Amnesty Hearings — Bloemfontein — 1997-05-12

PIETER JAKOBUS GOUWS: Chairman, thank you so much.  I would just repeat this that we as a farming community, we as all other people don't live on hard evidence, we live also on perceptions.  Perceptions being created, rumours that are spread, utterances that are made, certain people that would address us, certain information that would be supplied in secret to us, etc, based on this we looked at this brutality of the murders.  I would like to repeat that again and I have been at several of these homesteads, I am thinking of Vredefort, I am thinking down here in Ficksburg, I am thinking of some of them, Mr Fourie, before he was killed here in Bloemfontein, he came out of my office - three hours later he was killed, so in many of these cases I had a personal impression, I formed my own personal impression what was going on there, I spoke to the people, the widows, etc, and so on.
	The brutality then, the secondly that in most cases weapons were taken and then thirdly that very little other substances have been removed from these farms.  That it had to be connected to a political motive and I personally addressed the police during several instances where I said to them that they must do something about these political attacks on the farmers or else we will take the law in our own hands, we cannot carry on like this.  And I asked the farming community, our District Unions and our Farmers' Unions, I asked them to interact with their local police stations in this sense that they must try to find out who is behind these political attacks, why the political attacks and why don't they do something and to put pressure on the local police really to do something.  And as far as I am concerned, and it may sound bad here, but I think the impression created by us was that drastic action must be taken against these political murders of farmers and against these perpetrators of these murders.
	Furthermore we even took this case to the State President, the security.  We had public meetings where we had up to three Ministers involved, I am thinking for instance one in Ficksburg where we had Minister Kobie Coetzee, Hernus Kriel and other ones, where the farmers were so angry that I had to calm them so that they didn't, you know so that they shouldn't physically assault the Ministers.
	So you can understand the total pressure that was building up in the community during this period of time.  And Chairman, lastly I would like to say that the senior police as far as I am concerned, never really played open cards with us.  When I am talking about senior police, I am talking about the people in charge, like for instance here in the Free State, in stead of playing open cards with us, really briefing us on the detail what was going on, they even go in political battles with us.  I had a political battle with General Calitz through the newspaper at one stage regarding you know, the safety and security aspect of the farms.
	And we got the idea and again it might be a perception, but we got the idea and I for one probably helped to foster it even further amongst the farming community, that these guys were hiding something.  That they were not coming out with the full truth, they were not telling us precisely what was going on.  And we got the idea that it was to protect the expected elections in 1994, at that stage we didn't know when the elections would be, but all of us guessed that there would be an election later on and they didn't want any disturbances and they didn't want any, let us call it, action from the farming community that would upset this negotiations or negotiations going on during that time period.
	So to summarise Chairman, I think from a farming community side where I have been involved as a politician as well as a leader of the farming community and specifically referring to the years 1989, 1990, 1991, we accepted based on the information available to us and the perceptions created, that the political force or forces have been involved with the specific design to disrupt economic activities in the rural areas, to murder out farmers or by doing, by murdering out farmers, by the brutality of their acts, and I may add, during this period of time we called on all the old farmers to please move from the farms and to settle in towns or in areas where they are protected because they would be the first targets.
	It became evidence that in most cases, these attacks would be directed towards the older members of the farming community and we asked them at numerous occasions through press releases and other statements, we asked them to protect themselves, but in the final analysis please leave the farms.  We also put tremendous pressure through the political channels and through organised agriculture on the police force and I am talking about police force at local levels too and I am honest with you today if I say that we perhaps helped to create an atmosphere during that period of time, that we were under siege, that we were under attack and that political forces being applied against us had one purpose in mind, that is really to take our land, to wipe us out as economic force or to destroy our political influence.
	And I can honestly also say that we used every means available to us to try to get this manner rectified and the normal attention being paid to it, through action from Government, but up to I would say 1994, 1995, we never had the armed forces involved, and I am talking about the army or, you know, the defence force in broader terms, where they were brought in really to protect the rural areas, so it was up to the police and the farming communities and to a little extent, to a smaller extent perhaps the commando's working, where the farmers  had been involved themselves.
	And the last point Chairman, these farm watches, it happened that the farmers had to take their own vehicles, had to use their own vehicles, they had to patrol all the rural, dirt roads at night time.  During these times obviously the wife and kids would be left at home, all alone and a general psychosis of fear, or distrust, of aggressiveness prevailed during this period in the rural areas of the Free State.  The insecurity was tremendous, it was immense.  You couldn't live in the Free State in the rural communities during this period of time and not be effected by that insecurity, where the farmer would be away, his wife and kids would be sitting there on a farm, perhaps 10, 5, 15 kilometres away from the nearest neighbours.
	We even went so far to try to install a manned radio in every single farm homestead and I think that helped to a certain extent.  But Chairman, though perhaps a little bit elaborated, but I do think it was necessary to draw a better background for what actually happened during the period 1989 to 1991 as far as I am concerned, in the Free State rural areas, thank you.

ADV MADASA: Was there any formal arrangement between the Farmers' Union and the police in regard to security in that period?

PIETER JAKOBUS GOUWS: Yes, there was a formal arrangement.  The farm watch basically should consist out of the police, the security forces, then the defence force as well as the farming community.  In general terms what happened was that it was a direct working relationship between the police and the local farmers and many of the farmers joined the police force also as these special, I don't know what the name is specifically, but they were sworn in as special Constables, something like that and they would do duty with the police and we tried to get police vehicles or policemen involved in all of our night duties because we didn't deal only with security, we caught a lot of people you know, stealing for instance copper wire or cattle or whatever it was.

JUDGE WILSON: And did you have the problem that we had elsewhere that they were all short of vehicles?