Steeped in Blood (17 page)

The cross-examination was quite acrimonious, and when the matter stood down, I was warned to expect to appear some weeks later. When I arrived back in Cape Town, I wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, and decided to request that the piece of metal be removed from the leg. I found a willing surgeon and an anaesthetist
and, having obtained consent from the boy’s parents, we took him to theatre at the Gatesville Medical Centre. The piece of lead was removed. The moment it was in my hand, my heart sank: it was flat, clearly a ricochet, and its weight corresponded to the smaller shot that the police claimed to have used.

I went back to court with my tail between my legs and, before being cross-examined further, I asked the judge for permission to address him. I told him the whole story, but it didn’t make matters any better – I had clearly screwed up. The thirteen men accused were all acquitted in December 1989. It was not my finest hour.

Some of the less intelligent legal people saw my mistake as a reason to question my competence, and stories went around that ‘Klatzow made a mistake’ and ‘Klatzow is fallible.’ I believe that it was more of a testimony to my honesty than my incompetence, but some people will grasp at any excuse to cast doubt over a person’s abilities.

The expert for the police, who was, at the time, a professor of radiology at Stellenbosch University’s medical school, urged me to publish the results in a learned journal. Before I could get around to it, one of his associates obtained the data and published it. Interestingly, the same professor told me afterwards that I had had him convinced in court. It is not about giving the most cunning evidence, however; it is about giving evidence that is true.

In the eighties, the legal system did not seek justice for certain people who had been injured or killed. Instead, it protected the perpetrators, and was a sad indictment on the prosecutors and judges, many of whom were real old National Party war-horses whose sole purpose was to protect the state at any cost. Sadly, we again seem to be moving in that direction today: judicial benches are being packed with party cronies, reflecting cadre redeployment.

A memorial was unveiled on 24 September 2005 to the victims of the Trojan Horse Massacre. It is located at the site of the ambush, adjacent to what is now the Athlone Technical College, previously
Hewat College. The memorial incorporates a section of wall on which messages honouring the victims, as well as messages protesting against state violence, are spray-painted. It also includes a steel structure portraying armed police in a truck.

The Trojan Horse Massacre was one of many tragic events to take place in the 1980s in South Africa. On a personal level, it was a case that led me to extreme caution when making assumptions and statements. I made a huge supposition in error, and it is a mistake that I hope never to repeat again.

‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.’

– MARTIN LUTHER KING JR,

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

Getting rid of a problem rather than solving it was often the chosen path in the dark days of apartheid. Numerous ‘strange’ deaths occurred, and the official versions of stories were blatantly touted as the truth, while the struggle organisations had their own accounts of events. It was only many years later that the
actual
truth would come to light. As an independent forensic scientist, I found investigating many of these murders to be extremely frustrating.

The deaths of the Cradock Four were cases in point. The bodies of Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlauli were found in the Eastern Cape on 29 June 1985, sparking a huge outcry from the Anti-Apartheid Movement and liberation
fighters. The four had been active members of the UDF, so their deaths were not likely to have been an accident.

Matthew Goniwe, who was thirty-eight years old, hailed from Lingelihle, a black township outside Cradock. He trained as a teacher at the University of Fort Hare, and his teaching career spanned areas such as the Transkei, Graaff-Reinet and Lingelihle.

He was passionate about his community, but ran into trouble with the authorities when he was arrested in 1977 under the Suppression of Communism Act. He spent four years in jail in Umtata, during which time he obtained a BA degree from UNISA, majoring in education and political science.

Goniwe played a central role in the formation of CRADORA, the Cradock Residents’ Association – an unofficial township organisation – as well as CRADOYA, the Cradock Youth Association. At the time of his death, he was also the rural organiser for the Eastern Cape region of the UDF, and he was an associate member of the Black Sash.

In March 1984, Goniwe and a number of others were arrested under Section 28 of the Internal Securities Act, and were held in Pollsmoor Prison. They were released without being charged in October 1984. From that point onwards, Goniwe was under constant police surveillance.

On the morning of Thursday 27 June 1985, Goniwe, Calata, Mkhonto and Mhlauli left Port Elizabeth to head home to Cradock after attending a UDF meeting. The next morning, Goniwe’s wife phoned Port Elizabeth to find out what had happened to the men, as they had not returned home. Goniwe’s gutted car was found on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth that afternoon. In the evening, Sparrow Mkhonto’s body was discovered near the road to Perseverance, a few kilometres from the burnt-out car.

Sicelo Mhlauli’s body was found on Saturday 29 June in the sand dunes near Bluewater Bay, on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, and the following Tuesday, after an extensive search by members of the
police and the Defence Force, the bodies of Goniwe and Calata were discovered in the dunes, lying near each other on their backs, with burnt arms outstretched. The bodies were so charred that it was difficult to see whether they had been mutilated.

I was approached by Molly Blackburn, from the Black Sash, to investigate this case. The ‘official’ explanation of the deaths was that the four men had been killed by their own informers, which everyone intuitively knew was nonsense.

The evidence that I found told an entirely different story. When I examined the car, I could see that it had been driven away from where Goniwe was shot. It was clear when looking at the car that he had been shot by someone taller than him, as the seat had been set right back on its tracks. We also knew that Goniwe would not have stopped for anyone except the police. None of this added up.

