Yet, as far back as 1987 the SABC knew and we will broadcast this programme on Sunday night, the SABC knew about Vlakplaas, when they interviewed some askaris with balaclavas on Vlakplaas. One interviewees was Glori Sidebi, one of the most notorious Askaris.	In December 1989 Vrye Weekblad revealed that Siphiwe Mthimkulu was tortured and poisoned by the Eastern Cape security police and that he was seen in the company of policemen on 14 April 1982, the day he disappeared. All the newspapers ignored the story.  They first reported on it when this information came out in the Truth Commission, seven years later.	There is some detail about a private letter that I wrote, or a public letter that I wrote to FW de Klerk, but for the time let's just move on.	Vrye Weekblad revealed in November 1988 that Eugene de Kock was the new commander of Vlakplaas and that he had taken part in a number of murders and executions.  Like the murder of eight people at Piet Retief, and a month later, a Piet Retief policeman explained to us in detail how the murders too place. Only the Weekly Mail covered the story. It has all subsequently been confirmed in the Truth Commission and the De Kock trial.	In January 1990 police Sgt Barney Horne told Vrye Weekblad in detail of police torture, SAP support for Inkatha vigilantes who murdered UDF supporters and of the murder of activist David Mazwai whose body was dumped down an ERP mine shaft.  Silence from the mainstream newspapers.	In February 1990 Vrye Weekblad revealed that the Stonewash professor was a paid agent of the National Intelligence Service. I was charged under the Protection of Information Act and after a whole day of in camera testing by Neil Barnard, fined R7 000,00, because we revealed the identity of a secret agent. 	In May 1990 Willie van Deventer revealed the inner secrets of the Army Civil Co-operation Bureau in Vrye Weekblad, and shortly afterwards we introduced our readers to a top CCB commander, Pieter Botes.  Botes told us how he blew up Albie Sachs in Maputo in 1988, and explained the CCB's campaign against Swapo in a run-up to the independence elections.  The assassination of my friend, Anton Lubowski was part of this campaign.	The mainstream newspapers preferred not to publish or follow up any of this information, and the SABC tried to discredit it.  De Klerk's only reaction was to ask the Harmse Commission to find out if Lubowski was a spy as Magnus Malan had alleged.	Mr Chairman, while I am on the topic of Lubowski, please allow me a few remarks.  Craig Kotze sat in this chair yesterday and repeated the lies told by the former Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, that Lubowski was a spy for the military.  We have known for years that Malan was lying, but now there is proof. My colleagues, Jacques Pauw, is sitting over there, went to see Rich Verster, as I believe, Mr Chairman, you yourself did recently, in Dorchester Prison in England, in May of this year, Jacques went.  Verster was a senior spy-handler and held the rank of major in the shady military organisation called the Directorate: Covert Collection - DCC.  Verster told us he will testify in any South African court or before the Truth Commission that he was sent to Namibia in mid-1989 with a task to infiltrate and recruit Anton Lubowski as a military spy or informer, because he had an Afrikaans background.  He says he tapped Lubowski's phone and employed a well-known Namibian journalist and photographer to get close to him, and I know that this guy did get close to him.	Verster says now he tried everything, but Lubowski showed no sign that he would ever be disloyal to Swapo. On the night of Anton's assassination by the CCB, Verster was told to return to Pretoria immediately.  The military files on Lubowski were shown to him and discussed at great length at Covert Collection.  There was no piece of paper, nor any indication in the discussions that Anton had ever done any work for the South Africans.  Verster says he would come and testify that military intelligence then fabricated the documents put before the Harmse Commission of Inquiry.	It is time for Magnus Malan and people like Craig Kotze to come clean and apologise to the parents and family of Anton Lubowski.	Back to Vrye Weekblad. In 1991 a powerful bomb wrecked part of Vrye Weekblad's new town offices.  A CCB operative and later known right-winger Leonard Veenendal confessed to Maj Johan Pretorius of the then Sandton security police that he had planted the bomb.  He was never charged with it. A few months after that, attorney Bheki Mangeni was blown up in February 1991.  Vrye Weekblad published a sworn affidavit by Vlakplaas agent blaming Eugene de Kock and his men for the murder.  Total silence from the media. No action from the State.  Again, all proved true in the De Kock trial years later.	In August 1991 we published police agent Larry Barnett's confessions that he carried large amounts of money from the SAP to Inkatha and supplied them with arms. 	In June 1992 Col Don Horak, former Rand Daily Mail spy and instructing officer, exposed State Security Council dirty tricks in Vrye Weekblad. Silence from the media and denials from the State.	I heard Horak thanking me for saving his life. I am not so sure if that is a compliment.	Why is all this relevant, Mr Chairman?		