As I have previously stated, from my personal experience in dealing with the TRC, TRC officials, and the TRC-RSA Goverment; I have come to the extremely unpleasant conclusion, that the Truth and Reconciliation was not sincere, by the individuals who set it up, or who profess to be “TRC/Proudly South African.”
In fact, I have come to the conclusion that anyone or any business who professes to be “Proudly South African,” is Proud of Hypocrisy, Betrayal, Deception, Greed, Lies and Secrecy.
What is there to be proud of in conducting the most spectacular Political and Religious “Truth and Reconcilation” Prostitution Image Management Show?
When circumstances and experiences began to force me to confront this as a working hypothesis to understand the motivations of individuals within the TRC South African Goverment actions, which totally contradicted thier “Truth and Reconciliation” verbal diarhea rhetoric; I resisted.
I found excuses, I thought 'Give them Another Chance'. Again, and again, and again. Finally, I thought I would let them know: to thier Face: In Black and White, how their actions were being interpreted, and give them an opportunity to provide a response to provide some alternative perspective insight into their behaviour.
So, on 06 June 2009, I informed South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Nobel Peace Prize Recipients (Mandela, Tutu & De Klerk) of my allegations. I wrote them a complaint of my allegations against them (PDF), sent to them, c/o and via: the Norwegian Nobel Institute (PDF). I also setup the complaint, as a Petition to the Norwegian Nobel Institute:[1] I hereby accuse you of: (i) Human Rights Advocacy Intellectual Dishonesty and Hypocrisy; (ii) Proudly South Africa/’TRC-RSA’ Moral, Political and Religious Prostitution; and (iii) ‘TRC-RSA’ Fraud and Betrayal.
[2] My allegations are based upon my observations of your conduct, since 1994; and the working assumption conclusions I have reached are that, it appears highly plausible that:[a] The TRC was a massive fraud upon South Africans, black and white;In accordance with your Constitutional Rights in terms of § 32 and § 33 (Just Administrative Action; and Access to Information); please find herewith the information that I base my accusations upon; for your – hopefully serious – consideration, and response.
[b] White Guilt and Black Denial Politically Correct Proudly South Africa/TRC-RSA South Africans, & their Poverty Pimp dog-and-pony-TRC-show of pretend ‘Pimping Fake Reconciliation’ leaders (yourselves), are not seriously committed to Truth Telling, most definitely not to Transparency, and undoubtedly not to unequivocal emotional & psychologically sincere Forgiveness; and
[c] If (a) and (b) are proven beyond reasonable doubt to be legally true; then the TRC-RSA ‘social contract’ is null and void, as a result of your fraud and betrayal!
 |
One of the justifications cited for my allegations being:Eugene de Kock & the Truth & Reconciliation Fraud and Betrayal:
A SADF soldier, named Eugene de Kock – the most honest man in Africa, in my personal opinion – is in prison for 212 years, for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about his POLITICALLY MOTIVATED CRIMINAL ACTS during apartheid; to the ‘Truth (sic) and Reconciliation’ (sic) Commission; while his political superior, runs around the world with a Nobel Peace Prize Medal, and -- it appears -- a morally bankrupt conscience!
Other reasons, included:Your Intentional, Deliberate and perhaps Malicious Avoidance of Sincere Honourable Truthfully Transparent Advocacy for Ecologically Sustainable Principles of Sustainable Human Rights, Peace & Social Justice.....
Conscious Deliberate Avoidance of Publicly, Truthfully, Transparently and with a focus on Reconciliation, addressing the fundamental root cause -– population policy common sense....
White Afrikaner Genocide: Farm Murders & Torture motivated by Ethnic Hate & Vengeance....
Consequence of Afrikan Patriarchal Hateful Procreation of thousands and thousands of hated, unloved and unwanted Slave and Cannon Fodder Bred Children for Child Prostitution, Sexual Slavery and Rape....
18 July 2006_PeakOilRSA Briefing Paper: Is Gross Mismanagement of the Nation’s Energy Policy an Impeachable Offense?; delivered to your offices; c/o & via: The Office of -- then Leader of the Opposition, -- Mr. Tony Leon.....
