Special Hearings — Conscription Hearings — 1997-07-23

MR LIEBENBERG: I was surprised when a visiting Americanstudent asked me why the jobless and poor young Whites on thestreets of Pretoria look more sad to her than the poor Black jobless people.  In a following analysis she argued that it mustbe due to the fact that these poor-Whites lost all power sincethe advent of majority rule and democracy.  Hereby she impliedthat these people had real power in the first place.  Forgiveme the cynicism, but my immediate thought was isn't power relativeafter all?  What power had a young conscript when called up formilitary service, what power had a conscript even and NCO or ajunior officer when ordered to take part inside South Africa,townships if you like or rural areas or our formal colony?  Thewell known Afrikaans term "die fyfde provinsie" wouldring a bell with many of you or Namibia or inside neighbouringstates like Angola and Mozambique.  Authoritarian states unlikedemocracies at war have no inculcated culture of what constitutejust or unjust orders in the heat of what is perceived the battleagainst the enemy, the agitator the other.  These wars by authoritarianstates turned into dirty wars.  Maybe this is a set conditionfor the survival of the authoritarian states.
 I doubt, I also mention here briefly that I'm not that sure evenif I believe in the just war theory or believe that it can beargued under some conditions that democracy doesn't gravitateto dirty wars as well.  I can think about Dresden, Hiroshima,Warsaw and a lot of other places, American massacres in Vietnam. I doubt that conscripts or ex-conscripts for that matter hadany real power to speak of.  It is true that powerlessness shouldnot translate into a morality and precisely for that reason manyex-soldiers including conscripts not to forget our foot soldiersof the revolution and competence and liberation armies especiallythe lower ranks suffers from an historical overload of impressionsand experiences.  Call it post-traumatic stress syndrome if youwant to.  While some will admit to that there are those that aretrying to cope with a heroic or pathetic awareness that life evenafter the trauma has to go on as normally as conceivably possible. 
 I look at why I think fairly normal people with normal interestswere pushed into the trenches of a society at war with itself. I think we heard a lot about it this morning about the role ofthe church for example, the role of the school cadet system whichwas not voluntary in many cases although in some schools it wasand in others not.   In general there where social sanctions evenwhere school cadet systems were voluntary.  Maybe I should takeus back a bit to a conscript and I think it's important to keepin mind that non commissioned officers and officers experiencedthat closely I think that many of your conscripts are in manyrespects people with Standard Six, Seven or Eight and in retrospect,and then not necessarily had the tools to understand where theywere.  I wasn't even sure that I had the tools at the age of eighteen,commanding a platoon of thirty people, how I came there and forwhat reason.  
 The role of combat training is to prepare the soldier or thesubject through repeated and rigorous drills to be able to inflictthe utmost disruption amongst the enemy forces with as littleloss as possible on the side of own forces and keeping the economyof fire power in mind.  This dictum from the times of ancientEgypt Gengis Khan and the Chinese Federal Power stayed the samefor soldiers and commanding officers alike.  It applies to geurillaarmies, whether they are involved in armed propaganda, armed resistanceor national revolution.   ...(inaudbile) I thought here becausethe two come from very different worlds and they fundamentallyagree on the idea of why do you enter into conflict with whatyou perceive to be the enemy or those commanding you are perceivingin most cases what the enemy are.  
 I want to contextualise this.  It comes from an "OpleidingsNota", Thirty of Seventy Nine, dated 2 July 79 - Combat ShootingExercises to improve Results during Combat Situations.  The aimof all weapon training is to produce soldiers who can kill withany weapon.  Quote from a British Infantry Manual as an introductionto the "Opleidings Nota" so I don't think we necessarilyinvented that one but the next one we did invent.  
 In more detail, the success of infantry operations is largelydetermined by the dexterity with which the weapons are handledby the infantrymen and this dexterity is measured on the basisof how many of the enemy is killed.   In other words the artsof using the weapon will be measured in the end on the amountof destruction that you achieve with that weapon in which youwere trained.  For any soldier in training or in my case botha soldier and later an Officer Commanding this dictum would bevery difficult to misunderstand or to re-interpret.  