The involvement of the police in the investigation was predictable – their body language and attitude showed that they had no interest in investigating these murders. They seemed to know what had happened. The dockets were empty, and we had limited access to the evidence; the police used every tactic in the book to prevent us from getting to the truth. There seemed to be no such thing as an independent police forensic person. The sham of an investigation was a waste of everybody’s time, and it was one of those cases where the truth emerged only many years later.

Some fourteen years afterwards, in 1999, George Bizos revealed at the TRC hearings the minutes of a state security council meeting in March 1984, in which a reference was made to Goniwe by the former apartheid government minister Barend du Plessis. The minutes indicated that certain ‘agitator’ former teachers be ‘removed’. Du Plessis later stated that he was referring to the redeployment of Goniwe due to the political climate in Cradock. But the truth did come out, eventually.

Cases like this cast a terrible shadow over the state at the time. It was the same with the David Webster murder (which I discuss in
Chapter 14
). People started to assume that the state was responsible for all kinds of atrocities, even when it was not.

Another tragic and frustrating case in which I was involved was the Piet Retief massacre on 8 June 1988, an event that was typical of the unspeakable things that occurred during the years of ‘total onslaught’.

One of the methods used to fight the unholy war of apartheid was to capture certain of the ‘enemy’ and offer them a stark choice – summary execution or the opportunity to turn collaborator and work for the security police. This happened predominantly at Vlakplaas, but also elsewhere, as discussed in
Chapter 9
. It was not much of a choice, and most took the latter option and betrayed their former comrades to become askaris.

In the Piet Retief case, information arrived in the hands of the security police that certain ANC cadres – members of MK – were planning to cross the border from Swaziland into South Africa on a given date. A ‘secure’ vehicle driven by an undercover askari was arranged for the MK members by the security forces, and they were duly picked up. They were driven to an ambush site on a lonely part of the road outside Piet Retief, a sleepy hamlet close to the Swaziland border. The askari then, using the pretence of relieving himself, left the car, and the security police stepped out from the shadows and riddled the vehicle – and all those in it – with bullets.

No attempt had been made to arrest the occupants of the vehicle prior to the ambush. The result of the shooting was a set of bulletriddled corpses, and the normal falsified affidavits were prepared for the inquest. The photographs included in this book illustrate the savagery with which these killings were performed. Some time after the inquest, one of the constables who had been on duty at the Piet Retief police station that night unburdened himself to Max du Preez of
Vrye Weekblad
, and an article revealing what had happened was published on 26 January 1990.

I was called in after the article appeared by the attorneys acting for the families of the deceased, and I went up to the scene. We asked to see the car in which the killings had taken place. During the examination of the car at the Piet Retief police station, I found a bullet that had not been removed by the police during the original examination. I asked the policeman overseeing us whether I could remove the bullet, and he attempted to obtain higher authority. The legal team for the families contacted the magistrate in charge of the inquest, but there was silence from all concerned.

I took the bull by the horns and cut the bullet out of the seat. The angle at which it had entered the seat would have serious consequences for the police version of the story. I also wanted to perform ballistic comparisons on the bullet. No sooner had I arrived back at my laboratory in Johannesburg with the bullet than I was visited by Krappies Engelbrecht, by then a general in the police force. He instructed me to hand over the bullet and threatened me with prosecution for tampering with a crime scene. I was forced to give it to him.

Of course, nothing more was ever heard of the bullet.

The problem in this case was access to evidence. When one party has sole access to the evidence, it can be manipulated in any way. Government agencies should not have this privilege. In the United States and the United Kingdom, private forensic agencies are allowed access to all evidence, and the investigations can take place openly, standing up to the scrutiny of the public at large.

Nothing was conducted in the open during the apartheid years. The magistrate at the hearing of the Piet Retief massacre issued veiled and not-so-veiled threats about charging me with obstructing the course of justice. It has never ceased to astound me just how dishonest and politically servile the state officials were. They forgot their oath of office to uphold the law of the land, and in many instances they were so politically motivated that it was beyond reasonable belief.

Our counsel in the Piet Retief matter was Zac Jacoob, who was blind, but who constantly amazed me with his incredible courtroom acuity, eyes or no eyes. He made use of a little Braille typewriter, and he had a phenomenal memory. His work on this doomed case was excellent, despite the somewhat inevitable outcome, given the time and circumstances.

It was clear from the angles of the gunshots that this was nothing more than cold-blooded murder of people that the police considered politically undesirable. There was room to arrest them; the laws were robust enough to deal with any crimes committed by such state officials. But the police had learnt well from Steve Biko and others, and they wanted to eliminate rather than illuminate. A report in
Vrye Weekblad
at the time said that the policemen stood around drinking sherry while the bodies were being booked into the mortuary, attesting to their utter callousness.

At the TRC hearings some years later, I stated to Bishop Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine that these atrocities could never have happened without connivance at all levels of the public service, including police, prosecutors, magistrates and some of the judges. Many of the judges and magistrates behaved impeccably during those times, and several sought to frustrate the worst of the apartheid legislation by their interpretation of the law. There were, however, those who saw it as their duty to twist and bend the law, the evidence and anything else to achieve results that were in line with the wishes or needs of their political masters.