Human Rights Violation Hearings — Pretoria — 1996-08-15

GODFREY JOSIAH MADILENG MOTSEPE: Thank you.  Yes, I was appointed the ANC chief representative.  First and foremost in 1979 I was in Algeria and whilst I was in Algeria the ANC asked me to leave for Europe the following year to go and establish ANC missions in Western Europe.  So I set up the ANC office for the Benelux countries based in Brussels.  This office covered Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg.  Then I also went over to France to set up the ANC office in Paris at the instruction of ANC headquarters in Lusaka.
 As soon as I was ensconced in Belgium, immediately I noticed that I was being constantly tailed by what subsequently turned out to be South African agents.  Firstly, they used, what I would term, phycological warfare against me.  I would get to the office in the morning and find that they had opened the office overnight and searched through documents, but nothing would be stolen except, perhaps, one time when I found photographs of young white South Africans who were draft dodgers who wanted to join the ANC, I found that their photographs had disappeared in my office.  Then at times I would secure my apartment where I was living in Brussels with my family.  We would go away for a weekend.  I would go to, perhaps, to Amsterdam to a meeting and when I come back I would find that they had opened my apartment.  They would even leave the windows open, had rifled through the desks in the house, rifled through everything, but nothing would be stolen, you know, valuable things like typewriters or television or so.  I reported these things to the Belgium authorities and as time went on the intimidation PRETORIA HEARING TRC/GAUTENG
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became worse and worse and worse.  
 I remember exactly one night when I came back from a meeting and I got back to my house, to my apartment.  I just could not open the door of my, you know, apartment which was on the third floor and I was wondering what was happening because my family was inside.  When, eventually, my late wife opened, I found that she was very, very, very terrified because she said that she had received these phone calls in which she was being threatened.  They were even swearing at her, using all kinds of profanity to tell her that they know she is there alone and they can come there and get her.  These kinds of things went on and on and on and in the mid-1980's it just became worse.  
 There were about four assassination attempts made on my life.  The last two were the only ones which got much publicity in the newspapers.  I have here with me press cuttings from Belgium and, you know, Flemish and French language newspapers because it was very, very highly publicised.  This was on the fourth of February 1988.  It was on a Friday evening and I was working late alone in our office.  There was some work which I wanted to clear which was very urgent.  I had to send off telexes to Lusaka concerning some important issues.  So I decided to work late all by myself.  Everybody else had left.  Then somebody rang our doorbell.  When I answered at the intercom I could hear somebody with a very heavy accent trying to speak French saying that he was from a local Belgian newspaper and he wanted to interview me.  Now having lived in Belgian for quite some time and having dealt quite a lot with the media I knew that there was no Belgian newspaper man who would just come out of from the blue at night and say that he 
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wanted an interview.  Most of the newspaper men that I knew, people who were in the media, they would phone you during the day, they would introduce themselves properly to you, tell you who they were, which newspapers or which television station they worked for.  So I immediately said to this person at the door that, no, anyway I was not interested in the interview.  It was late, I was tired and I wanted to go home.  I was not in the least bit interested in having an interview.  So I forgot about the whole matter and went back to what I was doing.
 After about ten, 15 minutes or so I went over to the, to our front office, you know, sort of like our reception which looked over into the street.  I stood there and I was looking into the street.  I was just thinking what, you know, what was I going to eat because by then I had packed off my wife and children to London because they were so terrified of living with me.  These threats had taken a very serious toll on my wife and I was all by myself in Belgian at the time because I wanted them to be in safety.  So as I was standing there, one man wearing a, you know, wearing something like a skull cap and a, something like a raincoat with the flaps turned over this way, rushed to the window and he fired two shots at me.  I was very, very fortunate in that I dove out of the way and I lay flat on the ground, but a splinter from the bullet had hit me over here and I was bleeding a little bit.  So the authorities came, they took ballistic tests and the press were there.  It was quite a commotion and I was in a real state of shock at that time.  Statements were made and the Belgian authorities immediately, I think they even contacted Interpol and so forth, you know, to help.