Their response?DELIBERATE INDIFFERENCE
So, on 22 September 2009, I once again submitted the aforementioned complaint to South Africa's TRC Nobel Peace Prize Recipients; c/o Norwegian Nobel Institute. This time I submitted the complaint as a legal document, marked as Attachments FF.01a, and FF.01b. I served them on the Norwegian Nobel Committee (Tenth Respondent), c/o and via the Royal Norwegian Consulate, Capetown. Ms. Adele Day acknowledged Receipt at 10:54 hrs on 22 September 2009, on behalf of the Royal Norwegian Consulate, 17th Floor, Southern Life Center, 8 Riebeeck Street, Capetown; for the Royal Norwegian Ambassador, to forward the documentation to the Nobel Institute: Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Specifically, the Notice requests Respondents Nine and Ten, to take particular notice of the White Refugee Issues cited, under the Notice of Intention's points, [10], [11], [12] and [13], among others:[10] For the Record: State of Effective Emergency: South Africa’s Unrepresented White Refugees: The Tyranny, Disorder, Crime and Corruption of the State, has effectively resulted in a state of anarchy, where fundamental rights of due process, natural law, administrative law, safety and security, etc have been effectively intentionally, deliberately and maliciously suspended, as a result of corruption, incompetence and indifference. South Africa is heading towards a socio-economic, political and military failed state of Zimbabwefication.
[10a] ..... [10j]....
[11] Nuremberg Principles & Citizens Privilege: Accordingly the Applicant herewith informs the Tyrannical and Corrupt State Officials of South Africa (c/o and via Respondents Two to Eight, witnessed by Respondents Nine & Ten), the Applicant has signed the Why We Are White Refugees Petition (why-we-are-white-refugees.co.nr), herewith requested to be submitted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, on behalf of all White Refugee Petitioners, to the Minister of Citizenship & Immigration for Canada, to be submitted to the Federal Court of Canada, for their due process consideration, in the matter of Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and Brandon Carl Huntley; Court File No. IMA-4423-09.
[11a] The Applicant, as a Why We Are White Refugees Petitioner, herewith requests the Federal Court of Canada, to take notice of the repeated intentional, deliberate, malicious and hostile indifference and unwillingness of the South African (and African) Government(s), to provide for judicial and administrative due process and safety and security protections to the Applicant, and law-abiding, taxpaying ‘White Refugee’ citizens constitutional interests. If Canada, and other countries do not grant White Refugees convention status, then they will be condemning African White Refugees, to an intolerable situation in Africa, where their basic rights, security and lives, are in danger.
Under Point [12] and [13] I documented the list of documents submitted into the Court Record, of the High Court Western Cape: Application for Review # 19963-09.
Respondents Two to Eight: The Director of National Prosecutions; Hon. Patricia de Lille; Former President Thabo Mbeki; Former NPA Nat. Director, Mr. Bulelani Ngcuka; Former SAPS Commissoner Jackie Selebi; Former Min. of Corrections BM Skosana; and Former President Nelson Mandela.
Respondents Nine and Ten: Minister of Citizenship, Canada, and the Nobel Institute, Norwegian Nobel Committee.
To conclude:
A comparison: Do you notice any difference between Eugene De Kock and the ANC, when it comes to the Treatment of Children?
Did you know it was Eugene De Kock's Vlakplaas policy that he personally would kill any of his subordinates, who acted against his orders, with regard to not killing children?
Did you know the ANC endorsed and encouraged thier ANC Youth League Cadres to force young women to be impregnated (raped), to breed unwanted children, as future cannon fodder for the 'ANC liberation (sic) struggle'?MR HATTINGH: When you testified about Vlakplaas you also mentioned that it was not Vlakplaas policy to act against children. You expressed that rather emphatically, saying that members of your unit would have been killed should they have acted against your orders with regard to children.
MR DE KOCK: Yes, that is correct.
MR HATTINGH: You said that you would sentence them.
MR DE KOCK: That is correct.
MR HATTINGH: Did you have any information that there were children, and when I say children I mean small children, I'm not speaking of adult children as such. Were there any toddlers or small children in the house?
MR DE KOCK: There were no little ones, if I might put it that way.
MR HATTINGH: And if you had possessed such information, which measures would you have taken if any?
MR DE KOCK: If it had been necessary to attack the house, because this would have resulted in a change of approach, one would have to determine which changes one could make in the arrangements and then perhaps take two of the black members along to take the children out of the house and leave them at another premises. We have done this in the past. We could have taken another approach to the operation, for example by using a landmine which one could activate by means of remote control, planting this somewhere near the house or in a path which was frequently used. We would then have adopted a more comprehensive method in order to destroy a target.
