Special Hearings — Political Party Recalls — UNKNOWN

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: We signed the Geneva Convention after very careful consideration in all seriousness. But Mr Chairperson we were conducting a struggle in a real situation. It was not our choice that we resorted to the armed struggle, and in the same way, to the extent what could be called by Mr Vallye "a blurring" of the lines occurred. It was against our choice.
I would like to deal with the question of the actual situation. We were a guerilla army and unlike a conventional force where planning takes place at headquarters level, our planning had to take place at the unit and individual level where decisions sometimes had to be taken on the feet. We trained our cadres to first and foremost think and act politically and not alienate those we were seeking to bring onto the side of our struggle, even in the White community. But the apartheid regime never, never till we ended the armed struggle accorded our people any treatment as prisoners of war. In fact when I went to prison in 1964 we were called just "Bandite", ordinary criminals, not even terrorists, terrorists came later. So they never accorded us prisoner of war status. They never supported any international convention.
Our cadres also had to operate in the political context where sometimes they reacted with anger as to what they saw happening to our people on the ground. And 1984 was a particularly horrendous chapter in our country where thousands of people were dealt with in the most brutal fashion.
Then the gathering of intelligence was also the responsibility, tactical intelligence was the responsibility of the units on the ground, and here particular difficulties arose. Sometimes the information was wrong but at other times the information showed that the prime military targets were located in the heart of commercial and civilian areas. I myself came into the country, the 7th Battalion headquarters is located in a residential area on the way to Johannesburg Airport, and yet it is located at a point where there is a large open ground on the fourth side and I was sorely tempted, when I looked at political circumstances in the country to sometimes deviate from my mission and attack that headquarters, even if some of the houses were raised to the ground, and I went so far as to look at the houses and try and investigate who was living there. I was so sorely tempted that I had come to the conclusion that most of the houses were occupied by the top officers from that battalion. So I am saying how that was another particular difficulty when you came to adhering fully to the Geneva Convention.
Then at times our operations had to take place on the ground in support of the campaigns and struggles of the people. Again you had to locate yourself within the community and so this was another practical condition.
Then there is the reality that there were very long and insecure lines of communication, command and control, and the question of how we maintain discipline in a guerilla army, a political force. It's not the way it's done in a conventional army, by straight rules and regulations whereas in a guerilla force we rely on discipline through self-understanding and commitment to the objectives of the cause that we are serving.
So when President Tambo made that remark after the Kabwe Conference, he said very clearly that we were meeting at Kabwe two days after a massacre in Gaberone, and the essential point he made, not because he was unmindful of our signing the Geneva Convention, but because he was very mindful, he said when Gaberone was attacked we did not complain that soft targets were being hit because they have been hitting them all this time. What we did was to re-commit ourselves to intensifying the struggle, to saying that some of the restraints that we had placed on ourselves as to how we conduct the struggle would need to be relaxed. And in particular I would say then that where a military installation was in a commercial or civilian area, that restraint that we placed on ourselves had to be relaxed. But still, as I illustrate from my own case, we had to think very carefully. So those were the circumstances.
And I would say that like human rights was uppermost in our minds and that we were fighting for a society which would establish individual human rights for the first time in our country, in the same way we were very, very mindful that the tactics of the apartheid regime were drawing us into a morass where the rules of the games were likely to reduce an honourable struggle and besmear it, and we tried to avoid it.
So our commitment to the Geneva Convention was in that context a very real commitment and one which we constantly strove to measure up to. We could not follow other rules. We could not follow rules that said we should wear uniforms when we walked into the country and engaged in combat, we had to wear civilian clothes. The people were our protection.

CHAIRPERSON: Which one of you is it, Ronnie Kasrils?

UNKNOWN: Thank you Archbishop. I would just like to add to what's been said. I think that we really need to very finely analyse what the late Comrade Oliver Tambo had to say in context, as well as Chris Hani, the late, on that very page, because these statements that they both made form part of a major statement to the press. And the question that's been put looks at the Geneva Protocol and we thank the presenter for that. In terms of that Geneva Protocol I think what's salient is that 51.2, "Civilians should not be the object of attack and there should not be indiscriminate attack", Archbishop.
Now if you examine what Oliver said and what Chris Hani said they both are saying the opposite to this. Chris Hani says Umkhonto is a revolutionary army and is not going to embark on mayhem against White civilians. Oliver Tambo is constantly throughout the period saying we will not see civilians as the object of the attack. And if we look at his statement to the press he's talking about soft targets, but he's saying over the past nine to ten months there have been many soft targets hit by the enemy. He's using it that way. What they are both saying is that the struggle is intensifying, it was intensifying before all our eyes, at that time. It was going to intensify. We were taking the struggle to the White areas in the sense that this is where military and police personnel were, economic targets etc, and in that process obviously there were going to be casualties, but civilians as such would not be the object of attack and the attacks would not be indiscriminate.
So we are dealing with a very fine area. Very often politicians of all countries at war, from Churchill to everybody else, to Roosevelt, to those in charge today where wars take place, there is the talk about the crossfire. It's a very euphemistic term, we all know it, but we know that within wars of conflict this does emerge, and in that sense Tambo and Hani, I would contend, are no different to the kind of statements that would be made by leaders of the civilised world whose bombs were dropping at Churchill's or Roosevelt's behest where you had thousands and tens of thousands of people dying, actual civilians, because of a war effort. I am just basically saying that we must see every single statement within the context here. And I would like to respond that way. Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. Is there any one else? Matthews Phosa, Premier.