Special Hearings — Political Party Recalls — UNKNOWN

UNKNOWN: Yes, I indeed yes. Let me say that if you look at a lot of the assassinations of high profile people what would happen as part of that plot is that a story would be prepared beforehand to explain the killings. You see some of the evidence now with regard to the Mxenge case. Let us look at the possibility of saying that Mxenge was misusing money that he had got from the ANC from Lusaka as a result of which the ANC got angry as a result of which it killed him. You heard the story of Joe Qlabe(?), Joe Qlabe was assassinated in Harare. The Citizen four days after Joe was assassinated, the Citizen carried a story, an editorial in which they said Joe Qlabe had quarrelled with Nelson Mandela in Robben Island and had joined the Tambo faction of the ANC, and when he came out of jail and into exile, Joe Qlabe, that is why he was able to progress so quickly into senior positions of the ANC because he belonged to the Tambo faction.
Now the Mandela faction was very concerned about this as a result of which the Mandela faction killed Joe Qlabe. That was the Citizen four days after the assassination.
Of course we were all puzzled as to how the Citizen knows all of these intimate facts about all of this. The Zimbabwean police officer who was doing that investigation was a man called Varkevisser. Varkevisser, I know some of this because we had to work with them to try to get to the bottom of this, Varkevisser says to us, when two of us were sent in from Lusaka to work with the police on this, Varkevisser says we know that on Robben Island there was a division between Joe Qlabe and Nelson Mandela. Varkevisser relates the same story, we didn't know at that point of this article in the Citizen editorial. He repeats this whole story and says therefore this thing as the CID, the Zimbabwe CID really the leads that they will seek to pursue are leads about a conflict within the ANC.
Then a Captain in the Zimbabwe Army gets arrested for spying for the South African secret services. Varkevisser is still the investigator. Varkevisser takes this Captain from Chikurubi Prison, maximum security one morning for further interrogations and they take off to the east of Zimbabwe, board a light plane and fly to South Africa because Varkevisser was an agent of the South African Special Branch. So Joe Qlabe is killed by the regime, a story is prepared, it's fed to the Zimbabwean investigating officer who happens to be a South African agent of South African Special Branch, it's put into the Citizen to convince the public this is what the truth is and carried in an editorial, not a newspaper report, the editor himself puts all these things there. So the package is prepared. Joe is killed as a result of an internal fight. I am saying you will find in all of these major cases of assassination of this kind that the assassins would also prepare a story.
The story was prepared for instance about the assassination of Ruth First, that it was done by Joe Slovo because he was dissatisfied about their marriage or something. So I wouldn't be surprised at all that this is the same case with regard to all these things that are said about the death of Chris.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much. Hlengiwe.

MS MKHIZE: Thank you Chairperson. I just want us to go back to the ANC conflict with Inkatha Freedom Party. Much as we accept that there was an element of the third force as the Premier has said, I just wanted to look at whether there are any other factors which might have contributed to this which the ANC should have had control over, like the culture of intolerance within the organisation; lack of a human rights culture, so I just want us to look internally at what else might have contributed to an escalation of violence over years between these two parties besides the third force.