Amnesty Hearings — Bloemfontein — 1997-09-10

MR VISSER: Listen, I am not your child, Mr Motsamai.  Do you understand me?  Just answer the questions and leave the  personal attack out of it.

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: I am also not your child.  Listen here, this I did under the directions of the person who is seated next to me.  All this, I did under instructions by, I am taking this as a whole.  I am taking this as a whole, all of this that is contained in here.  I did not say to him he must be my counsel here, I never signed that he must come here and be my attorney here.

MR VISSER: Mr Motsamai, is it now your evidence that Mr Wagenaar, in fact, told you what to say in this affidavit?  Is that what you are now saying?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: I do not know how to answer you, because I said to you I do not agree with all this that is contained in this affidavit.

CHAIRPERSON: Did he sit and write things down while you were in the room with him, Mr Motsamai?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: He was writing, Sir, and whilst writing he was answering from Nelson Ngo's application.  He was writing from his mind, I did not state anything in this affidavit.  I do not know how many times must I repeat this.

CHAIRPERSON: Did he read to you what he was writing?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: He did read that to me.

MR VISSER: Is that all from the Chair, Mr Chairman?  Thank you Mr Chairman.  Did he tell you to say in your affidavit that you know Ngo for many years?  Did he tell you to say that?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: Must I repeat this, Sir, that this is the person who wrote here, responding from what was contained in Ngo's amnesty application. I do not know how to put it to you.

MR VISSER: Mr Motsamai, do you have a problem understanding the interpretation of the questions?

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Visser, he has told you, as I understand it, many times, that he did not tell Mr Wagenaar anything.  Mr Wagenaar wrote things down and told him.

MR VISSER: Mr Chairman, with great respect to the Chair, I am asking him whether Wagenaar told him to say that he knew Ngo.  That, I would submit, with great respect, is a perfectly fair question for him to reply to.

CHAIRPERSON: How many times has he replied to it by telling you he did not say things, Wagenaar said them.

MR VISSER: All right.  Let me ask you this, one last question.  Is your evidence that nothing in this affidavit is your own evidence, all of it is what Wagenaar told you to say?  Is that your evidence?

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Visser, you cannot get away from "told you to say", you repeat that every time.  Are you not putting to him, is everything in this affidavit what Wagenaar wrote?

MR VISSER: Did you understand that question put by the Chair?  Is everything in this affidavit something which Wagenaar wrote and which you did not tell him to write?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: That is correct.

CHAIRPERSON: You are quite sure of that, Mr Motsamai, that everyone of these, you had an opportunity to read this affidavit now, that every, all the information contained in there came from Mr Wagenaar, none of it came from you?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: That is correct.  He just looked where my names appeared from the, from Mr Ngo's application and denies such allegations and wrote in this affidavit with his hand.

MR VISSER: Mr Chairman, with that question in mind, oh, that answer in mind, I am not going to take him through every paragraph of this affidavit and I will leave the rest for argument later.  You know what it means to swear under oath, to speak the truth, do you not, Mr Motsamai?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: That is correct.

MR VISSER: Was the statement which Mr Wagenaar wrote down typed out while you were in Pretoria on the same day and given to you to read?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: I never read it.  I just kept hold on this, on that paper.  I wanted to leave that office.

MR VISSER: The question is whether it was given to you to read.

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: Who did that?  Nobody gave me a statement to read.  I just kept hold on those papers.

CHAIRPERSON: Were these papers given to you after Mr Wagenaar had written them down, was it typed out and was it given to you?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: They were given to me.

MR VISSER: And you told this Committee yesterday that they were given to you to read and then Mr Mamome said he is not satisfied, that is not going to happen.  Is that not what you told us yesterday?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: I would request you to listen to me as I speak.  We received these things, Mr Wagenaar said they would be read that side before we take the oath.  That is what I stated.  I never said Sergeant Mamome, that comes from you.

MR VISSER: I see.  Just to make it absolutely plain, you say yesterday you never said Mamome said he does not want it like that?  You never said that?
MR MEMANI OBJECTS

ADV MEMANI: No, Mr Chairman, he is misleading.  The witness is denying that they were read. He is saying that I said that the statement, we received the statement and Wagenaar said they will be read in the other office.  That is what the witness is denying.

MR VISSER: I will repeat the question to you.  Did you or did you not say yesterday that Mamome said he does not want it like that, referring to the reading of the affidavits before you signed them?

CHAIRPERSON: Was that not reading the affidavits in public?  He said he was going to read them, my recollection is he said he was going to read them to all of them and Mamome said he did not want that.  That was a general reading of each of their affidavits to the group.

MR VISSER: Thank you, Mr Chairman.  That is a perfectly acceptable interpretation of the evidence.  I withdraw that question.  Just one last question on this issue, Mr Motsamai.  If you wanted to read your affidavit, would you say that you had the fullest opportunity to do so before you went to sign it?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: If I wanted to.

MR VISSER: Did you, in fact, read it before you signed it?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: I did not read it.

MR VISSER: And when you signed it were you asked to take the oath, to say that it is the truth that you, that is contained in the affidavit and that you understand that those to be the facts according to your personal knowledge.  Were you asked that?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: What I stated here, the times stated in here are the same.  The date stamp that is here corresponds with the date that I have stated and this is what I stated yesterday.  Nobody was asked to confirm the contents of the affidavits.  All the papers were put on the table and everybody signed.  The dates are the same, the time is the same.  That shows that the person who signed here, this Captain here, did not work according to the Law.

MR VISSER: Mr Motsamai, Mr Motsamai, did you intend to sign an affidavit, you personally, did you intend to sign an affidavit?  It does not matter what anybody else did or did not do, your intention.

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: I was not intending to do that.  I just signed that to leave that office and come back home to Bloemfontein alive.  That is the only thing that was in my mind.  That is why I checked for mistakes, to see if I could find mistakes.

MR VISSER: All right.  In fairness to you, apart from checking for mistakes, are you saying today that what Wagenaar wrote, apart from paragraph two, was not the truth or is there something there which is the truth?

MOHONAETSE STEPHEN MOTSAMAI: The truth is what I told the TRC.  The statement that I gave to the TRC is the truth.  That is why I say I am here to speak the truth, not this.

MR VISSER: Mr Motsamai, I want to be fair to you.  Is there anything you want to draw to the attention of this Committee in your affidavit at page 29 of bundle B which is not the truth?