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

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: That would be too narrow an interpretation because at all times ANC policies emphasised the centrality of the political struggle and whilst the people's war strategy saw the
culmination in terms of a mass uprising that mass uprising could take many forms.  One of the dreams of all revolutionaries against unjust system has been the possibility of a general strike which would bring the country down to its knees.  And in many instances where a general strike has been sought to be the expression of that uprising it becomes necessary if the ruling authority were to use force to also ensure that there is some defence capacity.  The ANC has never been a movement which would put forwards a theoretical, analytical perspective for a strategy and simply insist that the reality must bend to that theory.  The art of revolution has been to adapt the strategy to the realities that you meet on the ground. 
 So I am saying to simply say it is a natural consequence of those positions that that blurring would arise does not follow.
 The second is the way in which the struggle was shaping up inside the country.  One of the great advantages that we today have, which has brought us to this democracy has been the very high level of politicisation of the mass of the people in South Africa.  It's a unique feature in the world.  Now when you look at some of the targets, as we have explained previously, often it is the people in that area who would know best within the system which particular individual epitomised that system in their day-to-day life.  None of us could say so from afar.  
 What has also come out in the recent past is often many 
masqueraded as civilians from the regime's side, even sometimes it's armed forces went into covert operations pretending to be civilians, because they were dressed in civilian clothes, but they would be known to the people that this one is from the security forces.  In fact my whole experience of the security forces, from the police section was all of them, my own personal torturers and the torturers of others did their work in civilian clothes.
 And that has also been illustrated the way, for example the Pretoria bomb, was reported upon.  We now know better how much the former regime manipulated the way in which the reports would go into the media.  In the Pretoria bomb case there was an early report, if I remember correctly in one of the papers, possibly the Rand Daily Mail which said immediately after the bomb there was a phalanx of uniformed people on Church Street.  But the reports kept on talking about 19 people as if they were civilians.  No newspaper sat down and said let's take the names, were they working at the Air Force headquarters, were they part of the Air Force staff or officers.
 So I am saying we need to be a little bit careful on that blurring.  I accept that if the struggle had reached its culmination by means of an armed uprising there was a great likelihood that the distinction would have been substantially blurred.

MR GOOSEN: But from the perspective, from the perspective of the security forces, the fundamental element of the revolutionary
strategy was to utilise the population as cover and in fact to galvanise the non-combatant population into armed action, and that that was the key component of MK strategy through the 1980 period.

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: The very nature of our struggle was that it was the oppressed people whom we had to mobilise and against whom - within which and amongst that population that we had our greatest safety, and it is for that reason also we justify the just war and the tactics that we used.  Our tactics were not to indiscriminately attack the civilian population and even in mobilising the public our tactics were to remind them that it is a political struggle against a system.  And from the formation of Umkhonto we emphasise that we had to use tactics to try and avoid this from degenerating into a race war where people, because of their colour, would be legitimate targets.

MR GOOSEN: In those circumstances, in the circumstances in which as a key component of revolutionary strategy MK utilises the population as cover how do the security forces distinguish between what they in their terms termed "terrorists" and those who were not terrorists?

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: This is the fundamental misconception of all minority oppressors who are in power.  They would portray us as terrorists.  We were not terrorists.  There is a clear distinction, even in the literature of revolutions between terrorism, guerilla warfare,
people's war.  Terrorism would be the indiscriminate use of bombs put in all sorts of public places simply to frighten the oppressor community into succumbing.  We avoided that.  
 But when the security forces put that perspective the underlying assumption is that the oppressed majority were happy with their condition, that it was just a bunch of agitators and terrorists who were the trouble-makers.  And it is from that assumption that gross violations of human rights becomes systemic in the apartheid system, because of that assumption.
 Our position was the opposite.  It was a political struggle where we had to make the mass of the people who were objectively oppressed and exploited to understand their oppression and therefore to stand up and join the political struggle against that oppression.  When we, who were part of the people, lived amongst the people it was not as cover, it was in order to mobilise that population into struggle.  Of course from the security forces who saw all black people as inferior people and who saw us as simply agitators and troublemakers and intimidating the masses into supporting the struggle they would pose the question as taking cover.
 When I was in this country illegally I took cover in the white areas.  In fact I lived in a garden flat where the owners of that flat would invite top officers of the SADF to a braai and I went to one 
such braai.  It was my best cover, because they never assumed that a so-called terrorist would live within their ranks.  Because the situation which I found in 1988 if I was living in a black area it would be more likely that I would be arrested by accident because the townships were under a reign of terror.  Any black person in any group moving about the streets was assumed to be a troublemaker.  So that's the difference.  And I think that when the security forces pose the question that way it is based on their misconception of the nature of oppression and the nature of the struggle.

RONNIE KASRILS: Mr Goosen I just want to add very briefly ...(intervention)

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Kasrils.

SATHYANDRANATH RAGUNANAN MAC MAHARAJ: Okay, thanks Chairperson.  I just want to add that that attitude of the former government, of the security forces to justify their actions, their terrorism against a population as a whole is reminiscent of the Nazis - few hundred people in the Warsaw ghetto rose justly against their persecution, the Nazi response is they having cover in the ghetto, the people provide that cover, wipe out the ghetto, Americans at Mai Lai, Vietnam, nauseating litany throughout history is linked to that kind of insidious philosophy of the former government and security forces.

CHAIRPERSON: Mr Ntsebeza wants to just make a particular point here.