Amnesty Hearings — Cape Town — 2000-03-15

PIETER JOHANN VERSTER: What I meant thereby was the fact that this was not an affidavit although I had told Mr Bizos that I was not under pressure, I thought that this was something that had already been dealt with and the pressure which came later is as I speak now, I would not have applied it, it was not problem for me but at that time there was a big conflict because I saw what the State was doing and I went to my own advocate and then there was an attitude that I saw was formulating in the media and I was forced to go to the minister who opposed me, who had two high court applications against me to take to his advocate.  Documentation was prepared and I have told the story of how I laid facts on the table and this statement then I can tell you for example it says "top secret" so this was at the minister's level, they tried to deal with it as top secret on one side and the questions were also answered as it was answered here so technically what I meant by that is that it was something that Willem Burger said, technically it was not a nursery school so let's forget about that, there was no explosion at any nursery school, the Early Learning Centre, he doesn't know whether it was young children or older children, so he said who said it was a nursery school and that is how I saw it and that is how the whole statement was drawn up.

MR LAX: The obvious implication of all of that is that if it suits your purpose you're going to tell a half truth or a lie or whatever for a technical reason and we have to try and decide and that's why I'm asking you to explain it, how to sift our way through these different versions and we have to understand your motives and your perspectives you see?

PIETER JOHANN VERSTER: I hope that I tried to say this this morning but I wish to reiterate that Mr Chairperson, what happened there was there was a police investigation while the police tried to protect themselves.  Factually this whole document was drawn up by Advocate Burger, it was not drawn up by myself, the questions were drawn up by him and because of this I was under pressure and that they had already sacked me and that I would be locked up and that I was disclosing secrets so I do not regard this as a document referring to my credibility.  It was a document with regard to my combat structures, well the result was the statement.

MR LAX: Okay.  The last area that I want to question you on is again and I spoke to you about this yesterday, it's the issue of one of our crucial criteria that we had to consider is the proportionality of your act and the relationship between your act and your object, it's remoteness, issues of that nature.  In other words, what is the relationship of between what your intended aim was, what you wanted to achieve and the methods that you chose and again I'm going to say, what alternatives did you consider before you made the decision to kill people or before you made a decision to blow up a building, what other alternatives did you consider?

PIETER JOHANN VERSTER: The alternatives were seated in the purpose of this specific project.  In this case, if we refer to this case then we have to measure it according to the disruption of the enemy.  If we wanted to kill people it would have been a greater activity if we wanted to make them aware of the fact that you want to plant bombs and bombs can be planted against you and I felt that this was a limitation therein, the whole structure in which I functioned was about minimum use of violence or force, in other words, only what was necessary to obtain that objective.  We felt that our whole essence, we were all people who were trained to fight with large groups of troops and to move in submarines and land with parachutes and use assault aircraft.  We focused it down, not like the ANC the opposition did, that exploded a bomb wherever and it is an act of terror and then 40 people died in Church Street. In this regard it was focused and dealt with an detonated by radio control in order to focus on the persons, correctly or incorrectly who we had thought were the enemy so in my vision it was the limitation to that who was the enemy.

MR LAX: You see, you still haven't told me what alternatives you considered?

PIETER JOHANN VERSTER: I think the alternative was - that was one of the alternatives, I did that because we did not kill people.

MR LAX: That's your justification, what I'm saying is your object was to scare these so-called young terrorists and gangsters, to scare them out of carrying on with the conduct that you thought on the information before you, on the intelligence before you they were engaged in.  What other kinds of scare tactics did you think of or were presented to you?  I may be that none were presented to you, I don't know, I wasn't there?

PIETER JOHANN VERSTER: I cannot recall anything else that was submitted to me but what I would like to say to you is that we by the time that it is a target to me then there is an acceptance that we functioned in a structure that is executive in nature and then within the definition of maximum disruption we may act and my boundaries were that definition, either I had to get these people on my side or I had to kill them or I had to disrupt them by means of an explosion so we acted executively and the police and the welfare and the army and the commandments of the army who were involved there, this was in my book part of the State dispensation, that was their problem to look at the softer side of the alternatives.

MR LAX: The Kewtown Youth Movement didn't appear on anyone's list or organisations to be dealt with, it was a totally insignificant little group of people and by that I don't mean they weren't effective but in terms of your priorities of targets, I don't mean any disrespect to Kewtown Youth Movement, in terms of the kinds of targets you were dealing with, it wasn't a big leadership organisation, it wasn't from what Mr Williams has said they were engaged in and accepting his word for the time being, they were a youth movement like hundreds of others throughout the country.

PIETER JOHANN VERSTER: You see Chairperson, church organisations, youth organisations, networks and other structures were used as mediums, that is exactly what Alan Boesak did through the church by means of support from the church in the revolution in my perspective.  In your book it is a drop in a bucket but it is part of a greater structure.  To me it was in order to execute my task to the best of my ability, correctly or incorrectly.

MR LAX: Did you consider alternatives in relation to the elimination of Dullah Omar and Gavin Evans?

PIETER JOHANN VERSTER: I only evaluated the plans as they were submitted in the region, we will have to confirm it with the Regional Manager, I cannot recall whether any alternatives were submitted by the region.

MR LAX: To see as the person who recommended because your power was to recommend or refuse to continue in other words to say uh, uh, you've got to stop this, it's not acceptable or to make changes - let me finish before you answer, that was your power and the fact was that if you agreed with it and you approved of it, it wasn't just that, you recommended it on to somebody else, Gen Webb in this case so incumbent on you as a person exercising a discretion was the need to think of alternatives whether this was an appropriate action otherwise if you were just a rubber stamp there was nothing for you to refuse.