Special Hearings — Mandela United Football Club Hearings — 1997-11-24

MR DE KOCK: Yes, that is correct.  The first part of your question was that he called me and I did not call him.  Secondly, I'm not certain of the date - it was 1991 I think where I got another call from Colonel Potgieter and General Engelbrecht relayed it to me and I then called him.  At that stage they were working from a safe house in the south of Johannesburg, I think the south of Johannesburg, and I was accompanied by Kobus Klopper, AKA Chappy and the tone of the conversation was that Colonel Potgieter had a problem with an Askari of the name Jimmy Mbane.   We then went there and I spoke to Potgieter about it, I don't remember whether Klopper was there.  The tone of the story was that Jimmy Mbane had worked for them, I don't know whether he was, what he did for them, but he was a problem for them at that stage and the request was that he had to be eliminated, and when we went away from there I said to Klopper "if they want to kill him, they've got to do it themselves". And from other security branches there were similar requests.  On the contrary, one of those was a charge in my hearing upon which I was found guilty.

DR RANDERA: Thank you, my last question Mr de Kock, and I think I just want to understand this whole killing that took place.  And let me say that it leaves me with a great sense of sadness, the great disregard for life that there was from your unit and yourself, but be that as it may, just let me understand this whole process.  Here you have a man who spent six months in detention, we are told by this very senior police officer that he develops a very close relationship, he gets all the information he wants from Mr Mabotha;  at the end of the six months he has to release him and yet of course he had a sense that nothing is going to happen in terms of prosecution.   But that still doesn't give me a reason why he feels this person should be killed.  On the other side we know that Mr Mabotha was an ANC trained person, he turned to be an Askari, he'd been with your unit, he'd actually managed to get away and you say it might have been because they'd gone, for want of a better expression AWOL, gone to Soweto, had been drinking or whatever else.  So it didn't concern you initially but just let's remember that we're talking about 1988 when your unit is still functioning in a covert way, that even in 1990 when Judge Goldstone had an enquiry, you said something very different that they couldn't come to a conclusion on the covert activities that you were involved in.   Now is there a real possibility that in fact Mr Mabotha had gone to Mrs Madikizela-Mandela to get protection so that he was actually going to blow the lid on what was happening at Vlakplaas?

MR DE KOCK: Mr Chairman, no, not according to my opinion because already in '83 two Askaris, one senior member deserted from us, from Vlakplaas, and went back to Botswana and Zambia and later operated within the Republic, especially the one, and he was very effective, he was from Botswana.   Further, Mabotha was, had already been away from Vlakplaas for long enough that he could have told Mrs Mandela anything he wanted to about Vlakplaas so it's no use to close the stable after the horse has gone.  The information had been relayed, there was nothing we could do about it any more and with the Harms Commission in '89 Dirk Coetzee washed us out of the water, as it were.  It was not that Vlakplaas was a secret any more.  What happened after that they simply tried to perform damage control to close up the worst leaks.  We didn't have to kill him to stop the secret from getting out.  It was no longer a secret.  In fact there was one situation where a member came from Botswana to reconnoitre Botswana but he never got there because he lost his way.  It's not as though Vlakplaas, but it was already known to the ANC, so much so that in '82 pamphlets were distributed by the ANC with a total of eight Askaris' photos of them, their names, MK names, full descriptions and this was distributed throughout the country that if these people were seen they worked for the security police and they were called "death to the impimpis".  But I don't think that information is relevant here.

DR RANDERA: Thank you.

KHOZA MGOJO: Mnr de Kock as a lay person who does not even read Afrikaans, I depend on what you have said here.  You have painted a very gruesome picture about the interrogation of Mr
Mabotha and you say that it started in the morning and finished very late in the afternoon and there were different shifts which were taking place.

MR DE KOCK: That's correct, that is how I recall it.

KHOZA MGOJO: Was it because he was not co-operating or not?  Why is it that it took such a long time?

MR DE KOCK: He didn't want to cooperate at all, he was perhaps one of the most tough, the toughest person I had come across.

KHOZA MGOJO: Did you think that you needed to give yourself enough time maybe by re-detaining him so that you will get the information which you wanted from him?

MR DE KOCK: During his interrogation it was of the most cardinal importance to, within the next hour or perhaps five minutes, get hold of those weapons and to have explosives before they could be used.
 After he had left for Soweto I don't know what happened, and I am not trying to say that I am innocent, I don't know what happened, but they then had sufficient time with reference to Kloppers' he said that he did have weapons, I am not sure about that but that is what was said.  In other words we had a person here with a very strong loyalty and who could indeed, you know withstand it.

KHOZA MGOJO: When he was handcuffed and he had his hands behind his back and you were leading him to your guillotine, did he ever ask for any mercy from you?

MR DE KOCK: He didn't say a word.  He refused to speak.  There was nothing.  He took what he received perhaps in the way the ideal soldier would take it.

KHOZA MGOJO: The last question which is really worrying me which I need to ask.  You said in your testimony that some of the interrogators they really enjoyed when they were interrogating the people, even if those people knew nothing.

MR DE KOCK: I have seen such people. They are the minority. I could perhaps point to one or two persons. One of them was here yesterday. I have a situation where a person like General Hans Dreyer, who is not unknown and perhaps one of the best operational commanders that I have come across, told me that he shuddered to think that he had to touch the hands of such a person, that he would rather prefer death to that. And to come back to Jacques Paauw's book. I don't know whether you've read it, I haven't done so, and without riding on their backs the applications to Pretoria, if you look at the tapes, you will perhaps here and there see the same tendency there.

KHOZA MGOJO: Mr de Kock, would I be right to say that during the process you got used to the culture of enjoying killing people?

MR DE KOCK: No. If I enjoyed killing people, shooting them then within the ability and the manpower, the training, the weapons, ammunition, explosives and the technical expertise we could perhaps kill a thousand people per night, no, many more people could have been killed, that was not the case. I'm not going to refer to the Pretoria Intelligence Service, who came to me with a request and a map of Lusaka to kill Gertrude Shope and to shoot her for the simple reason that she was the head of the ANC Women's League. If I understand it correctly, she was already aged at that stage. I think the file was left there for two, three years. All that we did use is the map for Lusaka because that helped us. So we didn't have a need here, am empirical need almost one could say, to kill people, no.

UNKNOWN: Colonel de Kock you mentioned now that there was somebody who gave evidence yesterday, who enjoyed assaulting and torturing people, who was it?