My point about all the detail, is that if the mainstream newspapers and the SABC had reflected and followed up on all these confessions and revelations, every single one subsequent, every single one subsequently proved to have been true, the Government would have been forced to then, to stop, to put a stop to the torture, the assassinations and the dirty tricks. It would have saved many, many lives.  And South African citizens and politicians would not have been shocked or pretended that they are shocked at the revelations before the Truth Commission the last year.	I think the question you asked Arri de Beer I would have answered yes, absolutely.  The information was there.  De Klerk knew it, everybody knew it. It was available.  Hopefully Arri de Beer read it then.  They did not believe it, because the SABC and the Afrikaans newspapers and the English language newspapers kept on saying these are woolly-headed revolutionaries and they are Marxist and media terrorists, you cannot believe them, they hate the State, this is the total onslaught.  But the information was there as I proved.	If the mainstream South African newspapers had done what good newspapers all over the world are supposed to do, nobody today would have been able to say I did not know.  Only the so-called alternative Press lived up to this duty, and they did it with the fraction of the staff and infrastructure of the big newspapers. It suited big editors and the media bosses to look down their noses at these mavericks, these media terrorists.	I find the newspapers self-righteous indignation around the recent Denel weapons to Saudi Arabia case very interesting.  I mostly agree with them, but I do wonder where was their diligence and their commitment to the public's right to know when it was really important? I find it very, very said that the Afrikaans newspapers did not come to this media hearing.  Instead, some of the senior men issued statements and letters asking the public to honour them for their bravery in opposing the AWB and the Conservative Party. 	To my colleagues at Beeld, who wanted to come here, I am tempted to say to them "julle is goeie kamerade" (you are good comrades), but it would probably be the wrong thing to say to them.	I started my career at the Burger in 1973.  I was a member of the first editorial team which started Beeld in 1974. I was a member of their Parliamentary team. I knew how intimate and cosy their relationship was with the National Party, its police and its Defence Force. I went to their parties too. I was there when those newspapers had all the information about the Information Scandal, but had a policy to never break a story, rather to manage it afterwards, in blaming it all on Connie Mulder and Eschel Rhoodie and saving PW Botha. I was there when Johan Grosskopf was axed as editor for asking straightforward questions after 16 June 1976.  I was there when they helped cover up South Africa's presence in Angola.  	By 1982 I decided I was going to liberate myself and I joined the "giftige Engelse Pers" (poisonous English Press).  It was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, because I became the political correspondent for Tertius Myburgh and Stephen Mulholland.  	The Afrikaans Press claim now they have always been in favour of a negotiated solution. You will see it in the letter to the Truth Commission by Mr Hennie van Deventer, and had always encouraged the National Party towards this goal.	This is not true, Mr Chairman. Why then, I would want to ask them, why did they then whip up an extreme hysteria when a few dozen of us, mostly Afrikaans-speakers, went to talk to the ANC in Dakar in July 1987?  They called us Communists and useful idiots.  Well, all we wanted to do was try and break some of the ice to make negotiations more acceptable to their constituency.	If they really wanted to encourage negotiations, why did the Burger refuse to publish an advertisement of the Democratic Party propagating talks with the ANC?  They can protest as much as they want, but one truth remains, until the last few months of the PW Botha regime, Afrikaans newspapers never opposed the National Party or their security forces on any important issue.	Their argument is that they could not move too far away from their conservative Afrikaner constituency.  I have no doubt in my mind, being an Afrikaner from a conservative rural background myself, that they could have pushed much, much harder, without alienating their readers.  There has never been a viable right-wing newspaper Afrikaners could turn to.  Anyway, the Afrikaner, I again say, I was always more progressive than the Afrikaans newspapers, and maybe from what we know now, that the news room, the Afrikaans journalists have always been more progressive than their editors and their bosses.	I remember in 1973, there must have been a general election or something at that stage, we had a snap poll in the newsroom of die Burger of all things, and 80% of the journalists working for die Burger said they would for the Progressive Party. Yet, they worked for a mouthpiece of the National Party.	Actually, one only needs to ask the Afrikaans editors of the Seventies and the Eighties one question.  Beeld is today one of the most professional and respected newspapers in South Africa, making huge profits and increasing its circulation.  At the same time, it is probably one of the most progressive white newspapers in the country. Certainly, the most progressive and open-minded daily Afrikaans newspaper ever.  