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

MATTHEWS PHOSA: (sworn states)

THANDI MODISE: (sworn states)

FANA HLONGWANE: (sworn states)

SYDNEY GOSHA: (sworn states)

MR NTSEBEZA: I see Mrs Nyakula at that back there.

MR MODISE: Madam Nyakula will take the oath.

MS NYAKULA: (sworn states)

MR NTSEBEZA: And if I can ask you Minister Modise for the same exercise, I think it will be Minister Maharaj this time.  Mr Maharaj all those who are going to make an affirmation.

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: I am having a bit of difficulty I don't know their real names.

RONNIE KASRILS: (affirms)

ZOLA KOTA: (affirms)

GERALDINE FRASER-MOLEKETI: (affirms)

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: (affirms)

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you Mr Ntsebeza.  If for any reason anyone else joins your delegation and wishes to take part we will then swear separate oath or affirmation.  Mr Goosen.

MR GOOSEN: Thank you very much Mr Chairperson.

CHAIRPERSON: So sorry, can I just make one other announcement, my colleague on my right who is from Durban seems to find it hotter here than anywhere else, whether it's the atmosphere or the temperature I am not sure, but he, as you can see, is without a jacket, if anyone from the delegation or in the audience would like to take their jackets off please do so.  I forgot to make that announcement until very late yesterday.
 Once again, Mr Goosen.

MR GOOSEN: Thank you very much Mr Chairperson.  Minister Maharaj I will proceed by addressing questions to you, to the delegation, unless there's a specific question to address to anyone of the members of the delegation and I will indicate that.
 In a political report of the NEC to the Consultative Conference held in 1985 the following statement was made which was quoted in "Oliver Tambo speaks".
"Our conference itself would be remembered by our people as a council of war that planned the seizure of power by these masses; the penultimate convention that gave the order for us to take our country through the terrible but cleansing fires of revolutionary war to a condition of peace".
 In similar vein a passage that is extracted from the book by 
Minister Ronnie Kasrils, Armed and Dangerous, is as follows:
"We were succeeding in our main objective of locating armed resistance amongst the mass of the people.  For every one operation launched by MK combatants there were scores carried out by a mobilised population.  Between September 1984 and April 1986 over 800 policemen's homes were attacked".
The strategy of people's war, the revolutionary strategy of people's war, much of which we have been debating during the course of this week, would you agree that that strategy of necessity meant the blurring of distinctions between trained armed soldiers and ordinary civilians who were caught up in quasi military formations such as amabuto or SDU's in the later period?

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: Chairperson first of all the strategy of people's war was a development based on the fundamental premise that ours was a just war.  That just war was directed at a system of rule which we knew as apartheid.  And apartheid was, both ideologically and practically a system of governance based on the ideological premise that there existed in this country a super race, which by virtue of being a super race had the right to rule over all others and to subjugate them. The people's war strategy therefore was a development in the course of that struggle.
 The distinction between civilians and combatants had, as 
President Tambo repeatedly said, been blurred by the activities of the apartheid regime. In fact I recall being present at Matola when the apartheid regime raided Mozambique and homes were raised to the ground, where the President asked, if you say that people who were living in those homes were armed and therefore justify the South African regime's attack then the question arises, aren't all white South Africans then legitimate targets?  Because white South Africans possessed arms in their private homes.  We did not accept that distinction but we said, this is the reality in South Africa and yet the South African regime was at times appearing to justify its actions against civilians both inside the country and abroad by saying that those were reported to be armed homes.
 Kabwe made the second point that in the intensification of the struggle until then we had always sought to avoid an operation which had a likelihood of leading to injury or death of a civilian, be that civilian white or black, Kabwe acknowledged that that rigid condition would have to be relaxed.  Debates had often taken place and continued to take place in our ranks, often to take the easier route to abandon our principled policy positions and seek to strike at the enemy at its most vulnerable and easiest spots.  
 The President then was simply saying that the strategy of people's war would rest on the concept of an uprising by the people and that our role as the armed formation was to enhance that 
capacity.  
 So that is how the issue was posed.  Whether that necessarily leads to a blurring is a debatable question, because what we were saying was that the regime had even located its armed forces within highly dense, whether commercial areas or residential areas, and if we had sought to get to grips with the regime's forces necessarily we had to accept that at times civilians would be caught up.  So that was an acknowledgement of that reality.
 If I recall the Kabwe meeting took place two days after the Gaberone raid.  That raid killed civilians.  Those civilians were not just South Africans, they were Botswana citizens.  Men and women and children were killed there.  And it was against that context that you must understand the question and the answers that our President put.

RONNIE KASRILS: Yes Mr Goosen since you quoted a book of mine which actually has been in the news this week in terms of the FBI, I think from your question about for every action of MK, 20 actions from the people.  Every struggle invariably starts with a small number of people who seek to show the way forward, whether it's Ghandi leading peaceful non-violent group to swell the ranks to involve the population against inequity, or when those channels of peaceful change are blocked you have a movement turning to armed struggle, invariably starting very small in numbers and the whole
objective is to mobilise people to bring them into action and with us, when we saw in '76 the youth rising, enjoining MK, we saw this as a great step forward in the struggle to overthrow apartheid.  
 In the eighties where this reference comes from we saw the fact that people now were rising as evidence of their involvement in what Mac Maharaj has referred to, the people's war, the objective of an uprising by our people, and that's why I formulated that statement in my book that way.

MR GOOSEN: I think that's really the point that I am trying to make.  I am not looking at it from the point of view of the actions of MK directed at civilian targets, we can come to that a little bit later, but from the point of view of the capacity of MK to engage in a people's war was dependent upon the ability of MK to mobilise, not only trained combatants, formally trained combatants of MK, formal members of MK, but also the general population, youth workers, students and so on, into armed formations and to prosecute the people's war on the basis of that people's army which comprised not only MK, as armed combatants, but armed formations, and in that sense that the distinction between armed combatants and trained combatants and mobilised masses blurred the distinction.