Special Hearings — Political Party Recalls — UNKNOWN

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: Chairperson I hope that Magnus Malan when he gave evidence before you acknowledged that the first necklacing was carried out by the apartheid forces. But I want to take the question very seriously. On hindsight if we delayed, in the judgement of any person, too long in appealing for the end of this practice and to condemn it, then on hindsight, yes, we made a mistake, we should have done it earlier. But the question re-arises again about the realities in which we were struggling.
From the period of the Rivonia arrests to 1973, it is from 1965 to 1973 repression reigned rampant in this country and there was hardly a single overt form of resistance sustainable within the country. 1973, with the strikes and in the context of various efforts by the African National Congress to re-group in exile, to train and to send missions into the country which were very quickly intercepted by the regime, the strikes of 1973, the uprising of 1976, brought back the reality that we could truly found our armed struggle on a political struggle and on mass action.
And the masses in this country need a huge tribute to be paid to them for where we are today, because by and large again, just as we focus sometimes on the violations and the larger picture disappears, and it appears as if the entire struggle of the masses was characterised by necklacing, it is the strikes, the demonstrations, it is the youth fighting with sticks and stones against saracens and tanks that has been an indispensable ingredient of where we are today.
So the ANC in its efforts to reach home needed to interact with the masses in motion and it needed to appreciate anything that they did even if it looked to us from a distance to be a form that we did not like. It needed to locate its appreciation in that context. The result is both the necklacing and various other activities that took place could not be reacted to by immediately having the benefit of the knowledge that the enemy was perpetrating those acts and seeking to discredit us. It had to be reacted to as something that the masses had taken up under conditions of extreme brutalisation and repression. And then you sought to channel that energy into proper forms of political action and unity with the armed actions that we were undertaking. So that explains the approach that we had to take.
It would be an extremely foolhardy leader of the ANC of 1984/85, '85 I think is the period of the first necklacing, to have stood up and said this is wrong, out with it. I know some people had the courage, but we had to balance the need for that understanding with a proper appreciation of what was happening at home, and we were always mindful that being so far from home needed for us to temper our judgements by a better understanding of what was happening on the ground. It was not for dassies and Cape wine that we sought to intercept every South African colleague in any part of the world, to sit down and talk with them and understand what was happening at home. Political leadership cannot be acquired simply from the textbooks, it needs to be located within the context of people as they are living and working and labouring and struggling. So that's the explanation I have.
And I think that it is an explanation that allows for us to say that if some people say our condemnation was made too late we can say, in all honesty that yes, it is possible to make that judgement from hindsight, but it would not be a judgement that would be very wisely made, and should not be too lightly made.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. Ronnie Kasrils.

UNKNOWN: I would just like to address myself to the very last statement that Mr Hanif Vally made where you focused on the two aspects internationally, the question of just cause in terms of a just war, is the one approach, and with it, and linked to it is what internationally is called justice in war, and that is that you wage your war in terms of humane conduct, so you don't invoke a just war and totally ignore your behaviour and your conduct. You might have a just cause and you wage a war and you resort to every means possible in terms of the ends justifying the means, necklaces, terrorism, indiscriminate slaughter and so on, and goodness knows we've seen a lot of that happening in this poor old world of ours today and in the past, but what of the ANC led armed struggle? We are looking at that struggle waged over virtually exactly 30 years.
Was it a just cause? Was our war about a just cause? Certainly. There is no ambiguity about that. I think everybody agrees.
How did we conduct that war? We are not looking at conduct by MK that was about wholesale indiscriminate terror. Over 30 years what can our critics point at in relation to that? There is the landmine issue. Mr Modise has referred to that. He has told you how a very legitimate approach of using landmines and not anti-personnel mines, we withdrew from that when we saw that we didn't have sufficient control, we withdrew from using that method.
The question of necklaces, Comrade Maharaj has dealt with that and the facts are that we issued this call to our people and we said hold on, necklaces should not be used.
What does that leave us with? In terms of the loss of human life one doesn't easily like to say well just a few car bombs, or just a few bombs that led to civilian deaths which weren't part of our policy as we've shown here, but in fact it was actually quite minimal. And in terms of that you must judge then the way we conducted this war. Where we made mistakes over 30 years we've apologised and we regret it profoundly, and I would say, Mr Vally, on that basis we fought a just war for a just cause and our justice in that war, the way we waged it, our conduct was extremely good. And I don't think you find many struggles that can compare quite frankly. As has been said here today, if we wanted to resort to terror bombing in this country it would have been very, very easy indeed, very easy, and you never saw that from the ANC and MK.

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. Hanif.

MR VALLY: Thank you Archbishop. I want to just move on to the next sub-point under the heading, which has got to do with Mrs Winnie Madikezela-Mandela. In the mid-1980's when popular struggle was at its height and the ANC was banned Mrs Madikezela-Mandela was seen as the public representative of the ANC. There have been two cases which have come to our Human Rights Violations Committee. The case of Lola Sono who was allegedly abducted and the complainant was the father, Mr Nikodemus Sono, and the case of Mr Siboniso Anthony Tshabalala and the deponent is his mother Mrs Nomsa Tshabalala, also a case of alleged abduction.
I have a number of questions in relation to this issue which I will put together and maybe the answer can be a composite one. Was Mrs Mandela acting as an ANC member during the 1980's? And if so was she subject to any organisational discipline? Were any attempts made to bring her position in line with ANC policy? Did the ANC make any attempt to establish contact with her to assert some sort of control over her in view of the fact that she was perceived as a public representative of the ANC, or in fact to dissociate the ANC from her actions?