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

MR MODISE: The South Africans were not the only ones who employed such methods to liberate themselves.  Here we are talking about an oppressed people, a people who are brutalised, a people who are murdered on a daily basis, what did you expect us to do?  We had to call upon the people to defend themselves and to use whatever methods they could to protect themselves, protect themselves against oppression, protect themselves against the rampant slaughter that was taking place in this country.  Our country was drowned in blood.
 And it is this regime that regarded, I mean it is that racist regime that regarded every black person who stood against them, who stood against oppression as the enemy.  
 Yes we encouraged people to liberate themselves and many people throughout the world who have been oppressed took that route and our people had the right to struggle for liberation, they had the right to defend themselves.  So it was within our right to call upon the people to defend themselves against these brutalities.
 Yes, I agree with you that when you have a people's war, and that statement has been made before, then the targets begin to get blurred.  But what must not be forgotten that amongst those masses there was organisation.  We had people's leaders amongst them and the policies of the movement were put across most of the time.  
 And also some of the atrocities that have been carried out 
have been carried out by the same regime pretending to be part of the struggling people so as to tarnish the name of the organisation that stood for the liberation of our people in this country.

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: May I just add to that Chairperson.

CHAIRPERSON: Mac Maharaj.

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: If we look at our submission in August 1996, page 52 in the second column halfway down we refer to a pamphlet that the ANC distributed in the country called "Take the struggle to the white areas".  In that it made a call to the people, and it gave them a guidance what they should be doing in taking the offensive in the struggle.  It was not just saying take arms and start shooting.  It said number one
"Strengthen our worker's organisations and engage in united action in the factories, mines, farms and suburbs".
That's disciplined industrial action, not shooting away like cowboys.
 Secondly, 
"Spreading the consumer boycott to all areas of the country".
Again not a violent form of action.
 Thirdly -
"Organised and well-planned demonstrations in the white suburbs and central business districts".
Then,
"Form underground units and combat groups in our places of work and taking such action such as sabotage in the factories, mines, farms and suburbs and disrupting the enemy's oil, energy, transport, communications and other vital systems.
 Next point -
"Systematic attack against the army and the police and the so-called Area Defence Units in the white areas".
 Last -
"Well planned raids on the armouries and dumps of the army, police, farmers and so on to secure arms for our units".
So this call was being made with a very clear focus, there's a multiplicity of forms of actions.  So we should not be reading this particular area of arm yourselves to simply mean that the focus of action was simply to get arms and shoot.  All these actions, in the context of South Africa of the time, if even workers went on strike would often lead to the police and security forces acting against them indiscriminately and violently, and may necessitate a further development of defending yourselves.
 So I think that if you locate it in terms of that, what we were putting forward and policy and guidelines and if you locate it within 
the three layers of armed activists that we were seeing where the place of the MK officer in providing guidance on the ground then you will realise that we were not making that call simply in a broad brush indiscriminate way that would lead to a complete anarchy situation.  That was the thrust of our policy and that was the thrust of our tactics.

CHAIRPERSON: Could I just before Mr Kasrils speaks, just for the record could you, I know you've made this before in your submission but I can't recall the - when was that call made, what year, can you remember?

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: 1985.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: After the - 1985 after the Vaal Triangle was burning.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much.  Mr Kasrils.

RONNIE KASRILS: It provides me with a cue, Chairperson, to focus on what I feel Mr Goosen is focusing on.  Mr Maharaj has said that this was in the context of the Vaal Triangle burning, why was the Vaal Triangle burning?  Why did Sebokeng rise up?  Because the people were under attack by the security forces and the government of the day and its policies, that's why.  That's why.  And there's a litany of this in our history.
 Our presentations in the past, the two past presentations 
explaining why we had to take up arms in 1961 make that point perfectly clear that the centuries of colonial repression followed by apartheid were naked, violent assaults on the people of this country, culminating in the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.  That's why we resorted to armed struggle.
 Kennedy had put it in a brilliant way when he said that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.  So it's a question as we, as the ANC has put it in its submission, that apartheid was genocide against the people of this country, the black majority.  They were out to kill people who rose because they found that the system was unjust.  They killed people if people attempted to demonstrate and protest.  So they are absolutely out of order in history, and they place themselves with all the tyrants of history when they say that they unleashed violence on a people demanding their rights because guerilla resistance or freedom fighters were opposing them, and they couldn't distinguish between the freedom fighters and the population as a whole, and therefore it's the freedom fighters who are to blame for the security forces of a tyranny having to deal with the people in this harsh way.  That's what is behind, that's the philosophy behind this rationale.  And that's why Mr Modise is perfectly correct when he points to the schoolchildren of Soweto in 1976.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.  Mr Abubakar.

UNKNOWN: Mr Chairperson to come back to the question that has been raised about the fact that they could not identify the combatants or members, trained cadres of MK, one raises the question, if there is a saboteur moving around the streets do the security forces simply go and bomb the entire suburb because there's a single saboteur there?
 One raises the question, if there's a spy what did the Americans do?  They used the sting operation to ferret out those spies.  They didn't round up the entire population and chuck them into prisons. Now that is the equivalent of what the regime was doing.  
 They did that purely because of the racist ideology of apartheid, because they saw blacks as subhuman and didn't care about their rights, and therefore they thought they could do it.  What did they expect the population to do?  The population as a whole arose.  It is not only the combatants that were there to fight the regime.  The entire population was fighting the regime.

CHAIRPERSON: Mrs Burton.