Steeped in Blood (14 page)

‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’

– MARTIN LUTHER KING JR,

leader of the African-American civil rights movement and Nobel Peace Prize winner

The truth was a complete misnomer in the turbulent 1980s. The state propaganda machine trumpeted out ‘official’ versions of events, portraying the ‘successes’ of the government in fighting the total onslaught in an attempt to brainwash the public at large. Unbeknown to most average South Africans, a common denominator in many of the political stories at the time was a place called Vlakplaas.

Vlakplaas was a farm near Pretoria, and the headquarters of the South African Police counterinsurgency unit C10. It rehabilitated ‘turned terrorists’, known as ‘askaris’ – the Kenyan name for ‘warrior’ – but actually operated as a paramilitary hit squad. Antigovernment agents were arrested, taken to Vlakplaas, and asked whether they would switch allegiance and start working for the government. If they refused, they were shot at point-blank range in front of the others – a sure-fire way to persuade anyone to agree!

Similar units were established in Camperdown in KwaZulu-
Natal and in the Eastern Cape, but Vlakplaas was the flagship of this operation. It was truly a place from hell: on entering its gates, all decent and honourable conventions were abandoned as murder became a way of life and torture an entertaining diversion. No law applied here other than the eleventh commandment: Do not get caught. The men from Vlakplaas lied, raped, murdered and thieved their way around the country, behaving in the vilest way possible.

They were led by a number of individuals, including Dirk Coetzee and later Eugene de Kock, who was dubbed ‘prime evil’ by the press. The tale of these men is told in many books, such as
In the Heart of the Whore: The Story of Apartheid’s Death Squads
by Jacques Pauw. I do not wish to repeat what has already been told, save to say that Vlakplaas existed to aid and abet the grotesque policies of the successive National Party governments. These were men who operated outside the law and who were devoid of any decency whatsoever.

The men of Vlakplaas needed money to further fund their operation, and they required something spectacular to show the political masters just how useful they were. That is when the bizarre scheme leading to the murder of the Gugulethu Seven was plotted.

As discussed in
Chapter 8
, a number of young men were duped into thinking that they were to attack a police van. They had no idea that this was a trap, and that they were to be the victims of a police murder squad sent to create good publicity so that the political leaders would be grateful and open the national Treasury to provide more money for even greater obscenities. That is exactly what happened. The seven men were all murdered, weapons were planted and the national propaganda machine revved into action.

The plot would have worked had it not been for the courage and integrity of Bateman and Weaver, who investigated it and told it as it was. The Minister of Police at the time, Adriaan Vlok, knew
about the whole squalid affair, as did the generals in the police force. We average citizens were docile, indoctrinated fools, accepting the pronouncements of the various government departments. It was obvious to anyone prepared to look a little deeper that something was not quite right. However, like the Germans in Hitler’s Nazi state, we chose not to see.

I was involved in many cases during these years. Many of the askaris were truly vicious. One of them was Joe Mamasela, whose handler was Dirk Coetzee, one of the first commanders at Vlakplaas. Mamasela was responsible for the brutal murder of Griffiths Mxenge, a human rights lawyer and anti-apartheid activist, and his wife, in Durban. With violent savagery, this agent of the apartheid government mutilated Griffiths’ face and sliced off his ears.

Another askari, Butana Almond Nofemela, became a celebrity in his own right for unravelling much of the story behind the hit squads. Nofemela was arrested and sentenced to death after murdering, of his own accord, a farmer and his wife in Brits.

He was paid a visit in his death cell by his former associates from Vlakplaas, who promised him that they would see to it that he was not executed, as he was ‘one of theirs’. Ten days before Nofemela was to be executed, they informed him that they had tried their best, but could not prevent the execution. His commanding officer visited him on death row and told him, ‘Sorry, you are going to have to take the pain.’

Nofemela used his head. Backed by a legal team, he blew the whistle on Vlakplaas, Dirk Coetzee and the others, and in all the mayhem, torture and terror that had transpired, he was granted a stay of execution.

This sparked a huge exposé of Vlakplaas, with the law taking its course. Dirk Coetzee, who had left the police force in a hurry, had started a new career as a private investigator. Coetzee was an irritation to the police, and they were eager to pin something on him. The police labelled him a maverick, but Dirk contacted Max
du Preez from
Vrye Weekblad
, a newspaper started by Du Preez and Jacques Pauw that had the courage to challenge and question the state’s ‘official’ versions of events. It was a logical place for Dirk Coetzee to tell his story, and it was the biggest story this fledgling newspaper had dealt with.

The newspaper arranged for Coetzee to fly to Mauritius, where he unfolded the whole tale of murder, torture, political assassinations and lies to Jacques Pauw. After the story broke, Coetzee eventually found asylum in the Netherlands, and on 17 November 1989, the story about Vlakplaas broke on the front page of
Vrye Weekblad
. The local mainstream media in South Africa preferred, by and large, to ignore the story or to deny its truthfulness, but it received widespread coverage outside South Africa’s borders.

The floodgates were open. Dirk Coetzee’s revelations prompted other policemen and government officials to start talking. As an upshot of all of these revelations, Colonel Eugene de Kock, who headed up Vlakplaas at the time, was given two life sentences and an additional 212 years in prison, on charges ranging from murder to kidnapping to assault and corruption. Like most South Africans, I watched this horrific story unfold, but so much of what was revealed made sense to me from the political cases in which I had been and would be involved.

