Special Hearings — Armed Forces Hearings — 1997-10-10

GEN NYANDA: Thank you Mr Chair, I just wanted to say that in my experience as an operational commander, there is no evidence
that I can recall of where it became a pattern that people who were trained in the manner in which Mr Khoisan has outlined, in other words people  who received crash courses were the principal perpetrators of deviations, if there were deviations, which in any case there has been an admittance that in certain there were aberrations in the manner in which people conducted certain operations inside the country.  There is no evidence whatsoever that this was because people had received inadequate training. 
 Where such abberations took place there were mistakes on the part of the people who carried out the operations and because of certain reasons which have been outlined, like mistakes where we targeted farmers and military personnel in the form of landmines, but innocent civilians were caught in the crossfire or innocent civilians detonated those land mines, and there is no evidence, it cannot be established that in fact  it was people who were trained, who had received crash courses, who had received inadequate training were responsible for this. I just wanted to make that point, thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: I just wanted to say can the record reflect that that was General Sipiwe Nyanda.

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: Chairperson if we look at our submission of the 12th of May '97, page 66, you will see there that we acknowledge first of all that as a guerilla force we were operating in conditions
totally different from that of a conventional army and that placed it's own constraints and problems, and it necessitated that our first line of discipline depended to a great deal on political maturity and hence the political training of our cadres.
 It then went on to say that yes the crash courses did create their own problems because some of the recruits, not all, because in general I would say many of those who came for crash courses already came having some contact with the movement. This was not like the 1976 exodus.  It was people by arrangement with people inside the country would come out for a prepared crash course, generally not just a two to four day but two weeks, three weeks four weeks at a time. Some of them would even be flown to Angola for a six weeks course and brought back. It was still within the crash course concept. So they came with some political base from home, that's the general crash course person.  But some of them had sketchy political understanding about the nature of the struggle and some of them as supporters, drifted in and out of structures, not simply because they were weak or bad people but because of conditions of life in this country. You were being harassed in Kwamashu, you would try to save your skin by going to Claremont, and if you were harassed in Claremont you would try to get away to Alexander. So that movement would take place together with the impulse to fight  oppression. So that did create problems.
 But to illustrate then a little bit of the detail. Comrade Andrew Zondo was a fully trained cadre, but his testimony shows that he came under enormous pressure within the country and within himself when the massacres took place. And he recognises even in the court that he acted in a way contrary to ANC policy.  In that desperate state looking at what was happening to our people, a trained cadre could succumb to those pressures.  A crash course could easily succumb to those pressures as well. There is no guarantee that the discipline of our army could ensure that not a single cadre would act then outside of the disciplinary framework that we tried to impose.  And for that too, we acknowledge with regret, and apologise for any actions that were done by them under those conditions.
 How did we take the training?  We saw the training in modules.  We didn't see that single crash course visit as the end of the cadre's training.  We saw it as a component of the cadre's training. We saw the cadre going in doing reconnaissance, bringing information pointing to potential targets, potential recruits, storing arms,  before the cadre went into combat. And when it came to sabotage also, we saw the cadre being involved in simple sabotage before the cadre would be given a more sophisticated sabotage job. 
 This is one of the reasons why we began to rely on the limpet mine, because it was so simple to operate, it would have been more 
cost effective to use dynamite but to determine the size of the charge, to even split a railway line and conserve your resources was a most sophisticated exercise.  But to put a limpet mine to blow it up was a simple task because you simply had to set the pin and the correct timer which is based on the colours.  But the cadre would go through in action and come back to visit us in the forward areas for further training.  
 The same thing was happening inside the country. The cadre would be selected from inside the political formations as a potential combatant, given certain types of training, asked to practise that training and when performing well put in a unit and then go on to advanced to further training in small modules. All the time linking it to political instruction and all the time linking it to the need for a disciplined formation.
 So that's how we tried to bring about that discipline and that's how we conceptualised even the combat groups and the SDU's in the late eighties, that they would be a stepping stone to further development of the cadre into a combat group and ending up as a fully-fledged MK cadre,  And it was our hope that if the struggle went on that path in a prolonged way, we would then be concentrating on training officers outside from selected people who had already seen some sabotage experience on the ground.

MR GOOSEN: Thank you very much Mr Chairperson.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Lax.

MR LAX: Thank you Chairperson, just, you spoke earlier about false-flag operations and that was a contributing factor in some ways to this whole issue. One of the areas that you may well have touched on, and I haven't seen the full purport of your previous submissions, was the issue of basically compromised communication lines.  In other words, and I quote one instance that I'm personally aware of, is the case of Ben Langa and those cadres who executed him and then were themselves executed. And the information we have at this stage is that that unit was compromised and that there were certain instructions issued as a result of that compromising so to speak, misinformation in terms of which he was executed and clearly that was people at work, agent provocateurs and so on in a way - how did you try and deal with that situation where you were at risk in that way?

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: That instruction to that unit came from an enemy agent who had risen to hold a position in the Natal military machinery known as Ralph or known as Fear, whose wife was also an enemy agent, whose confessions showed that she while based in Swaziland, had visited South Africa at least four times clandestinely to report to her superiors.  And it was (...indistinct) who gave that instruction, am I right?

MEMBER OF DELEGATION: Yes.