Why is this argument of pampering your constituency not valid now?	Let me quickly conclude with the demise of Vrye Weekblad.  The abuse of the legal system by the State continued against us.  In 1991 and 1992 three senior civil servants sued us with State aid for large amounts of money for what they called defamation.  Genls Leon Mellett and Herman Stadler - Genl Mellett who was also a former police spy on a newspaper.  Basically his complaint was that we wrote a story that he played in one of these little picture books and we called him Captain Caprivi and actually he was Captain Duiwel (Devil).  (Laughter).	That was a real part of his complaint.  We were also sued by Herman Stadler and Attorney-General Klaus von Lieres.  	In May 1992 Vrye Weekblad wanted to publish a story that it was not the ANC but a security policeman who threw a hand-grenade at Labour Party Allen Hendrickse's house, after he annoyed Chris Heunis with his swimming on a white beach.  We asked the Commissioner of Police, Johan van der Merwe, for his comment before we published the story, but he ran to the Pretoria Supreme Court and Judge De Villiers granted an interdict against us.  One of the three senior officers who applied for the interdict, was the source of the story, which has been subsequently proved totally correct.	The vendetta through the courts eventually cost Vrye Weekblad its life. He had of the Police Forensics Laboratory, Genl Lothar Neethling sued us for R1 million, after we published Dirk Coetzee's statement that Neethling had provided him and others with poison which was used to drug or kill ANC activists.	In the Rand Supreme Court Judge Johan Kriegler accepted Coetzee's version and found Neethling an unreliable witness.  He dismissed the case.  But the idea that a respected citizen and a member of the Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns could b ea killer and a liar was simply too much for the Judges of the Appeal Court.  Vrye Weekblad was ordered to pay Neethling's costs and R90 000,00 for the defamation.  The case dragged on for five years and eventually the legal costs for both sides added up to more than R2 million.  Neethling was sponsored by the taxpayer, but Vrye Weekblad had to close, faced with this bill.	Mr Chairman, the decision by the Appeal Court was one of the blackest moments in our judicial history.  There is today absolute proof from several quarters that Neethling had lied to that court.  As Judge Kriegler found, Neethling did in fact secretly prepared different kinds of poison, with the exclusive purpose of killing opponents of the Government.  The Pretoria Attorney-General has a sworn affidavit by Vlakplaas policeman Steve Bosch, in which he tells of how he fetched poisoned bottles of beer from Neethling.		The same Attorney-General has several affidavits, gathered during his investigation, into the activities of Wouter Basson and the chemical and biological warfare project that proved that Neethling told the courts blatant lies.  Damning evidence of Lothar Neethling and his poison also comes from a former colleague of Neethling and Basson, who is presently a client of attorney Brian Currin.  The Truth Commission knows who this man is.  He does not want his identity known at this stage.	Mr Chairman, but this is probably the most devastating evidence gathered against Neethling.  This is an affidavit by a former State Prosecutor, called Johan Marnewick van den Heever.  He states that he once used Neethling as an expert witness in a large fraud case and visited Neethling at the forensics laboratory.  Neethling proudly gave him a tour of the facility and gave him several demonstrations.  Then Van den Heever states:		"I was very impressed with what Neethling had achieved at the laboratory and I was very impressed with what I saw. I indicated this to him and I could see he was very proud of what he had achieved. He also in general discussed his work with me and various breakthroughs and inventions that they had achieved at the laboratory. It was in this context that he mentioned to me that the laboratory had developed a poison which could precipitate a heart attack.  He furthermore mentioned that the poison would not be traced at a post-mortem examination."Neethling had testified under oath before Mr Justice Kriegler that nothing like this ever happened in his laboratory.	Van den Heever then tells another story. I include the affidavit in my submission. He tells another story about an accident Neethling was involved in which seriously undermines his credibility as a reliable witness.  And this affidavit, and the original is in the possession of my lawyer, Carinovo.  	Mr Chairman, Vrye Weekblad was closed because of Lothar Neethling's perjury.  Lothar Neethling was indeed a kind of Dr Mengele, who experimented with different kinds of knock-out drops and poison for the use of security policemen to kill activists.  	We know some of the names of some of the people who were killed in this way.  But we don't know how many people died after drinking Lothar Neethling's poison.  He should be charged with multiple murder, perjury and fraud.  Fraud for getting our money for his lies and closing down a newspaper that could have played a very constructive role in the transformation of our society today.	I truly hope you can help me bring this man to justice.  Thank you.