Thabo Seseane
In a mockery of justice, apartheid-era assassin Eugene De Kock, who
was serving two life terms plus 212 years for other crimes, has been
granted parole by South African Justice Minister Michael Masutha. The
minister said he was being paroled “in the interests of
nation-building.”
Nicknamed “Prime Evil,” De Kock confessed to
more than 100 acts of murder, torture and fraud, and took full
responsibility for the activities of his undercover unit. He was never
tried for most of the killing and maiming he perpetrated on activists
fighting white minority rule in the 1980s and early 1990s.
De Kock
made his confessions in front of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC) which was established a year after South Africa’s first
fully democratic elections in 1994.
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond
Tutu, who chaired the TRC, said the decision to release him represented a
milestone on South Africa’s road to reconciliation and healing. He
added: “I pray that those whom he hurt, those from whom he took loved
ones, will find the power within them to forgive him. Forgiving is
empowering for the forgiver and the forgiven.”
Masutha denied De
Kock parole last June, saying he had “made progress” towards
rehabilitation but that some of the families of his victims had not been
consulted “as required by law.”
In 2012, De Kock sought out the
relatives of some of his victims, including the mother and widow of
African National Congress (ANC) lawyer Bheki Mlangeni. The family
refused him forgiveness, questioning the sincerity of his request.
Mlangeni was blown up by a bomb planted in a tape recorder sent to him
in February 1991 while he was working to expose the activities of
Vlakplaas, the secret police unit commanded by De Kock and named after
the farm that served as its headquarters west of Pretoria.
De Kock
was sentenced in 1996 for the murders of Japie Kereng Maponya and the
Nelspruit Five—Oscar Mxolisi Ntshota, Glenack Masilo Mama, Lawrence
Jacey Nyelende, Khona Gabela and Tisetso Leballo. Four were shot and
killed in an ambush in the early hours of March 26, 1992 outside
Nelspruit, Mpumalanga province. The fifth, Leballo, was killed later the
same day “and the body subsequently destroyed by means of explosives at
Penge Mine near Weltevreden,” according to the TRC amnesty application
of De Kock and nine accomplices.
The TRC was a piece of high
political theatre, also carried out in the name of “nation building.”
Short on truth and long on reconciliation, it was designed for the
benefit of the elite, black and white, but not for justice. No
submission to the commission is permissible as evidence in court. None
of the accomplices named by De Kock have been brought to trial, much
less the bureaucrats and politicians who ordered and facilitated the
murders carried out by Vlakplaas operatives.
In a guest column in the Daily Maverick
posted just before Masutha’s decision, Jane Quin asks, “[H]ow dare we
as a country spend precious ... time, money and energy considering the
release of the killers who are captive, when we haven’t even bothered to
bring the others to book?”
Quin’s sister Jacki was shot and
killed by Vlakplaas members under De Kock in a cross-border raid in
Maseru, Lesotho in December 1985. The ultimate responsibility for this
crime rests with the politicians, bureaucrats and assassins who planned
and carried it out.
By the same token, certain prosecutors and
investigators are complicit for making the call not to pursue criminal
cases against those responsible. This is where responsibility and blame
for the release of De Kock should be apportioned, not to “we as a
country”, if that includes working class South Africans who want nothing
more than to see apartheid-era oppressors brought to justice.
The consideration shown De Kock, a highly capable purveyor of state
violence, runs counter to the democratic aspirations of the masses who
sacrificed so much in the anti-apartheid struggle. His parole is an
addendum to Nelson Mandela’s discredited narrative of “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world” and upheld to this day by the ruling ANC and the likes of Tutu.
This
explains why among mainstream commentators, the news of De Kock’s
parole has been broadly well received. “We are not a vengeful nation,”
veteran journalist Max Du Preez pontificated in an interview with e.tv.
Speaking
at the time of De Kock’s previous, unsuccessful parole application,
right-wing opposition Democratic Alliance leader James Selfe commented,
“It seems ... inequitable that Mr. De Kock is ... the only one [being]
punished.” In other words, since none of his accomplices were in jail,
De Kock had no business being behind bars either.
A month before
his inauguration in May 2009, President Jacob Zuma of the ANC reportedly
paid a secret visit to De Kock at Pretoria Central Prison. According to
the Sunday Independent, De Kock gave Zuma information regarding the involvement in apartheid crimes of people who have thus far gone scot-free.
This
could implicate figures now serving under the ANC government, since
apartheid agents are known to have infiltrated the resistance movements.
Most likely, any sensational information will be kept under wraps and
used to settle matters between the various factions in the ruling party
behind closed doors.
Masutha granted De Kock parole at the same
time he denied Clive Derby-Lewis’s bid for medical parole. “There is
nothing to suggest Mr. Derby-Lewis’s condition is such that he is
rendered physically incapacitated … so as to severely limit daily
activity,” said Masutha.
?Derby-Lewis, who has terminal lung
cancer, was convicted for aiding and abetting Polish national Janusz
Walus in the assassination of Chris Hani, a member of the ANC and the
Stalinist South African Communist Party. Walus borrowed from Derby-Lewis
the gun he used to kill Hani in the driveway of his home in Dawn Park,
Ekurhuleni on April 10, 1993.
Masutha delayed a decision on the
parole application of Ferdi Barnard, another apartheid state hitman,
found guilty 17 years ago of the murder of anti-apartheid activist David
Webster. “I was paid a R40,000 [US$3,400] production bonus after the
killing. For a job well done,” Barnard boasts in Jacques Pauw’s Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins (Jonathan Ball, 1997).
“It
was an approved operation,” he maintains, “and Joe Verster [then
director of the Civil Co-operation Bureau, Barnard’s unit] knew about
everything.”
Barnard was sentenced in 1988 to 63 years and two
life terms, the second being for an attempt on the life of Dullah Omar,
who went on to serve in the cabinet of former President Mandela.
Whatever
the fate of Derby-Lewis and Barnard, the ANC government has with De
Kock’s parole signalled its contempt for any popular concept of justice.
Through an endless series of backroom deals, the ruling elite is
cynically whitewashing the past and palming off these efforts as “nation
building.” The result is a country that is safe for mass murderers, a
playground of the well-connected and rich criminals.
Workers have
thus gained an insight into the ANC’s attitude towards the instruments
of state security. As proved by the Marikana Massacre in 2012 that left
34 striking miners dead, and as it will be in the class struggle now
developing, the uniformed brutes who come after Barnard and De Kock can
also expect to get away with murder.
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