Amnesty Hearings — Cape Town — 2000-11-19

UNKNOWN: Mr Chairperson, before dealing with motive, may I revert to one of the questions that you put to my learned friend and that is the people that have got amnesty for very serious crimes, the Amy Biehl, St James' Church and let me deal with the Amy Biehl case which was often quoted if they could get amnesty why can't we get it?  They lose sight of a number of legal and factual matters that distinguish the cases, particularly in relation to proportionality which is really a value judgement and the values of people depend to their age and intelligence, their education, their religious beliefs and the whole situation which leads us to have certain values, particularly in relation to proportionality.  To equate the acts of youngsters on the street, embittered by years of discrimination against them, lacking in proper facilities in their education and being bombarded by slogans of "one settler, one bullet" and acting on the spur of the moment that night when they see a young, white woman and they attack her and they kill her, applying those facts to the requirements in relation to motive, in relation to circumstance, in relation to proportionality, is one set of facts and that decision can - you're not called upon to say whether that is correct or not.  I don't want to make a submission whether the decision is correct or not but the motive, the facts, the circumstances, the background of the individuals is quite different.  I deal with the Amy Biehl case because it has been raised in other proceedings and I had occasion to read the Judgment and the distinguishing factors are so far, so important, that one Committee properly applying the criteria from ...(indistinct) comes to a conclusion, it doesn't mean that that decision can have any influence upon the decision of persons of the circumstances and the motivation that they're applying for amnesty here.  And if we take the other cases where I might, if we go and read the decisions it may be a different fact is stated.
	Mr Chairperson, on page 39, the question of motive.  I don't want to read out the paragraph.

CHAIRPERSON: Yes, we'll read them ourselves.  We've read them, I can assure you we'll read them again after having heard the argument.

UNKNOWN: ...(inaudible) only because he happens to dislike the target's political views.  The political views he holds are in his - not his main or real reason for agreeing to kill and what we say in 80 is that the mere fact that the person holds strong political views also does not and in itself properly explain a political motive to agree to participate in killings.  It is insufficient to say that I was a good Afrikaner and supporter of the National Party.  This may explain why you agreed to vote for the National Party in an election but it provides a totally inadequate explanation for why a human being might agree to carry out murders on behalf of the State.
	The applicants have not really sought to explain what events in their lives or strongly held political beliefs brought them to the point where they were willing to agree to kill the class or classes of persons who were targeted by the CCB.  An inference that we can draw from the behaviour of certain of the applicants is that they were probably psychopaths of a type and I don't want to enter into a medical, but it takes a certain amount of psychopathy to become a member of a group whose main objective is killing people.  But this is not a political condition, one would have expected evidence to the effect that the applicants personally believed that the people connected to the End Conscription Campaign deserved for reasons a, b and c to be killed.
	Mr Chairperson, there is another ...(indistinct) difficulty here and it straddles motive and proportionality, credibility and full disclosure and that is this, that none of the applicants was prepared to unequivocally say in any particular case "the buck stops with me, I made the decision either to propose or to confirm a death warrant".  They're prevaricated.  May I remind you of the difficulties that we and members of the Committee had to get them to agree that they had a discretion whether to do it or not.  We couldn't get an answer and it was only as a result of giving out of the way examples.  If I recall, a seven year old child, if you were asked to do that, were you prepared to do it in order to get a concession that there was a principle of discretion and once in terms of the Act from 3(a) to (f), they have to give evidence in order to satisfy and a satisfactory basis what their motive was, what the circumstances were, what the special objective was and whether or not it was proportional.  To pass the buck the way they all did here from the lowest to the highest is evidence of the fact that they were not bona fide, that they merely entered into this situation where killing is our business, don't ask us any questions about it.
	And what we say in 83 that we are not dealing simply the case of a uniformed soldier who agrees to shoot Nazis because they have declared war on France or bombed our home town.  The facts here for some people who agreed to murder civilians who had espoused different political views to the government of the day.  We have not heard any applicants explain the following, why they personally believed that murdering civilians were morally or politically justified, what strongly held political beliefs or life experiences motivated them to join a death squad which targeted anti-apartheid activists?

CHAIRPERSON: On this question of - and I understand your argument about members of the Police joining ...
END SIDE B OF TAPE 2
START OF SIDE A - TAPE 3

CHAIRPERSON: What is the situation or is there any difference between Basson for instance, who was a military man the whole time and probably, I don't know, we don't know under exactly what circumstances he became involved in the CCB but it was probably  when it was formed on an order, or just a transfer, or whatever and ...(intervention)

MR WESSELS: Sorry Mr Chairman, may I just say that there's specific evidence on record in that regard.  He was in fact asked by Verster to come and see and he was then told that he was going to be transferred to the CCB ...(intervention)

CHAIRPERSON: Yes, so his is a different situation.  He's a military man, gets a senior officer saying:  "Look we've got a new unit", he can hardly sit down and start negotiating, taking into account the ...

UNKNOWN: Well an officer is told, he's an officer and a gentleman and he's ordered to go and become a member of a murder squad and he doesn't raise any difficulties and he says:  "Yes, I'll do it.".  What is the difference in fact between him and, he could have said:  "I will go, Mr Verster I do not accept this, I will go to the leader of the army and I'm going to say that I am not going to do this.  I will go to the Minister and I will say".  It's no answer to say well but he probably knew that the Head of the Army and the Minister may have sent him to some outpost or other as a result.  There are no easy excuses.  There's a difference between if he was asked as a member of the Special Forces to commit an unlawful act, well that would have been a matter to be decided under those facts, but he applies for amnesty, to be judged as a member of the CCB and his joining makes him not much different and the same applies to Verster.  The only person that can have possibly benefited from this is Webb because he kept his, he was really a nominal Head of ...(intervention)

CHAIRPERSON: Also he was Head of Special Ops which was a far bigger operation, this was just a part of it.