Amnesty Hearings — Pretoria — UNKNOWN

JAMES WHEELER: Mr De Bruin was not at home that evening, and after we returned, I went home, but I dropped Mr Pyper off at his home and I went to my own home, and the following morning I returned to Mr Pyper, where we discussed these things and I said to him again that I did not believe that we had killed people and I returned to my home and that is where the police arrived then.

MR MOLOI: Did you endeavour in any way to reach De Bruin, your immediate senior, according to you, or any other AWB official?

JAMES WHEELER: No, I did not, because on radio and television there was no mention of the so-called resistance which would have been carried out by the right wing movements.

MR MOLOI: ...contribution then have been recognised by AWB if you had not made it known to them, and secondly by the political, the government leadership at that time, because it was your intention to disrupt what they were doing, the elections, how would it have been known?

JAMES WHEELER: We must once again consider the allegations which were made that we were in fact a group of people who carried out these actions, and that is what I believed as well, and the day after the incident, we were reasonably shocked or embittered because no other incidents had occurred, and that we had acted exactly according to that which the right wing had proclaimed and that nothing further had happened.

MR MOLOI: Can you really say you had acted precisely as the right wing had prescribed, because if I understood you properly, you were never given instructions to go shoot the blacks?

JAMES WHEELER: I would say so.

MR MOLOI: ...proud then if the disruption of the elections succeeded, that your organisation, through your contri-bution, is recognised as the cause thereof?

JAMES WHEELER: Yes, I would have been proud.   However, after these events, what is there to be proud of.

MR MOLOI: How would, before you were arrested, how then would your organisation accredit you, so to say, with that deed if you did not inform them about it?

JAMES WHEELER: Let me put it to you this way, there was no mention of accreditation or reward, we were told that we were doing this for our country.

MR MOLOI: No further questions, Mr Chairman, thank you.

CHAIRPERSON: Yes, thank you.   Advocate Gcabashe, do you have any questions you would like to put to the witness?

UNKNOWN: Yes, thank you chair.   Mr Wheeler, talking about the value system that you were brought up in as an Afrikaner conservative young man, those same values you were taught in your family were the values that people like the Ecksteens who were at your house, the other family, Schutte, I mean they, your wives, they held the same values, didn't they, they were brought up in the same types of households?

JAMES WHEELER: I'm not certain as to how they were raised.

UNKNOWN: The discussions you had on your house on the 27th, the political discussions, you were all agreed that you were under threat as a "volk", that you needed to protect yourselves and you needed to try and conserve the values you had been taught?

JAMES WHEELER: Could you repeat the question please?

UNKNOWN: Just from the discussions you had on the 27th, you were talking about politics, yes?

JAMES WHEELER: Yes.

UNKNOWN: The ideas that you were sharing were based on the same values you had all been taught, you know that you are a folk, you are a grouping of people, fairly conservative people, yes?

JAMES WHEELER: Those who were present, who were not as far right as what we were, had their own ideas and I had my own ideas.

UNKNOWN: I'm simply saying that the core of things you were discussing, as Afrikaner people, was that you believed in certain things, is that correct?

JAMES WHEELER: That is what I believed, yes.

UNKNOWN: And you wanted to preserve your culture, your status as fairly conservative people?

JAMES WHEELER: That is correct.

UNKNOWN: And this is what colours your political idea as well, you know, your upbringing, those values you are taught, there are certain political objectives therefore you try and achieve?

JAMES WHEELER: That is correct.

UNKNOWN: I'm just thinking broadly in terms of the AWB, broadly in terms of Afrikaner families, what I have learnt about them in proceedings such as this, so if I'm wrong, please say I'm wrong, all right?   Now, in those discussions, you and Mr Pyper were the only ones who wanted to go out and do something to derail these elections?

JAMES WHEELER: That is correct.

UNKNOWN: And you heard the discussion between I think it was Mr Ecksteen and Mrs Pyper, where he said to her, "Try and stop them", you were there?

JAMES WHEELER: I think so.

UNKNOWN: And you, despite having your own people say to you, "This isn't the right thing to do, not now", you still decided to go out and shoot whichever black person you came across?

JAMES WHEELER: You could put it that way.

UNKNOWN: You went out and didn't bother to identify those black people as ANC or Communist Party members?

JAMES WHEELER: As I've said, one must look at the broader spectrum, if one wanted to identify the people, you would have had to have gone to the election rooms and looked at the ballots which they had voted with in order to determine who was ANC or who had voted for other parties.

UNKNOWN: But your upbringing was to value life, yes?

JAMES WHEELER: That's true.

UNKNOWN: The only time you would go against what you had been taught from childhood would be where you had a specific political objective?

JAMES WHEELER: That is correct.

UNKNOWN: Now I'm talking about this particular case, how did you think you were achieving a political objective when you couldn't identify your enemy?

JAMES WHEELER: I accepted that black people voted ANC and that they were ANC orientated, and that led me to doing this.

UNKNOWN: Now, you grew up with black people around you, whether they were workers, but you grew up with black people around you, yes?

JAMES WHEELER: No, the only time when I worked with black people was when I actually began working, when we mixed with black people, so to speak.

UNKNOWN: Didn't you have black "bediendes", people who worked in your home from a young age to the time you were married and settled?

JAMES WHEELER: No.

UNKNOWN: The few black people you met at work, did you assume that they too were ANC or Communist Party members?

JAMES WHEELER: On the mine there were various cultural groups also from other countries, for example from Mozambique, who had come to seek out work here, and those with whom I identified as South African mine workers, in my mind they were ANC members.

UNKNOWN: But this wasn't a fact that you established at any stage?

JAMES WHEELER: No.

UNKNOWN: And forgive me if I'm wrong, do say so, this isn't what the AWB taught you or talked about, that all black people are ANC or Communist Party people, all of them?

JAMES WHEELER: Everybody accepted it as that, and we also knew that the IFP was on the one side and automatically the AWB was aware of them, so it was said that black people supported the ANC, however most of the IFP members came from Natal and we didn't really have anything serious to do with the IFP people.

UNKNOWN: Also Lukas Mangope and the AWB, to a certain extent, co-ordinated activities, supported them in certain ways, those were black people, the AWB didn't teach you that every black man is an enemy, am I wrong?

JAMES WHEELER: You could put it that way.   If you observed what had happened in Bophuthatswana, that the AWB members were driving through the streets and voluntarily shooting at black people, so at that stage they didn't know to which party those people belonged.

UNKNOWN: Yes, but the AWB people went there specifically to protect a black person and his followers, those were not their enemies, that's why they died there, they were helping black people?