Amnesty Hearings — East London — 1999-04-07

CHRISTOFFEL PIERRE VAN DER WESTHUIZEN: Chairperson, we were in the privileged position by the recruitment of the National Defence Force members, that we had access to a lot of expertise, graduates, technical people and a variety of occupations, professions.  Instead of using a Doctor to keep guard, we decided to use such a qualified person, in community upliftment projects and for that purpose a component of information was established that was Citizen Affairs, Civil Actions.
	Those people that we had then as National Servicemen, would be utilised in the communities to assist the local people whether it was with regard to medical issues, assisting them on farms, sowing, whatever, there were a variety of projects, and funds were made available and budgeted for, by me as Commander as well, for these actions.
	I used some of these people in Transkei, Ciskei and also in my own command for the time that I was here in the Eastern Cape as well as in the Witwatersrand.

MR SIBANYONI: Lastly, if I look at this Plan Katzen, it bypassed some of the departments, for example you were dealing with Ciskei and Transkei which were by that time, independent States, but I didn't see any involvement of other departments like the Department of Foreign Affairs.

CHRISTOFFEL PIERRE VAN DER WESTHUIZEN: That is correct Chair.    The Plan had its origin as a departmental idea, even in the planning phase, it was the security community involved, and not departments such as Foreign Affairs.
	Whether Foreign Affairs were later notified about this, I do not know, but yes, that is correct.  It was part of the security environment, and I think in the whole cycle of the Plan, it stayed within the security community.

MR SIBANYONI: Thank you Mr Chairperson.

CHAIRPERSON: General, you said that you started working on Strelitzia some time before and Strelitzia was your own initiative and you worked on it, and then you ultimately submitted it for consideration and approval and that was refused.
	Thereafter, you get if I may call it, added pressure, coming from the then State President to say look, these areas must be stabilised by the end of December.  You then come up with Plan Katzen, which has a thread running between it and Strelitzia, although there is differences, there are similarities.
	Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the feeling that that Plan Katzen was drawn up as a reaction to a situation that you had been placed in, in other words come up with a plan to stabilise this area or normalise it, so you just improve on or amend slightly Strelitzia and resubmit it.  Did you in your heart of hearts believe that Plan Katzen was a Plan that could succeed, if not within that 18 months in which you were given to normalise the area and I think you had mentioned that you thought it was optimistic, do you think it could have succeeded at all?

CHRISTOFFEL PIERRE VAN DER WESTHUIZEN: Chairperson, even today, I doubt, I think it was desperate times.  One can read of this desperate factors if you read Plan Katzen and even Strelitzia.
	Besides the very short time frames that we had, it is also true that the situation in the Eastern Cape reached peaks of being out of control, or not being controlled.  No, I did not think that Katzen could stabilise or normalise the whole situation.  In Katzen, I also wrote that this does not replace our existing plans and we had plans on a variety of terrains.
	Katzen was seen as, I won't say as a desperate effort, but as being a more drastic way to see whether we couldn't perhaps in that time frame, start to address this one big problem in the Eastern Cape.
	The idea was that it should commence, make a start and then by means of good control, keep things on track and then through that, that we could address this one main problem, existing in the Eastern Cape.
	But to put it in this way, I did not really put all my hope on Katzen.

CHAIRPERSON: Yes, thank you.   Mr Knoetze, do you have any questions arising out of questions that have been put by the panel?

MR KNOETZE: No, thank you Mr Chairman.

MR KNOETZE: .

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Avenant, do you have any questions arising?  Anybody else?

MR PENZHORN: No questions, thank you Mr Chairman.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you General, that concludes your testimony.
WITNESS EXCUSED

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Knoetze?

MR KNOETZE: I have nothing further, thank you Mr Chairman.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, so does that conclude the evidence for your applicant?

MR KNOETZE: It does, Mr Chairman.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Avenant, do you want to proceed with your application?

MR AVENANT: Mr Chairman, we will proceed, yes.  I believe they wanted to rearrange the microphones.

CHAIRPERSON: We will take a short adjournment while I have been indicated - two minutes' adjournment, while the microphones are adjusted.
COMMITTEE ADJOURNS