Special Hearings — Armed Forces Hearings — 1997-10-09

UNKNOWN: I don't want to object to my learned friend, I could just see us sitting here until five o'clock this afternoon with General Coetzee repeating his answers, and my learned friend repeating his questions.  And the problem which we have here Mr Chairman, and I think Mr Lax tried to point it out, is that what my learned friend is putting to General Coetzee is a question of argument, it's not a question of fact, and General Coetzee is attempting to answer it on a basis of fact whereas he could have just conceded the argument, as I will (...indistinct) because my learned friend is putting argument to the witness and with great respect that is what is causing all this delay with respect Mr Chairman.  I am not trying to stop him, I am trying to assist.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.  Mr Lyster is also going to try and assist.

MR LYSTER: The problem that we have is that a lot of people have applied for amnesty for unlawful killings, a lot of police personnel and some army personnel ...(intervention)

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: Yes Sir by that admitting that they went outside the law.

MR LYSTER: Yes, ja.  And all of them they've either said that they understood the various words that we have heard here, "elimineer", "uitrooi". "uittewis", "neutraliseer", "maak 'n plan" all that sort of stuff, "vernietig" they understood that to mean kill, or they have said, they are not relying on those words, they have said it was the unspoken understanding of the day that they were at war, it was a life and death situation as General van der Merwe said, that extraordinary measures had to be used; you had to fight fire with fire; you had to use the methods of the revolutionaries against them; had to counter them with their own methods and that they understood that what they were doing was within their jobs as policemen or army personnel and they've applied for amnesty.  Your attorney there acts for some of them and I am sure that when they apply for amnesty that is the argument that will be put forward, that ...(intervention)

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: I am in complete agreement with what you have said this far.

MR LYSTER: And those people have said in their amnesty applications that under no circumstances whatsoever do they regard themselves as criminals, which is how Mr de Klerk described them in this very room some months ago, that anybody who committed an act committed it as an aberration or a bad apple and that they were criminals. And these people were very, very angry when it was suggested that they were criminals.
 And they said that the unspoken understanding of the day, or the spoken understanding, clandestine understanding, was that they were entitled to do what they did, which was to abduct people, interrogate them and then torture them in some cases to get information from them, try to persuade them to become agents of the State and then when they refused to do it or when they were so badly injured that they couldn't have been prosecuted or taken to a State hospital they executed them and buried there and then.  Those people believe that they were entitled to do it because that is what they understood their superiors to be telling them.

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: But Sir I am in complete agreement with what you have said this far.  They may have understood that, they may have genuinely have understood that and I can understand why they are so cross with an attitude of the three monkeys, we don't see no evil, we don't hear no evil and we don't speak no evil, I can understand why they are so cross with that and why they are angry with that.  I can understand that very well.   But what I am trying to convey Sir is that you must distinguish between that situation, that person, was influenced by a range of possibilities and probabilities which only he can come and describe to the Amnesty Committee.  Only he can do that.  What committee he belonged to, what the chairman of that committee said, what they decided together, where they decided and in what circumstances they decided, and what I did Sir, and what I understood.  This is what I am trying to - I am trying to divide this into that situation, that's all that I am trying to do Sir.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Lax.

MR LAX: Thank you Chairperson.  General you've agreed with what Mr Lyster advanced as, what I would call and I am asking your opinion on this, in essence a culture that prevailed at that time within the security forces, would you describe it as such ...(intervention)

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: No not at all ...(intervention)

MR LAX: Would you concede that?

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: No, not at all Sir.  A culture is something that is all-encompassing, a culture is something else.  First these cases, although I am in complete agreement that some of them are to me, personally, repugnant, morally personally repugnant, but there was never a culture existed in the South African Police that any policeman or any of the branches of the South African Police could go and kill people at will, at their own motivation or anything of that nature.  That is a culture, that is an all-encompassing thing of indiscipline, or a laissez-faire etc, that never existed Sir.

MR LAX: Well you see General what puzzles us is how this, and these occurrences, were so widespread in so many of the jurisdictions, whether it was KwaZulu Natal, take Trust Feed for example, whether it was the Seven Day War in our Province; whether it was a whole range of these other incidents that people have applied for amnesty for all over the country, every one of those individuals in one form or another believed that they were within the authority to act in the way they did, whether it was Eugene de Kock, whether it was whoever, and these are all people who believed they were honourable men, who believed they were acting in the course and scope of their employment with the police or the army or whoever.
 How can - the issue I want to raise is, for a time you were a very senior head of the police and you were head of Security Branch, were you never aware of that culture, that attitude, that -call it what you will, but that ethos that people genuinely thought that's what they had to do?  I am not for one moment saying they weren't bona fide those people.

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: I must, just for the sake of clarity Sir, but the incidents you've mentioned I have very grave doubts whether they happened during my term of office, so please ...(intervention)

MR LAX: Well just if I could just clarify ...(intervention)

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: No, no, no ...(intervention)

MR LAX: The one - some incidents that Mr Lyster referred to  did happen during your term in our province.

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: Which one is that?

MR LAX: 1985 and 1987 they were the situations that we have referred to where we exhumed bodies near Pietermaritzburg ...(intervention)

PETRUS JOHANNES COETZEE: In '87, when is that - the Operation Vula?

MR LAX: No, not Operation Vula, these were other personnel and I won't go into the specifics but they were people who have pointed out graves of people that they executed, interrogated and buried on farms that were leased by the police and so on.  They have been in the media and so on, that's why I am referring to them.