 Then I say a bit about the introduction of people into the trenches. I look a bit at conscripts, our own experience.  I've heard peoplesaying this morning that or at least it was implied in an articlethat many of these conscripts were callous and that they feltvery powerful.  I remember a day in Oshikati when I arrived therewith my new platoon at the airport and while we were there waitingfor two or three days the choppers brought in some insurgentsor geurillas that were shot.  They were in plastic bags and off-loadedonto the tarmac and we went there, I went there with quite a fewof my troops and one of theses soldiers combatants from SWAPOwas quite badly mutilated on the body because he had been shotwith a twenty millimetre machine gun from a gun ship which isa Aleutte helicopter with a heavy machine gun on it and it wasinteresting that, that callousness if it was there was then difficultto discern because some of the troops disguised their reactionwith a makeshift bravado, some showed a cold determination tosurvive under all circumstances and at all costs and I think mainlyin order to go back home, and some other literally couldn't stomachthe sight.  I think in many cases if callousness came it mighthave come many years later for many of those people.  
 I mention a bit about another experience of a guy that I stillthink to-day is rightwing but that was confronted with a bodyafter a contact which he shot at together with other people andrealised that in this Namibian sun save for luck and a bit ofskill he could be the guy lying there in the sun with the wormscrawling all over him.  I think that type of experiences are thingsthat touched all people deeply and I resist to think that aftermany years of battle in this country that there are people whocan say that it might have numbed people, but it didn't becomesomething that no-one could consider or take seriously.  In factit's probably one of the reasons why lots of people later in manyways tried to change the course of history.  
 I'm not going to deal with the church stuff as there's abouttwo minutes left.  I'll deal with our conscripts, officers andnon-commissioned officers like myself and what we felt and rationalisedwhen we were there, more so how we felt and what we decided uponafter we left military service.  There's a bit about what mostof us knew ducking and diving in order not to go to your nextcamp and the sort of decisions and traumas in trying to understandwhere do I go and when do I object.  In my case I objected fairlylate in 1987 to military service so if I have to ask for amnesiaor amnesty it would be because I was in the SADF and I supportedthe arms struggle at some stage.   I never killed anyone directlybut I think it's another thing to think about.   
 There's a few things that I think one could perhaps contemplateand I'll just briefly deal with it.  Maybe I should just readthis as it would probably offer an understanding on how many soldiersand I think more so trained soldiers in permanent forces thanpeople who have tried to leave behind their experience or theirsocialisation feel.  I think it was quite clear that for myselfin more or less the middle of my military training many of usstarted making and much more so later after I was at University,started making distinctions between political and fighting Generalsand subsequently I think even if we differ deeply and we do fromthose fighting Generals one retains some respect for them.  Ithink here about Constand Viljoen for example initially when Iwrote this I said and perhaps Jannie Geldenhuys after Kwamatuthe Kwamakuta Trial.   I'm not entirely sure how I feel aboutGeneral Geldenhuys whom I respected very highly in 1980.  Whatmost of us were getting both disillusioned with, tired of andI think which in a very real sense moulded our moral decision-making to choose  for a new future and for transformation ofsociety was that I think the feeling that these politicians andpolitical Generals directed and dictated politics and war fromTuynhuis in the Union Buildings and that in many cases, especiallythe politicians, had no personal experience of war and it's impacton humans, the land and nature.  Not to mention the individualor collective human psyche.  
 I look a bit at why I think we're not that extraordinary people. The liberation forces would have felt the same, experienced thesame and I also ask the question what about those people in theexistential vacuum from both sides that are now left with tryingto figure out where to go.  The turn of Government doesn't necessarilybring a job or resolve your problems that you have as a resultof a long history of alienation.  
 On a practical side just a few short things.  One is, is it notmoral, not necessarily for the TRC but in the aftermath of whatwe're going through now, why the question should not be askedwhy lower ranking officials in service of an authoritarian orderare found guilty of human rights transgressions while politicalGenerals and even more so politicians that created the ambit withinwhich this all took place, go free?   Perhaps this is a personalbone or two to pick, I have problems with those people especiallyon the side of the apartheid regime as well as on the side ofthe liberation forces that justified our involvement, our antagonismand our struggle for power in an academic or religious sense. I know people are saying that many people became a lost generation. I'm not sure that the not so lost generation that are in a bitof an existential vacuum but certainly looking for alternativesand have become deeply distrustful of all religion can be thatwrong and perhaps that's something which we should morally re-evaluate,think about and debate a lot in future.  
 I think especially the alienation and the double disillusionmentthat people lived through in the way in which religion and politicsdictated their lives made it difficult for them to understandhow one can rebuild on the basis of something that was so destructive. 
 I made two notes about the future, culture of tolerance, opennessand ubuntu which you can read.  The suggestions there are quitestraightforward.  And six, which is probably more important butwhich I think should be looked at clearly later as there's notime now.  The developing of a sound culture, structures and processesregarding civil military relations in a democratic South Africa. But that is all there for reading in the submission and the Appendix. Thank you very much.