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 Then on the 27th of March which was a month later I was woken up the Belgian authorities very late, in the early hours of Sunday morning.  When we dashed to our office with them we found that a 17 kilogram bomb was placed on the door of our office just in the entrance to the building.  Our offices were on the ground floor and they had put it there.  Timed to blow us up on Monday morning at nine.  I was usually in my office at about nine in the morning.  The secretaries and other people came earlier to open up, but I would usually turn up at nine.  All the neighbourhood in that area which was a densely populated, you know, area were woken up.  They were evacuated by the bomb squad and the bomb was removed by these bomb removal machines which blew it up somewhere very far away from our office.  Even the Belgian authorities were shocked at this kind of behaviour because they said to me, we cannot understand what kind of people are these who want to kill you alone, but they are prepared to sacrifice the lives of so many people.  That 17 kilogram bomb would have blown half the neighbourhood to pieces.  
 Two days afterwards on the 29th of March, that is when our chief representative, Ms Dalcy September was shot to death in Paris.  So it seemed as if this was the same hit squad which was travelling around Western Europe at that time trying to eliminate all ANC people or activists.  Subsequently I was told by the Belgian authorities that when this hit squad was in Britain, Scotland Yard tipped off the Belgian authorities that there was a group of very dubious characters from South Africa who were leaving for the continent, who were coming across and they had even sent photographs of these people and their names because 
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apparently one of them had been with the South African embassy in London and the British drove him away as persona non grata because of activities which were not related to his diplomatic status.  So they called me over and they showed me a photograph of this man and this was exactly the man I saw that night when he shot at me because for a split second we looked at each other when he came running to the window and he stood there and I stared into his eyes and he stared at me just for a split second before he drew and he shot.  That photograph tallied with the description that I had given to the Belgian authorities.  They had made an identikit that same night and it tallied with the photograph and they told me his name.  I know his name, I know who he is and we also found out that he came back to South Africa, he was a Sergeant at the time.  For these nefarious deeds he was promoted.  He is a Captain and he lives in Cape Town.  I am not sure whether he was given a golden handshake, he is retired or what, but we know that he lives somewhere in Cape Town as a Captain whose name I haver here with me.  
 Now, the harassment which I had suffered caused me a lot in health wise.  I lost a lot of weight because I could no longer sleep in one place.  I was moving from place to place.  I could not eat properly, I could not sleep properly and the most terrifying thing of all for me was that these people knew who I was, I did not know who they were so I was scared of anybody that I saw.  Anywhere, in the bus, in the tram, in the streets.  I did not know who they were, but they knew me.  So this gave me quite, you know, quite a traumatic experience.  I developed a disease called shingles which hospitalised me in the UK for quite some time.  It was very, very painful.  The doctors told me that it was caused 
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by having lived in an extremely stressful situation for a very long time that your health just deteriorates completely and your nerves are almost on the end of, you know, their tether.  
 Worst of all, this kind of experience affected my late wife far more deeply than we suspected because after we had gotten back home here through all the stress that she had been through, she developed a brain tumour which led to her untimely death because she had become very, very terrified.  Even when we were back home here she was still very, very terrified, she could not even accompany me to an ANC meeting here at home.  When she saw the police coming with guns, especially 1990 when we arrived, she was so terrified that she just could not.  So, briefly,  I think that would be my statement.  
 I would very, very much want to know why did these people want to eliminate me.  I was not carrying any guns, I was just like a diplomat, I was just putting the case of our people across.  There was never a time when I intimidated the members of the South African Embassy.  In fact the irony of it all is that I even stopped some terrorist groups who wanted to blow up the South African Embassy in Belgian and in the Netherlands.  I stopped them because they came to enquire from me and I said to them, no, this is not what we are about and yet, I mean, I became the very person that the State, the apartheid State waned to eliminate and for what reason.  I was, as I say, I was not carrying any weapons at all.  I was, I had never ever made any threats or anything.  All I was doing, I mean, was diplomatic work, going to meetings, convincing millions of people in Western Europe about the evil of apartheid and 
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calling for economic sanctions against South Africa.  So I really want to know who was it, I mean, who sent these people to try and eliminate me, to make my life virtually like hell.  I mean I, from day to day I never knew whether I will come back home alive.  They had made my life, you know, I could even feel at times that I was walking next to my grave.  So this is what I would really want to know and I feel that those kind of people, really, they do not belong in a New South Africa.  They ought to be locked up as far as I am concerned.  Thank you.