By Norm Dixon
Chilling new evidence has come to light of the involvement of the highest political and military levels of the South African state in murders and disappearances of anti-apartheid activists. Documents leaked to the progressive weekly New Nation have directly named the current head of Military Intelligence and implicate at least two serving cabinet ministers and President F.W. de Klerk in the decision to order assassinations in 1985.
"Until this week", New Nation wrote in its lead story on May 8, "the state remained safely cocooned in its web of secrecy, which was fortified by the lack of documented evidence. But damning State Security Council documentation, containing the death warrants of prominent Eastern Cape civic leaders, has come into the possession of New Nation."
Like most of South Africa's oppressed majority, New Nation continued, "we suspected that state organs were the invisible hand that has been killing our people. All along we suspected that the decisions to kill were taken at the very highest level, and all along we suspected that there was a third force that was masterminding the violence. Now all these are no longer suspicions, they are facts — cold, concrete facts."
The document — known as a "Signal Message Form" and dated June 7, 1985 — was addressed to the State Security Council (SSC) headed by then-president P.W. Botha. It detailed a telephone discussion between the commander of the Eastern Cape Joint Management Centre, Brigadier C.P. van der Westhuizen, and General Van Rensburg of the SSC Secretariat.
It detailed how the two officers cold-bloodedly discussed the fate of Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sicelo Mhlauli and Sparrow Mkonto — all leaders of the Cradock Residents' Association and the anti-apartheid United Democratic Front — and decided they should be "permanently removed from society as a matter of urgency".
The plotters discussed the likely repercussions, saying a similar reaction could be expected to the protests that followed the disappearance of three leaders of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organisation a month earlier — suggesting that they too were eliminated by the military.
The mutilated and burned bodies of the Cradock activists were found less than a month after the message was relayed.
The documentary proof of the direct role of the SSC in the order to assassinate the black leaders for the first time provides hard evidence that the apartheid regime's most senior leaders were aware of, and approved, political murders. Several of these leaders, including President F.W. de Klerk, remain in charge of this complex repressive apparatus.
New Nation has confirmed that at the time the SSC made the decision to murder the Cradock four, F.W. de Klerk was a
"coopted" member of the council. The SSC also contained two ministers who are currently in de Klerk's cabinet: foreign minister Pik Botha and former defence minister Magnus Malan. The man responsible for implementing the death warrants, General Van der Westhuizen, has since been promoted to chief of staff of the South African Defence Force's Military Intelligence.
The SSC and the Regional Joint Management Centres below it were key elements of the repressive National Security Management System. Conceived in 1978 with the election of P.W. Botha as National Party leader and then prime minister, the objective of the NSMS was to "defeat the revolutionaries and regain the [political] initiative". The structures of the NSMS, with the SSC chaired by the state president at its apex, were not even accountable to the whites-only parliament. In reality, this body was the actual government of apartheid South Africa.
The permanent members of the SSC included: the state president; ministers of defence, foreign affairs, constitutional development, finance and justice; the chiefs of staff of the SADF, army, navy, air force and SADF medical services; the director of the National Intelligence Service (formerly the infamous Bureau of State Security — BOSS); the commissioner of police; chief of the security police; the director of security legislation and the director-general of the office of the state president. All in all, 12 of the SSC's 24 permanent members were unelected security officers.
Below the SSC are 11 Regional Joint Management Centres. They gather information about political activists and their organisations, and identify where they live and work. They make recommendations to the SSC and implement its decisions.
Given the fact that the Cradock activists were killed within weeks of the Eastern Province Joint Management Centre's assassination proposal being made to the SSC Secretariat, it is almost certain that the full SSC, chaired by P.W. Botha and attended by de Klerk, sanctioned the deadly course of action.
The structures through which the assassinations were ordered and carried out remain in place although they have been renamed since de Klerk's rise to power. In the de Klerk government's March budget, half the defence budget of US$894 million was earmarked for the secret Special Defence Account, the SADF's dirty tricks department.
It is widely believed in the liberation movements that these covert structures continue to function and that the widespread violence throughout South Africa by Inkatha gangs, vigilantes and the shadowy "third force" is being funded and coordinated through them.