August 17, 2007
It sounds like a file from one of the aborted plans the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had for Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. In 1989, members of the South African Police (SAP) were to kill anti-Apartheid cleric Frank Chikane, the secretary general of the South African Council of Churches, by lining his underwear with a neuro-toxin. The attack went forward, the poison in the underwear attacked Chikane's central nervous system, but it did not have the desired effect. Chikane survived. He is now Director General in Thabo Mbeki's Office of the Presidency.
In the 1980s, arguably the worst decade of the Apartheid regime's reign of terror, a man by the name of Adriaan Vlok was the country's Minister of Law and Order. What he presided over was an era of lawlessness and disorder in which the police who worked under him engaged in murder and violence and fomented chaos and anarchy against the anti-Apartheid opposition and the non-white population as a whole. Last month South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) announced that it will bring charges against Vlok, a former police chief, Johan van der Merwe, and three other former high-ranking police officials for their complicity in the attempted murder of Chikane.
Vlok, van der Merwe, and the others did not apply for amnesty under the provisions of the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which offered the chance for those who committed human rights violations during the apartheid era to reveal the truth about their involvement in such activities in exchange for amnesty. Vlok in particular, like so many others among the securocrats who ruled black South Africans with their fists sheathed in an iron gauntlet, believed he was above the law and above the TRC, even after the National Party's Apartheid state had fallen into discredited obsolescence.
The NPA's actions have put paid to the false sense of impunity that Vlok and many like him continued to feel after the African National Congress rose to power. Vlok's is not even the most prominent name to come forward as subject to prosecution for Apartheid-era crimes. That honor goes to former President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (an honor he shared with Nelson Mandela in 1993) FW de Klerk.
In many ways de Klerk embodies the shifting sands of responsibility for those within the white power structure in the National Party's last years in power. There is a great deal to admire about de Klerk. In the wake of the intransigent reign of his predecessor, PW Botha, the “Old Crocodile,” de Klerk bravely took on the Afrikaner power structure and initiated changes that would lead to the eventual election of Nelson Mandela and the ANC. He freed Mandela from prison, initiated official negotiations with the anti-Apartheid opposition, and in the end ceded power.
At the same time, it is easy to overstate de Klerk's role. He saw the handwriting on the wall. And yet in the period after 1990 he stood as head of state for a regime that continued to murder the opposition, that fueled violent rivalries between black factions in South Africa through “Third Force” and “hidden hand” operations while blaming “black on black” violence, and that turned a blind eye to gross violations of human rights. De Klerk was not an unreconstructed Afrikaner nationalist like Botha, but he bears some responsibility for horrors that went on even as he helped negotiate away the NP stranglehold on power.
De Klerk enters the picture at least in part by way of yet another of the infamous members of the former security state's hierarchy, Eugene de Kock (that world, for all of its reach, was remarkably small and, unsurprisingly, insular). De Kock was a legendary member of the elite police unit based at a farm outside of Pretoria, Vlakplaas. While a member of Vlakplaas, de Kock was directly involved in dozens of political murders of anti-Apartheid activists and innumerable other crimes. Many of those crimes were discovered, and he was put on trial and sentenced to what added up to well more than two centuries worth of prison time. However, de Kock also proved to be one of the most vital witnesses before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Because of his central involvement in so many of South Africa's heinous crimes, and because of his desire to save his own hide, de Kock proved a compelling and powerful witness. Indeed, his testimony before the TRC earned him amnesty for every single case for which he applied, though many of his crimes were outside of the ambit of the TRC and so he still sits in prison.
De Kock thus embodies the ambivalence many feel toward the TRC – he was a murderer so feared that his nickname to friend and foe alike was “Prime Evil.” On the other hand, without de Kock's testimony, his ruthless honesty, and his unflinching willingness to reveal the inner workings of the security forces, many of the Apartheid regime's secrets may have never been revealed. For years de Kock has expressed his unwavering belief that authorities such as Vlok have blood on their hands that has been neither revealed nor washed.
An example of de Kock's long-standing criticisms of his bosses came on the 8th of March, 1996 when South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper published one of award- winning political cartoonist Zapiro's incisive pieces. It depicted de Kock, on his way from testifying in his trial, and Vlok, who was on his way to testify at the trial of another significant government figure, Defense Minister Magnus Malan. Coming from the door of the “De Kock Trial” were dozens of skeletons, indicative of de Kock's crimes, but also his revelations, the skeletons he released from his closet. The simian-featured Vlok, meanwhile, prepared to enter the “Malan Trial,” which tellingly had spilled none of its secrets. Zapiro's spot-on rendition of de Kock, the square-jawed, apodictic Afrikaner police officer, shows the him being led away in his handcuffs, peering back at Vlok, who is stunned to hear de Kock pointedly ask: “My defence is: ‘Just following orders' . . . . . . What's Yours General?”
But de Kock does not believe that matters in the tumultuous 1980s and early 1990s stopped with Vlok and similar cabinet-level officials. De Kock has long argued that PW Botha and FW de Klerk are as guilty as any of the underlings who carried out the will of the state.
In interview that de Kock recently gave to a South African radio station from his cell in Pretoria's notorious Central Prison he argued that not only would he testify against Vlok and van der Merwe, but that de Klerk too “has a lot to answer for.” De Klerk's spokespeople have denied de Kock's claims, and in TRC testimony de Klerk always adamantly insisted that he knew nothing of the activities of the security forces operating during his years in office. It appears that de Klerk's claim will receive a test when the Vlok trial begins on August 17, as a source close to the proceedings believes that Vlok and van der Merwe will reveal that de Klerk knew what happened in security briefings where crimes were discussed and planned. The defiant former President recently challenged the NPA to charge him with a crime if they could muster the evidence, clearly believing that the NPA can do no such thing. Perhaps he would be wise to wait until after Vlok testifies, possibly in a plea agreement that will allow Vlok to escape a jail sentence.
There are South Africans who believe that the country needs to move beyond the crimes of the apartheid regime. They refer to the pending criminal proceedings as “witch trials,” ask if such trials are necessary, and argue that with the TRC process completed, such prosecutions seem politically motivated. In this matter, as with so many others, South Africans are divided largely (though not universally) along racial lines. Whites often assert that the country needs to move on from an apartheid past that benefited the vast majority of them. Black South Africans, however, believe that the past still walks among them. The reality is that the TRC mechanism was not intended to be the final word on anything, and that the prospect of criminal charges always were a reality, even if the state has had a difficult time pursuing criminal complaints regarding pre-1994 political violence. It seems disingenuous or naïve in the extreme to believe that those guilty of apartheid crimes ought to be exempt from accountability because some are tired of dealing with a past that they perpetrated, or from which they profited, or simply that makes them uncomfortable.
Adriaan Vlok's skeletons are seeping from his closet. His are not the only ones that lie within.
Derek Catsam is FPA's South Africa blogger and an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.
*Editor's Note: As this piece went to press Adriaan Vlok negotiated a plea deal in which he received a 10 year suspended sentence. He has not, however, been exempted from a number of other crimes committed during his tenure as Minister of Law and Order.