MR HATTINGH: Would you have given specific instruction that the members ensure that no children be injured or killed?
MR DE KOCK: Yes.
MR HATTINGH: And you state that you had acted in the past at premises where there were children, what did you do in such cases with the children who had been present?
MR DE KOCK: Chairperson, in the case of an operation in Lesotho for example, the child-minder was left with the baby. And in the case in Swaziland, a man lay on one side of the room, a man with an AK47, he was my opposition and I was on the other side in the passage with a handgun and there was a little one running up and down in the passage. We left it at that, we didn't shoot and I left the house.
In another case we locked the child and the minder of the child in the bathroom. In fact this happened more than once.
» » [Truth and Reconciliation Transcript: Applicaton No: AM 0066/96: Murder of Chand Family: Eugene De Kock]
“All [young girls or women] opposing the wishes of the [ANC young cadres] were reminded, that it was every woman’s obligation to give birth to new “soldiers”, in order to replace those warriors killed in the liberation struggle. The idiom of the adolescents referred to these patriotic efforts as “operation production”. Because of exactly this reason it was forbidden for the girls to use contraceptives.” -- Johannes Harnischfeger
» » [Africanisation of RSA: ANC's Occult “Struggle” Politics: Witchcraft and the State in South Africa]
Sign the Petition to the Norwegian Nobel Institute to Withdraw Nobel Peace Prizes from Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for (a) Intellectual Dishonesty & Hypocrisy; (b) Moral, Political and Religious Prostitution; and (c) TRC-RSA Fraud and Betrayal.....
Eugene de Kock seeks pardon
SAPA
3 January 2010 12:25
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Johannesburg - President Jacob Zuma may be considering a presidential pardon for convicted apartheid-era police hit squad commander Eugene de Kock, the Sunday Independent reported on Sunday.
The newspaper said Zuma met De Kock during a secret visit to the Pretoria Central Prison in April last year. It reported that "sources close to De Kock" had described the meeting as cordial.
Zuma flew from KwaZulu-Natal to meet De Kock, the former commander of the Vlakplaas counter-insurgency base, home of "death squads" which murdered anti-apartheid activists.
De Kock apparently gave information to Zuma about the involvment of other people who got off "scot-free".
In return for a pardon, the newspaper reported, De Kock indicated he would help any new investigation into apartheid-era atrocities, including the recovery of bodies of victims of the security forces.
Zuma' spokesperson in the Presidency, Vincent Magwena, and ANC spokesperson Zizi Kodwa have denied any knowledge of the April meeting. - SAPA
» » » » [News 24]
South Africans reconciled?
Greg Barrow, BBC
Friday, 30 October, 1998, 09:18 GMT
 “I hereby accuse you of: (i) Human Rights Advocacy Intellectual Dishonesty and Hypocrisy; (ii) Proudly South Africa/’TRC-RSA’ Moral, Political and Religious Prostitution; and (iii) ‘TRC-RSA’ Fraud and Betrayal. In accordance with your Constitutional Rights in terms of § 32 and § 33; please find herewith the information that I base my accusations upon; for your – hopefully serious – consideration, and response.” » » [Letter to Nobel Peace Prize Recipients: Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk & Desmond Tutu; c/o & via: Nobel Institute: Nobel Prize Committee] |
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to investigate political crimes during the apartheid era. Over more than two years, it has taken more than 20,000 statements from individual victims of human rights abuse, and received more than 7,000 applications for amnesty.
The aim of the commission and its chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was to promote reconciliation in South Africa's divided society through truth about its dark past.
One of the Truth commissioners, Dr Faizal Randera said: "If we cannot understand what made people think and do what they did these conflicts will arise again within our society."
In the turbulent final decade of South Africa's last white government, few sections of society were left untouched by violence.
De Klerk says sorry
Those at the centre of the conflict have been sought by the commission to explain their role in events that took the country to the brink of civil war.
Very few political leaders have come forward to apologise for the sins of the past. But South Africa's last apartheid president, FW de Klerk, was one.
"I and many other leading figures in our party have already publicly apologised for the pain and suffering caused by former policies of the National Party. I reiterate these apologies," he told the commission.
