Special Hearings — Mandela United Football Club Hearings — 1997-11-24

<UNKNOWN>: Mr Chair, I wonder if the Commission will grant me the indulgence of just one question relating to Bishop Storey's notes.
 I wonder if anyone of the witnesses could just refer to the note of Thursday the 12th of January.  It's been suggested that in some respects Bishop's Storey's notes may not be accurate and there's just one particular aspect I would ask anyone of the witnesses to comment on, it's on page 3.  
 The report there is made that: 
"It was initially agreed that the Committee could have access immediately but changed her mind and told them to come back later in the day"
If you could perhaps look at that and then see in the next paragraph:
"When the Crisis Team returned - this time without Chikane, later on the Wednesday etc.,"
Would you recollect that that was an accurate description of what in fact happened?

CRISIS COMMITTEE: I must say I don't remember that.

CRISIS COMMITTEE: Same here.

<UNKNOWN>: If Bishop Storey says: this is a contemporaneous note of what his assessment of the position was, would you have any reason to dispute that?

SIDNEY MUFAMADI: No, except that I think it's important for us to put on record what - once more, what Reverend Chikane said, that we negotiated to see the children and we were given permission to see the children.  What I wouldn't remember is what time did we start those negotiations and at what time did we actually see the children but we did see the children.

<UNKNOWN>: Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.  Now my colleague here.

KHOZA MGOJO: Thank you Mr Chairperson.  Can I refer the team to Annexure C, the last paragraph, part 1 on page 2.  In your Annexure there seems to a suggestion here that at the meeting at Soweto the two young men Gabriel and Thabiso, did declare to you that they were assaulted by the football club and also they do say that they were not taken to the doctor for treatment but were treated by the members of the football club.  What type of treatment was given to them, did you ever ask?

CRISIS COMMITTEE: Sir, you will notice that according to that report, that is the information they gave to a meeting - big meeting of representatives of various formations of the MDM, which was attended also by at least two members of this Committee.  I don't remember anybody probing as to the nature of treatment and so on but indeed we noted the fact that they said this.

KHOZA MGOJO: Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Hlengiwe.

MS MKHIZE: Thank you Chairperson.  In Annexure B, page 2, number 4, it says
"He, Katiza before running away from Hammarsdale was working with C R Swart security branch"
I would just like to know whether in your in-depth interviews - somewhere you said: "We had to break them", did he say about the other experiences like for instance, he was coming from Hammarsdale, young people there had been detained, they have been brutalised, they learnt to kill, to do all sorts of things, did he say any other thing about that?  The relevance of that question is around number 1, which we say we have called you because of our interest in understanding the formation of this youth grouping.

CRISIS COMMITTEE: Well, he didn't elaborate on the exact details of the nature of his working with special branch at C R Swart.  We must also say that on our side, we did not delve in detail into that matter because the main thrust of our being there was to save the young people and had we started now delving into everything that was arising, it's possible that we would have - it would have been really a diversion so to speak.

MS MKHIZE: I'm interested in this because I would like to hear whether you picked up - that as a grouping together, they were a danger to each other or to themselves?  It really important for us to understand this formation.

CRISIS COMMITTEE: If the young man says he was working for the special branch, then I guess a lot of questions would go on in your mind and perhaps you wouldn't get all the answers.  Who directed him to come to Paul Verryn's house, is he a free agent as he's playing a particular role with regard to the conflict between what we understood then to be the Mandela Football Club and the Methodist Church?
 I'm saying those questions you would ask yourself but we thought that if we spent a lot of time investigating that, we would have moved away from the main task which we thought we were attending to at the time.

MS MKHIZE: Chairperson, the reason why I'm also interested in this question is because in our own minds there are reasons why you didn't act timeously - in terms of rescuing this situation, are not yet clear because in your own words you have all said you were not intimidated by Mrs Madikizela Mandela, so she wasn't an issue.   But at the same time we don't get an impression that you acted in a particular way. You interacted with children who had been exposed to violence, the killings, who have held a gun, so that part is not clear as to what you did.

CHAIRPERSON: Reverend Chikane?

FRANK CHIKANE: Can I just ...[intervention]

YASMINE SOOKA: Sorry before you begin, when you answer that question, I wonder if you could just indicate whether if you had passed that information on, something might not have happened to the person concerned because really there was a paranoia out there about informers and I was wondering what impact that had on any of your decisions.

FRANK CHIKANE: Chairperson, firstly before I answer the second question, I think the first question we had already indicated.  Short of negotiating to get the young people handed over to us, the next you needed to do is to go to Mr Mandela himself and Mr Tambo and that's what we did and it was done within that same time around the 13th, 14th etc, all of it happened around that particular time so that was the action.
 I put it on record Chairperson, that there's reference to Mrs Mandela not responsible to any structure and my understanding at that time was that Mr O R Tambo himself was in fact the one who interacted with her and that's why we actually did exactly that.
 On the issue of Cebekhulu, I think it's important to be a bit careful about how you handle information of a person who said I worked for police stations C R Swart in Durban, Hammarsdale.  You don't take that word and communicate that as it is because it could cause somebody's death and so you need to be careful whether or not this is true and if it is true, why did he run away.  
 There were many questions that were involved, why did both the Inkatha Freedom Party and the UDF reject him?  There were many questions but even when we learnt about a list of informers amongst us, we were careful in handling that type of thing because you could also have information fed in and then you kill each other in the process.
 And that is why we had to act very responsibly and not do anything that would in fact jeopardise anybody's life at that stage with the uncertainties that were involved.

MS MKHIZE: Because there isn't much time, I will the Chairperson to ask two related questions.  Yesterday when we heard Bishop Storey, it wasn't clear in our own minds as to why he didn't intervene as a matter of urgency directly but he gave us an explanation that he had to work through community structures.
 I for one was left with an assumption which I would like to clear with you, whether were political interests, ambitions and aspirations a factor in not really taking vigorous steps?   I know this issue has been raised but the feeling is that this is an important question and you must explain it.