Amnesty Hearings — Johannesburg — 1999-02-19

CHAIRPERSON: Do I understand then you had a meeting, you showed him your notes, he showed you his notes, and you took all the notes away with you and you sat down and wrote out this document?

PULENG ZWANE: Yes, as an Investigator, I had to make sure that whatever I put down, the person who is being investigated, has an access to that and that reflects what he was telling me.  That statement reflected what Dube told me.

CHAIRPERSON: Yes, but you took it away, you wrote the document, the statement out from the information you had, and you then showed it to Dube and he agreed to accept it, is that the position?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.

MR RICHARD: And at that stage, were you happy that what Mr Dube was going to swear an oath to affirm, was the correct recordal of the truth of the matter?

PULENG ZWANE: What I was happy about was that at least to a certain extent, we would have established who have killed Dhlomo.  But what we would not have established was whether was Dhlomo an informer or not, or was Dube an informer or not.
	Those other hanging things were immaterial.  What was material was who killed Dhlomo and the person who killed Dhlomo, then makes an application for amnesty.

CHAIRPERSON: That is what interests me.  The statement doesn't say who killed Dhlomo?

PULENG ZWANE: The statement says Dube who led a unit in Soweto as a commander, Dube and his cell, makes a collective responsibility that as a cell they have killed Dhlomo and therefore they are making an application, but not that Dube was prepared to say to me I am prepared to take the full responsibility of the case.

CHAIRPERSON: But as I understand it, you can tell me if I am wrong here, Dube had told you who had killed Dhlomo?  He told you that it was the cell commander who killed him?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.

CHAIRPERSON: Why didn't you put it in the statement?  You said what you were happy about was that the statement would establish who killed Dhlomo.
	My difficulty is if that was what you were happy about establishing, say that he decided that Dhlomo should be killed and ordered the cell commander to do so.

PULENG ZWANE: Okay.  Maybe the issue here is whether do you define a killer as a person who pulled the trigger or do we define a killer as all the people who have plotted for a person to be killed.  I define a killer in those broad terms.

MR RICHARD: What is the responsibility of an applicant when applying for amnesty, is it not to make a full and complete disclosure of all relevant facts?

PULENG ZWANE: It is so.

MR RICHARD: By omitting the relevant facts as to who pulled the trigger, don't you believe you are omitting a relevant fact?

PULENG ZWANE: Maybe I would take you back. I did not complete my investigation in this case to my satisfaction.  Had I been given the opportunity to do so, I would have been sitting here with more dignity and confidence.  Believe me, it is hard for me sit here without having completed that investigation.
	So, it is very unfair to ask me a question whether I have omitted some relevant facts.  I would ask you who defines whether a fact is relevant or not?  I would say Joy is also relevant to the case, but I also omitted her.

MR RICHARD: Right.  Were your Security Branch sources able to confirm that the deceased, Mr Dhlomo was an informer?

PULENG ZWANE: Pardon me sir?

MR RICHARD: Were your Security Branch sources able to confirm that the deceased was an informer?

PULENG ZWANE: By deceased you mean Dhlomo?

MR RICHARD: Correct.

PULENG ZWANE: No, they could not.

ADV SANDI: Sorry, did you specifically ask them whether he in fact was an informer?

PULENG ZWANE: I asked them and then they told me that they are not, they don't know whether was Dhlomo an informer or not.  Today our knowledge, Dhlomo was not an informer.

MR RICHARD: When did you make that enquiry, before or after this statement sworn under oath as it is styled?

PULENG ZWANE: You will forgive me there, I am not sure, but I can put my head on the block here by giving you a history.
	Each and every person I investigated, though the TRC calls them a perpetrator, they later on became my friends, all of them, from Vlakplaas askaris and so on, and after my investigation, I still had contact with them and in our discussion and in our contact, a certain information came to me and then I am not sure whether that information came to me at the stage of writing that statement or afterwards.

MR RICHARD: So your answer is you don't remember?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.

MR RICHARD: Now,  if you turn to the last sentence ...(intervention)

ADV SANDI: Sorry Mr Richard, if you will be dealing with a different issue, can I just ask a question pertaining to what you have just dealt with.
	Mr Zwane, are you always alive to the possibility that the police could tell a lie about someone who is not an informer to say that this person was an informer?  How do you deal with that?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.  Thousands and thousands of people have been killed with the accusation that they are informers, and others have been surviving the killing.  In terms of the police we cannot conclusively rely on them as to whether was so and so an informer or not.
	The police could just label a person an informer, and then you bring that information to the TRC.  For instance, Maake Skosana who was accused of being an informer, though the police labelled her an informer, but the TRC investigation established that she was not an informer, so we cannot rely on the police to determine whether was so and so an informer or not.

CHAIRPERSON: The only way you could ascertain this with any certainty, is if you can get hold of the relevant docket or other books, case books or things, and there are entries in there, reflecting information that the police had received.

PULENG ZWANE: Sure, but you should know that the police give their sources code names and then as long as you base your information on codes, you won't go anywhere.  The only person who will know the code is the handler, who happens to be a Security Branch and who are not trusted.

CHAIRPERSON: The point is if you do it conclusively enough, you can ultimately ascertain who could have supplied that information and who could not?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.

MR RICHARD: But you did not make those investigations?

CHAIRPERSON: Well, you never had sight of any of the books?  As I understand you were told things by certain Security Policemen, who were not concerned with the investigation themselves, they weren't handlers themselves, they merely gave you some information?

PULENG ZWANE: Look, from the start I said this case was, I was not tasked to investigate this case.  This case came to me in the process of me investigating other cases.
	So I spent little time investigating this case.  Had I had enough time and opportunity, I would have been a different person sitting here.

MR RICHARD: Thank you.  Go to the last line, last paragraph of your document, now Exhibit D, there you used the words
"members of his Unit, took a ..."
and I stress the word: 
"decisive decision"
Then if we compare that phrase with paragraph 4 on page 10 of the bundle, there is a paragraph which says that: "circumstances that led myself ..."
that is Mr Dube: 
"Sipho Tshabalala, Clive Makhubu and Sibogiseni Zungu to take a decisive decision to eliminate Dhlomo were as follows"
It is not unnatural that both documents used the same word, decisive decision.  You wrote them?

PULENG ZWANE: I?

MR RICHARD: You wrote both?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.

MR RICHARD: From that we can understand that what you were told by Mr Dube was that he and the three persons I had named from paragraph 4, took a collective and joint decision?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.

MR RICHARD: And that is what Mr Dube told you?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.

MR RICHARD: Is that what you believe from what your investigations reveal, to be the case?

PULENG ZWANE: Sure.