Special Hearings — Armed Forces Hearings — 1997-10-07

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much for your presentation and thank you for making copies available to the panel, so that we could follow this carefully and clearly.
 Brig Mofokeng, you have outlined the submission on behalf of APLA and PAC.  What we will do now is to ask Mr Glen Goosen who is the national director, investigative unit to put questions to you. If there are questions that you yourself wish to reply to, obviously you will do that. If there are other members of your delegation that you want to refer to, we are perfectly happy for anyone to attempt that reply.
 May I say before I hand over to Mr Goosen, who is assisted by Mr Paul van Zyl, that the TRC has no political agenda.  Like you, it is committed to the truth, wherever it leads us. And if the questions are awkward, it will be exactly the same as some of your statements which you say may have been unfortunate or awkward, because I think it is good that we face each other honestly and openly.  And I am very grateful to you for being as frank as you have been.  The TRC is a controversial commission, it deals with many difficult problems and our only solace is that everybody seems to find us difficult, not only PAC or APLA, but we are criticised from all sides.  I think that's inevitable and all we have to do is to try and keep an honest and open course.  You have set that standard and I am grateful to you.  Mr Glen Goosen.
EXAMINATION BY MR GOOSEN
   Thank you very much, Mr Chairperson.  Brig Mofokeng, I am going to start by addressing the question to you. You will indicate who from your delegation might answer the question. It is not necessarily directed to you personally, but I will begin by addressing myself to you.
 You deal to some extent in the presentation that you have just made, with some of the elements of the strategy, military strategy adopted by APLA, and perhaps, if we could start with that.  In the PAC submission of the 20th of August of last year, the armed strategy adopted by APLA is described as a strategy of people's war. What exactly is meant by that term and what were the key elements of that strategy, understood by the APLA command?

UNKNOWN: I think I will answer that one.  The strategy of APLA, as I described earlier on, what is the liberation war, what we referred to as people's war.  It was based on the premises that ours is the struggle of the people as a whole, of the oppressed people.  We adopted guerilla warfare and guerilla warfare basically, it is the strategy of the weak to fight the strong, until the ultimate destruction of the powerful.
 So people's war basically, it is the involvement of the people in every front to wage struggle, to destroy the status quo or the regime. Of course, as the name shows, that Azanian People's Liberation Army, it is the army base on the people, on the course of the people as a whole and it remain a liberation movement. 
 I think others can maybe add on that, because it is quite a broad concept. Maybe if you want specifics, but before then I can call upon my colleagues to expand on that, because the liberation war is quite broad and is there anybody who will want to - because I don't get as to whether what actually did you want?  Because, yes, it is based on people's war and guerilla warfare, as a liberation warfare.

MR GOOSEN: Right.

MEMBER OF DELEGATION: Yes, basically what it means is that when you strategise in the war, you are not only going to involve the people that have been trained in a formal way, but you are also going to mobilise the people, mobilise the people and organise them, into defensive units, so that they can defend themselves in a situation where the oppressed people running the gauntlet of racist brutality, each one of them had to defend himself. So APLA's mission therefore, was to arm the people eventually. Like you had a militia, people's militia, so you arm the people so that now everybody understand what the struggle is all about and what the defensive nature of the struggle is, and what is to achieved one, and what is their role, each one of them in the struggle. So the people therefore, in that sense, are involved gradually.

UNKNOWN: To add on that, it involved various fronts, like workers, that is the trade union front, the students front, the peasants front, the intellectual front, or the academicians, et cetera. So it involved everybody to participate in the destruction of the system.  Brig Phitla wanted to add on that.

BRIG PHITLA: I think to put it in the correct perspective as well.  The Azanian People's Liberation Army learnt from the other liberation struggles, all over the world.  We took examples both of defeats and successes.  From those defeats and successes, then we came with our own strategy and we had to adopt what we thought was best suitable for our conditions in South Africa.
 Our existence justified itself by being supported by the people who were claiming to be fighting for. 
 Secondly, the experience it taught us, that in countries like in Cuba, where the liberation forces did not base their struggle on the support from the masses they claim to liberating, and therefore they remained (indistinct) and they were defeated.  Whilst in other struggles, like in the People's Republic of China, where they correctly identified and associated themselves with the Chinese people, their struggle succeeded, because the whole struggle which they were waging had therefore justified itself through the support that they got from the people.
 Therefore, our strategy of the people's war was based on the fact that our struggle could only succeed if it is supported by the people. We were recruiting from the people, we were sheltered by the people, we were financed by the people and we were fed by the people. Meaning, therefore, that our struggle was mostly supported by the people who were claiming to be fighting for. Hence, we are saying it is a people's war.  Thank you.

MR GOOSEN: Thank you.  I would take it from that, that the defining of particular military targets would be shaped by the notion that one is operating on a broad front, mobilising in different sectors of the community.  Would that be correct?

MR NTSEBEZA: You must speak into the microphone.  You have nodded, but it is not recorded by the machine.

UNKNOWN: That is correct, yes.

MR GOOSEN: What then were defined as the strategic military targets of APLA, and is it possible for you to give a description of those strategic military targets, through the period of APLA's development?  Obviously APLA operated over a number of years and not just in one particular period.  What then were the strategic military targets defined by APLA in the prosecution of this people's war?

UNKNOWN: Ja. Ja, in military terms we are having strategy and tactics. I don't know whether you are confining yourself to strategic targets or even technical targets. But in our bulletins, in our submission, we always reiterate that our targets are where the police, the Army and all other security services or organs of the State, and of course, including other technical objectives and targets. I think I will also refer the matter to my delegation to expound on that. Anybody?