Coetzee found himself moving around a lot, as there were regular attempts on his life. In 1990, he was in a safe house in Lusaka when a parcel was delivered to the local post office addressed to him. He took one look and suspected that it was a bomb sent by the security police, so he returned it to the apparent sender, who happened to be Bheki Mlangeni, a young attorney working for Cheadle Thompson & Haysom. Innocently, Mlangeni opened the box when he received it. It contained a cheap Walkman with a tape labelled ‘Evidence – Hit Squads’. He put the headphones on, plugged them in and pushed the start button. This detonated a massive explosion, which blew his head off.

Mlangeni’s family approached the legal firm of Cheadle Thompson & Haysom, and I was called in to investigate the case. The more I looked at it, the more certain I was that this was a police hit. The parcel had been sent to Coetzee by someone who knew where he was. The explosives were suspicious. Bomb builders were usually explosives experts from the mines who used gelignite that they smuggled off their work premises. The explosive material used in this case was PETN – pentaerythritol trinitrate – a substance not readily available outside military circles. It was also not a standard South African detonator, and appeared to be of Eastern Bloc or Russian origin. The Eastern Bloc had no interest in killing Dirk Coetzee. Quite the opposite, in fact.

However, the police had access to all kinds of weaponry seized from Eastern Bloc operatives. The prime suspect at the time was Waal du Toit, who headed up the bomb unit of the SAP. He ran a specialist bomb laboratory and was a guru in his field. I had a heavy suspicion that General Lothar Neethling – South Africa’s own ‘Dr Mengele’ – had a finger in the pie too.

The police could not investigate the matter, as they were the prime suspects in the case. I was asked to oversee the investigation, and worked closely with the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on the matter. One of the first things I did was voice my dissatisfaction with the involvement of Klippies Kritzinger, a policeman. I asked who he was answering to, and established that, of course, it was General Neethling – a prime suspect. Kritzinger took a back seat because of my objection, and this made me no friends during the investigation. He also denied the existence of key elements in the investigation, such as the bomb laboratory of Waal du Toit, which I asked about.

The evidence included a handwriting sample and a fingerprint. I obtained a court order so that we could acquire handwriting samples and fingerprints from the men of Vlakplaas. Court order in hand, I arrived at Wagthuis, the police headquarters in Pretoria,
and was met by Krappies Engelbrecht. One of the darker forces of apartheid, Engelbrecht headed up the Brixton Murder and Robbery Unit, and was a murky character. People around him were responsible for murders and torturing, yet he always managed to evade prosecution. The mere mention of his name to Judge Richard Goldstone, who headed up the important commission investigating political violence in South Africa in the early 1990s, used to send Goldstone into apoplexy!

Engelbrecht greeted me with his standard ‘Hello, Duif.’ He always called me ‘Duif’ for some unknown reason. I wanted to see the Vlakplaas men three at a time – I didn’t want all the papers handed out simultaneously, as it could result in switching and confusion of the process. But the men were all seated at one long table, and Engelbrecht told me that this was the way in which it would be done. I said no, and we argued bitterly. I left Wagthuis saying that I would see them all again in two weeks’ time.

I obtained yet another court order, and this time managed to get all the fingerprints and handwriting samples on my terms. This was a clear message to the men of Vlakplaas and the South African Police that the tide was turning, and that we would start investigating them. No one was above the law any more.

There was no particular finding at the trial, and the feeling of the courts at that time was echoed well in the title of a book that George Bizos wrote subsequently,
No One to Blame: In Pursuit of Justice in South Africa
. The courts were extremely reluctant to reach decisions that were anti the police or authorities. Anybody can manipulate a crime scene if they hold all the evidence, and there were many devious examples of this happening during the 1980s. Evidence was also often damaged or destroyed or lost, severely hampering any meaningful investigation. The Gugulethu Seven case illustrated this perfectly. The environment was truly toxic in those days.

Vrye Weekblad
went on to reveal the secrets of the Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) in May 1990, and described how CCB
commander Pieter Botes had tried to kill anti-apartheid activist Albie Sachs in Maputo in 1988, as well as destabilise the run-up to the Namibian elections in November 1989. In 1991, a bomb destroyed the
Vrye Weekblad
offices. A CCB operative by the name of Leonard Veenendal later confessed to having planted the deadly explosive.

The demise of the newspaper came that same year, when it was sued by Lothar Neethling in a defamation case linked to an investigation in which two activists had gone missing on the banks of the Komati River. Neethling was linked to this incident, and the court case took place over a protracted period of time. The police had not wanted another Steve Biko on their hands, and Neethling’s ‘silent, undetectable potion’ had been their answer.
^*

What is sad about this is that Neethling was a well-qualified man who put forensic science on the map in South Africa. In normal criminal cases, he was excellent. Unfortunately, when politics entered the fray and state interests were on the line, he showed a different side of his character.

Vrye Weekblad
published allegations that Neethling had synthesised poison in his laboratory, ‘remedies’ that were referred to as ‘
Lothar se doepa
’ – Lothar’s potions. These were formulated in order to kill African National Congress (ANC) activists without a trace. He showed himself to be a dishonest man who had little regard for science and the truth. I even question his application to the TRC for amnesty.

In this case, Neethling’s concoction should have resulted in the two activists dying from heart attacks. The only problem was that
the potion did not seem to work: after numerous doses the men were drowsy, but not dead. So they were shot, their bodies burnt and thrown into the river.

I visited the alleged murder scene as well. It was remarkable how accurate Coetzee’s memory was regarding this event. He described every minute detail, such as a fork in the road and the topography, and when I investigated it, I was able to find the exact spot where the murders had taken place. I photographed the area from the air (see
photo
), and what Coetzee had described was virtually 100 per cent accurate. We never found any remains in the area.