Amnesty Hearings — Johannesburg — 1998-10-15

MR PRINSLOO: With respect, the Committee is looking at this in retrospect.  The purpose was to obtain the firearm, but now you have to consider the full testimony, because this applicant had now been wounded.  Things had gone wrong, and as a consequence of the fact that they had gone wrong, they would be hunted by the police.
	It was the most natural thing that the people would do away with that firearm.  The first applicant didn't tell them to throw it away, but they knew they were in possession of hot property and it had to be thrown away, they were in that situation.

CHAIRPERSON: Yes, but anything they had taken would have been hot, whether it was automatic rifles or whatever.  They didn't take that firearm to one of the safe houses, and handed it over to the guards at the safe houses and said use this, and defend the women and children when the persons who were the enemy, come to attack you on election day.  They didn't do that.
	What did they do?  They disassembled it and threw it away in the dam.  So in other words, one has to consider the death of the deceased if one looks at the proportionality aspect, against that which the applicants had in mind to achieve as part of their objective.
	Can one do that?  That is what I wish you to address.

MR PRINSLOO: Mr Chair, the applicants wished to obtain firearms.  What they did because of the circumstances with that weapon, cannot with respect, affect their application because it is a fact, they went to Van Rensburg, the Commander's house.  He was informed of what had happened, he helped the applicant, he covered up the fact that he was injured, he had him treated so that the police couldn't find him or discover him.
	The second thing they did was exactly the same with the firearm, to keep that in circulation so that these people could be linked, because they were using legal firearms, not stolen firearms in their attack, so their firearms would be able to be brought into connection with the cartridge casings found on the scene.  They did they just have to go and hand themselves over to the police without any resistance?  Then there wouldn't have been a struggle.
	That in all honestly, couldn't have been the case.

CHAIRPERSON: Is that not the action of people who realised that they had made a mess of things and that they were staring in the eye the consequences of their criminal actions?  This is not the actions of people who felt that what they had done, was justified.  This is more the actions of people who had been criminal and who had tried to escape the consequences of their crime.
	The other point is with what purpose was the Constable killed?

MR PRINSLOO: With respect, to obtain the firearm or firearms there.

CHAIRPERSON: For the sake of his side arm?

MR PRINSLOO: (Microphone not on)

CHAIRPERSON: So the objective was to kill him for the side arm which was then thrown away?

MR PRINSLOO: But with respect, you keep taking us to the fact that the firearm was thrown away.  How could this be attributed to the first applicant, he was wounded, he didn't throw it away.
	If the other people threw away the firearm, he can't be blamed for it.  He did not throw it away, he did not even give the instruction to this effect.  There is not a single piece of evidence to that effect that he had said anything like that, that the firearm had to be thrown away.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Prinsloo, the firearm was not used in the struggle in which the applicants and the organisation were involved.  At the end of the day, this firearm did not contribute anything or take anything away from the struggle in which they were involved at that stage, that is the point we are making.

MR PRINSLOO: With respect Mr Chair, what the Committee submits is that if it had been successful, it would have contributed.   If there first had to be a contribution, then one has to go back to many other cases, and unfortunately I have to refer you to many ANC cases where things went hopelessly wrong, when there was no contribution to the struggle, and that wasn't a problem for those people.
	If one looks as a recent case, where I was involved with the Black Cats, where the ANC policy was not even to rob people, where they went and robbed people, and how did that contribute to the struggle?

CHAIRPERSON: Are you referring us to findings or just to facts of other cases, because if you can refer us to findings as in the case of Froneman which you had put forward to us, that makes sense, but otherwise it wouldn't help much.  Unless it is a finding already given.

MR PRINSLOO: I could refer you to the case of - where they went to the St James church where the person involved, was just picked up at a taxi rank, he went to the St James church and there as it was stated, they indiscriminately shot at people who were just innocent churchgoers.
	If one were to look at the proportionality there and how it contributed to the struggle, while at that stage negotiations were already ongoing, and these people were killed in cold blood, 54 people were seriously injured and nine killed and the weapons that were used there and one looks at the proportionality, how could one compare it with what is held up to these applicants?
	One should look at the case of Amy Biehl for example as well, and here I can give you copies.  There didn't even appear to be an instruction in the case where she was killed.  It was simply that they wished to bring home the message that it was aimed against white persons.
	As a matter of fact, she was not even a person who was against that set up, she was serving that particular set up, and she was totally, hopelessly innocent.  She was killed.
	With respect Mr Chair, how could one at all draw a distinction as in the case with Froneman and Harmse and the person killed there, and the applicant?   I could refer you to the case of the applicant Botha and Eugene Marais, where the applicants who were members of - I can't remember the exact movement - that was in the case of Botha, Smuts and Marais, where the movement was under the command of Piet Rudolph, the Orde Boerevolk, yes my colleague corrected me here.
	In that case, the applicant said that for every white killed, they were told to kill ten blacks.  It was like a revenge case.  A white was killed on the beach and the instruction was given that ten black people had to be killed.
	The applicants in that case went with automatic rifles, they searched for a target, they were looking for a target, there was no specific target identified.  They encountered a bus and they cold bloodedly fired into the bus and killed numerous people there.  People whom they didn't even know whether they were Inkatha, ANC or whatever.
	They were killed there.  The first applicant, Botha's application failed because the person who was supposed to have given the instruction to him, didn't testify but the second and third applicants involved, did received amnesty.

CHAIRPERSON: Was there in any of these cases which you are referring us now to, a situation where the applicant for amnesty had said that he was disappointed because the action had failed?
	Wasn't it so that in each of these cases it was an argument that however shocking the incident might have been if one were to look at it cold, in a normal situation, it was justified in terms of some or other struggle in which some of those applicants or one or other of those applicants were involved?  And not one of them had called it a failure, it was a success from their point of view, but they were sorry that it had to happen that innocent people in the process were also injured.
	But everybody was convinced that what they had done, had been justified and had been a success in terms of how they saw the case in that instance.