Amnesty Hearings — Vosloorus — 1998-11-24

RONNIE KASRILS: I will certainly do so and enquire about this.  I was asked about the situation then and was beginning to refer to the outbreak of violence in - at the end of July 1990.  This was just four, five months after the lifting of the ban on the ANC and there was great hope about peaceful development in our country to enable us to work through negotiations to the election and certainly one will remember that the ANC and it's alliance were very positive in that regard.  The nature of the violence that erupted took everybody by surprise.  The nature of the violence was so horrific and barbaric that it's very difficult to eradicate it from one's memory and emotions but cold figures alone will remind us that an approximate 700 people died between August and September and the majority of those people were in the Witwatersrand, in Soweto and on the East Rand where the violence in that period broke out.
	The killings continued without let up and by the end of the year over 1800 people had been killed, again largely on the East Rand, to some degree the West Rand and Soweto.  By April of 1991 another four months later, 2400 people had been killed so it's in that particular period of bloodshed in which over 150 people were being killed a month that one really has to understand the response of the communities to this war that was launched against them and I say a war launched against the communities of Catorus, Vosloorus, Thokoza, Soweto and the East Rand because in actual fact the vast majority of people killed were the normal township dwellers and if we could remind ourselves the nature of the attacks were varied.  We lived through that ghastly period in which drive by shootings took place, absolutely random shootings at bus queues and taxi ranks.  Drive by shootings where people in the taverns and the shebeens were gunned down.  Further shootings when vigils occurred and when funerals occurred and mixed with those killings were the killings on the trains, killings by hit squads where community leaders were singled out and assassinated whether they were members of leaders of the ANC or of a community organisations and trade unions, many began to die in that method, in that manner and then within all that, what began to occur were the nightmarish attacks on people in their dwellings such as at Swanivale on the West Rand, later at Boipatong and in many cases in this particular area of the East Rand where people in balaclavas normally but in very large numbers, hundreds strong, would descend from the nearby hostels.  This happened throughout the Witwatersrand and attacked the nearby dwellings, set them alight and killed people in the streets.  
	I'd like to state that this was not new to South Africa, that back in 1976 we saw elements of this occurring in the Soweto uprising and in the Western Cape in the townships there where again balaclava masked people from nearby townships descended on the community with clubs and guns.  They were called the witdoeke and the reddoeke at that stage and they literally attacked people in the streets and the houses.  Now I bring this to the attention of the hearing because there already had been a pattern established in South Africa.  A pattern which was in response to the advance of the struggle against apartheid and in '76 and in the '80's, the East Rand was a very powerful stronghold of the liberation movement against apartheid.  We would say that post 1990 the ANC submission in it's documentation to the TRC has talked about forces of counter-mobilisation and counter-resistance, sometimes called the third force, clearly linked to the security forces, the police and the military intelligence, the police in particular and various forces which were recruited, as it had been recruited in 1976 to attack people in Soweto and the Western Cape.
	So the perception very strongly formed and I would say proved in a number of cases such as the Trust Feeds case in KwaZulu Natal was of complicity between the security forces and elements.  The Trust Feeds case, Operation Marion in KwaZulu Natal showed cooperation between the defence force and the IFP to still the tide of liberation.  
	It's in that situation where unfortunately everybody in a hostel is seen as being hostile to the community who are experiencing this onslaught against them and I think we need to understand that context as to why in that situation virtually every community in our country that was under this kind of onslaught, responded and saw the nearby migrant hostels, rightly or wrongly connected with a political partly, rightly or wrongly connected with the security forces as being the major source of terror and war against innocent law abiding people.
	It's in that situation then that the ANC comes under enormous pressure from the people, from the communities and everybody is saying to the ANC be it the national leadership or the provincial or the ANC members in a particular community like Vosloorus, like Catorus and Thokoza, "why are you not protecting us, your MK people have been trained, you have fought against apartheid, you cannot stand by and let us die in this manner."  So there's enormous pressure that is exerted and I think it's very, very difficult for anybody, even if they wished to keep out of it, not to feel that they had the absolute duty and responsibility to come to the protection of the community.
	It's during this period that the ANC at leadership level and at it's highest policy making levels, takes decisions about the protection of the community against violence and about the need to set up self defence units and I would just like to briefly refer to those key conferences.  We're talking in the first instance about the ANC's National Consultative Conference that took place at Nasaret outside Soweto, a short drive from us in fact, in December 1990 at which this whole issue is taken up as one of the key issues, the unleashing of violence in Soweto and on the West Rand as well as elsewhere in the country.  But those are the two key areas at the time.
	Following on that conference was the ANC's 48th National Conference in Durban in July 1991 taking place now after something like 2400 deaths by April, this is now over 3000 deaths by mid '91 and the ANC there takes reports from it's Consultative Conference in December, there's debates on the issue and there is the decision that ANC supports the creation of the self defence units, calls upon members of MK to assist in the training, in the preparation of self defence units against the attacks on the community.  Within a month there is a key conference of MK in Venda, the then Venda, which was addressed by President Mandela who already was on record at the July conference as exhorting the membership to come to the defence of the communities and at that conference in Venda in a speech which has come to be entitled "the oppressed must be their own liberators".  President Mandela states:
"uMkhonto weSizwe should play a role in training and establishing popular defence units under the control of community organisations to defend our communities against State sponsored violence and crime."
So the policy decisions are there and it's in that period that a document called "For the sake of our lives" is written to give guidance to those involved in setting up the self defence units.  It's a document which unfortunately in the record now is only, there's only half the document which has been preserved.  It is possible to locate the rest of this document with very stringent searching which we've been trying to do through our various archives but the document which the defence has here, page 109 to 118 if that makes - of volume 1.  I've informed defence is only half the document.  I can assist this hearing with the remaining half of that document however.   It's entitled "For the sake of our lives", I was very instrumental in assisting in the drafting of this document which went through a number of phases and discussions within the ANC and particularly the MK side.  The document sums up the terror and the violence which I've referred to and stresses that a political solution should be found to the problem and the key way to solve the problem is a political way and at 1.3 it makes the point and this is written Chairperson and your colleagues, at the beginning of 1992 when one might say the conflict between the ANC and the IFP is at it's height, but at 1.3 the document states:
"Initiatives, such as of talks with Inkatha are extremely important.  Campaigns at local and trade union levels to improve understanding between township communities and hostel dwellers are imperative."
It goes on to refer to the need for political pressure on the government of the day together with exposures of the role of the security forces in the violence throughout the country as a means of forcing and to quote "the Government to curb the killers" because the problem was and I'm saying this as an aside, that the people just could not rely on the security forces and on the police to protect them.  That was a major aspect of the problem we faced.  
	The document goes on to say:
"That side by side with politics, the political endeavour is the need to build structures that could protect people's lives and property and their homes"
and it then reiterates this by saying we need a two pronged strategy.  To quote:
"The political offensive for peace and self defence structures to protect the people."
Because obviously, one could not leave people to face the violence we've referred to and to die the way they were in such numbers whilst discussions and peace talks took place.  So in the absence of the police force and the security forces, to keep opposing forces apart, to police the townships, to secure the communities, we were left with no other method other than to assist people to develop organs of self defence ranging from neighbourhood watches to sound the alarms and blow the whistles when danger was seen to actual units which would patrol the streets which would form lookouts, to help sound the alarm, to rally people and in the end to be able to defend people from attack.