But as the commission was preparing to publish its report, Mr de Klerk took court action to stop the report from implicating him in a series of bombings in the 1980s. He had been told the report would say he had evaded questions about whether he knew of plans to bomb the offices of organisations supporting the black liberation movement.
Apologies not enough
Many black South Africans have been left feeling that apologies are not enough.
Many are angry that the perpetrators of human rights abuse under South Africa's last white government can be granted amnesty if they make a full confession of their crimes.
It has been an unprecedented experiment in trying to heal the wounds of the apartheid era, but after more than two years of hearings and investigations some people are asking how much reconciliation has been achieved by exposure of dark truth from South Africa's dark past.
Mathatha Tsedu, the political editor of South Africa's most popular black newspaper, The Sowetan, said: "Black people are the sufferers here ... they saw the TRC as a mechanism to try to deal with that pain.
"White people have so much to hide about what they have been doing all along and they saw the TRC as some kind of witch hunt and therefore didn't go," he said.
The trauma of the past
Much of the criticism of the commission stems from a basic misunderstanding about its mandate.
It was never meant to punish people, just to expose their role in crimes committed under apartheid.
It is in this respect that the achievements of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stand out.
Only by revisiting the trauma of the past can people look to a better future - but with the truth comes pain and a reminder that reconciliation may still be a distant goal in the new South Africa.
» » » » [BBC]
I forgave apartheid's chief killer
The Guardian.UK
February 21, 2004
 ‘There is a difference between posed, fake intellectual forgiveness, and sincere, sensate being forgiveness, and, this difference has been, so far, almost always avoided by politicians; including South Africa's alleged Truth & Reconciliation Peace Prize politicians.......’ -- Affidavit of Brad Blanton Ph.D. evidencing ‘citizens privilege’ Nuremberg Principles of Civil Disobedience; in Support of Complaints: HC-WC 019963-09 & SAHRC WC-2009-0455BS” (PDF) |
Nicknamed "Prime Evil", Eugene de Kock has the blood of countless black South Africans on his hands. Now a psychologist from the townships says he should be pardoned. She tells Rory Carroll why.
When the apartheid assassin known as "Prime Evil" was sentenced to 212 years for crimes against humanity, the black South Africans outside Pretoria's supreme court cheered and danced. Never again would Eugene de Kock walk the streets. That big blank face with the thick spectacles would stay caged until the day he died. That was 1996, and De Kock is still inside the grey world of C-Max, the maximum security section of Pretoria's central prison, his body in orange overalls, his feet chained to a metal stool bolted to the floor when visitors come.
But in one sense De Kock is out. Out and roaming the mind of South Africa with awkward questions about the nature of evil and forgiveness, courtesy of a black woman who decided to look into the monster's heart and found a human being worthy of a pardon and freedom. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a psychologist at the University of Cape Town, has published a remarkable book about her conversations with De Kock.
Titled A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness, it has been dubbed by some as "Interviews with a Vampire". In fact it is a nuanced and clinical scrutiny of how and why an apparently ordinary man became murderer-in-chief for a brutal regime.
It dwells on his atrocities - the torture, the ambushes, the executions, the exultation in inflicting suffering - and yet concludes that Prime Evil deserves to be forgiven.
"Yes, if the authorities asked my opinion I would say Eugene de Kock should be pardoned," says Gobodo-Madikizela, sunk in an armchair at her office in Cape Town.
"He has been visited by the widows of some of his victims. He is an example of how dialogue can happen."
“Which is worse: Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann who commit evil acts not thinking they are evil, or De Kock committing acts that he knows are evil?” -- Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela |
A series of interviews in C-Max totalling 46 hours convinced her that the commanding officer of state-sanctioned death squads was genuinely remorseful about his career and a changed man. A bestseller in the US and South Africa, the book has been widely praised, with South Africa's Nobel laureate for literature, J. M. Coetzee, hailing a "coolly intelligent analysis of how the conscience gets to be numbed".
Afrikaans-language newspapers welcomed the book as a brave contribution to understanding the past and shaping the future. The near-universal plaudits have puzzled the author as her conclusion that De Kock should be freed could be expected to be controversial.
 Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, left, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. |
"In a way it worries me that the reaction has been so positive," she says. At book fairs and readings she has been asked why she focuses on the perpetrator rather than the victim, but otherwise she has not been challenged.
