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

RONNIE KASRILS: I just want to focus on the military in this regard.  Mr Maharaj has looked at the Security Police.  The military liked this idea of unconventional warfare against the revolution, counter-insurgency warfare.  It's not new, a discredited regime throughout history, its military comes to a point where it starts playing around
with the idea of counter-insurgency.  We've seen it with the Americans in Vietnam, it gave rise to the Mai Lai Massacre that created a political crises in America and the American Government decided that it couldn't continue with that kind of activities and it pulled out. 
 The British have utilised this in their anti-colonial struggle, in their struggles against the colonies, counter-insurgency warfare, Burma, Malaysia and so on. In relation to the IRA there's the example under the heading, Death on the Rock, where the British SAS broke the rule of law and if you remember they killed three suspected IRA people on the Rock of Gibraltar, shot them down, gave them no chance whatsoever, it turned out they were not armed.  So the apartheid regime and it's military played with this idea when one illegal form of methodology had clearly failed, it was already unlawful what they were doing in terms of the draconian laws of apartheid, the military became very involved in the eighties from the time of General Viljoen, developing their theory of counter-insurgency and one must recognise that as just a worse form of illegality.  There was illegality before and now they resorted to a worse form of illegality and attempted to clothe that in this term, counter insurgency warfare.  
 Let us always remember that when they descended to these dirty tricks, it was as a result of the fact that they were bankrupt.  It 
was not as a result of the fact that the revolutionary struggle was giving them no other option. Their option was to come to the point which this country came to in 1990, and that was to begin to respect the rule of law and the rights of people.

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: May I just add Chairperson, because I'm saying that yes in the eighties there was a massive step-up in ignoring the law altogether in their activities, but I'm saying that all the mechanisms, the methods were already being practised from '63 onwards.  When we went to Robben Island in 1965, end of '64, in my truck was a spy put in as a prisoner, sent to the isolation sections, and I think I ended up there just to give him a cover, otherwise I would have been in the general sections, but he was put there to come and spy on us and when they found that we had realised that he was a spy they then came to work one day and announced, sorry he's not your relative  -  Mr Raymond Nyanda,  your appeal has succeeded and he was released.
 He had served more than a year with us to be able to spy.  That was the extent to which they were carrying out these activities across the board, all of them, unlawful in terms of their own laws.
 The same thing happened even insofar as bugging.  They bugged the rooms where we were consulting our lawyers.  1963 the Rivonia Trial, if the President could come here he would tell you that in their room they had to communicate with their lawyers by 
writing notes and they actually trapped the person by one day making a remark while passing the note saying it's about this officer. And straight away the prison officers rushed into the consulting rooms and grabbed that note, and that was proof that it was bugged. So everything was being done illegally from 1963.  
 And the explanation that we need, the issue that has to be really searched for when asking what happened and why, it's not the abberations, it's how a system generates that and makes it structural to itself. There will be abberations in our history in the future and we will have to guard against it but if we do not attend to the systemic factors that generate it then we will not have learned a single thing from our past and those generals should be helping us for their own sakes and for their children's sake.

CHAIRPERSON: Advocate Goosen.

MR GOOSEN: Thank you very much Mr Chairperson.  On a totally different tack, getting back to the issues that we were canvassing before lunch, we were dealing with the notion of SDU's as they had developed from their original conception of people's militia.  In the period prior to 1990 when people were recruited internally for short term military training, how did the MK leadership exert control over the targets that they selected?  What was the nature of the training received in those circumstances?  How were those people engaged in armed action?
 The question really there is is it possible that in consequence of the actions of those people who received limited training, that human rights violations took place and specifically that that process of recruitment, minimal training and then engagement of those people, that that may have contributed in practice to an increased number of attacks on soft targets if you like?

RONNIE KASRILS: But Mr Goosen we really feel that that was thoroughly canvassed last time.  Mr Maharaj is just checking the pages. We'll gladly respond to the question here Chairperson and try to keep our answers much shorter than they've been but I don't really quite frankly see anything new in the way the question has been posed.  We pointed out that - I think at great length dealing with this, that at that specific stage with the struggle intensifying in South Africa and much greater recruitment, Kabwe, there is that decision to intensify the struggle at all costs.  We've got our forward command areas in places like Swaziland, Botswana, etc and even some units operating within the country well-trained people who had been outside in the camps for some time, we wanted to prevent a situation whereby people came out for a long period of time and found themselves in Angola for a year, sometimes two years or so, which had been the case, particularly in the seventies, so there was this need to step up training.
 We recognised that this would create problems in terms of 
how well could you train people and to provide them with what we always stressed, the need for political guidance, and this was stressed in the training of people who were given those crash courses, was the term used, which could be four days, outside of Manzini or somewhere in Botswana or Lesotho or so.  
 We had good results this way.  It did assist in developing our presence in the country, the number of MK cells.  And the way we would seek to exercise control would be with a communication link with those individuals with very, very clear-cut guidelines to them and discussion between the commander in that frontline area who was training the people as to what categories of targets to go for.  
 So I don't know whether it's so much the shortened training period, although I think in our submission we do refer to that, but the reason perhaps why there were some of the actions which we had to intervene and stop was very much the result of the way emotions were running in the wake of massacres at home and people's feeling on the ground that they should react interpret the Kabwe guideline of intensification of the armed struggle and the struggle generally in White areas. 
 You know I'm going on at a great length now but it's all there and I'll just ask Mr Maharaj if he can refer you to the references.