That she is black and grew up in a township probably disarmed some critics. At the age of five, she cowered behind her mother's garden hedge while army trucks "like huge monsters" chased people through the township. Just as important is her evident sincerity: she did not set out to empathise with De Kock, it just happened. It also helps that Archbishop Desmond Tutu liked the book, and that reconciliation has been South Africa's leitmotif for the past decade.
“The Milgram experiment was designed to simulate the conditions in which Eichmann operated, and to determine how many individuals would – like Eichmann – follow orders and be obedient to the system in which they operated; and how many would practice civil disobedience and refuse to be obedient to perceived illegal authority. Milgram’s experiment revealed that a significant majority of the population – 65%, like Eichmanns millions of accomplices – merely follow orders, irrespective whether the orders violate their deepest moral beliefs; only 35 % possessed the skills and competencies for civil disobedience.” -- Affidavit of Brad Blanton Ph.D. evidencing ‘citizens privilege’ Nuremberg Principles of Civil Disobedience; in Support of Complaints: HC-WC 019963-09: SA's Unrepresented White Refugees & SAHRC WC-2009-0455BS: ANC's Crime of Apartheid” (PDF) |
Gobodo-Madikizela's first visit to C-Max reads like something from Silence of the Lambs. The warders gave her a chair with wheels and demonstrated how she could whiz backwards if De Kock, replete with Hannibal Lector garb, made a lunge. Instead he stood up, leg-chains clanking, extended his hand, smiled and in a thick Afrikaans accent said: "It's a pleasure to meet you."
De Kock grew up in a conservative Afrikaner family as white minority rule was entering crisis. Besieged by opponents inside and outside the country, the government had the blessing of the Dutch Reformed Church when it hit back.
De Kock led the army's counter-insurgency unit, Koevoet, in Namibia, a dirty war fought in the bush, which left few prisoners. When riots worsened in South Africa he was brought home in the 1980s to head Vlakplaas, a farm where the security services interrogated suspects and refined their killing techniques - letter bombs, booby trapped headphones and vehicles, poison - which claimed the lives of countless civilians and liberation fighters.
It was his own men who nicknamed him Prime Evil. "Bad he was, but mad he wasn't, not at all. He had a sense of drivenness. He was looked up to by the entire country as a fixer, he was the kingpin in the machinery of destruction," says Gobodo-Madikizela.
In 1995, a year after democratic elections brought the African National Congress to power, he went on trial and a horrified public learnt all the gory details. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission granted him an amnesty for some crimes in return for testimony, but that did not affect the court's prison sentence and De Kock, it was assumed, was gone for good.
Gobodo-Madikizela is an unlikely champion for his liberty. Chic and trim in tweed trousers and an orange blouse and scarf, her accent has the neutrality of years abroad. Born in the impoverished township of Langa, outside Cape Town, she witnessed daily police brutality and discrimination but she managed to get a clinical psychology degree and study in the US.
 “I have not given up my quest; to determine whether my fellow South Africans are committed to practicing what we preach, or whether we are just a bunch of two faced lying gutless emotional, psychological and political cowards. If so, best we at least have the courage to admit that to ourselves, and return the Truth and Reconciliation Nobel Peace Prize Medals, and retain some measure of dignity.” “I appreciate you for – what I interpret as -- your courage to support Amnesty or a Pardon for Eugene de Kock.” |
After serving with Archbishop Tutu on the human rights violations committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she was inspired by victims' stories to write a book about vengeance and forgiveness. Intrigued by De Kock's request to meet and apologise to the widows of some men he murdered, and by the widows' decisions to forgive him, she started visiting C-Max in 1997.
What unfolded in the grey interview room could make a great play, the white man exploring his psyche with a member of a race he tried so hard to oppress. Did he ever kill one of her friends or relatives, he asked, and seemed relieved when she said no.
De Kock broke down when he recalled meeting the widows. "I wish I could do more than (say) I'm sorry. I wish there was a way of bringing their bodies back alive. I wish I could say, 'Here are your husbands'."
The psychologist touched his trembling hand, a reflex that troubled her. "He's got blood all over and for me to be drawn like that . . . it made me question my sense of empathy."
Waking up in bed the following day, she was unable to lift her right forearm as if, she says, her body was grounding it for having engaged in a prohibited act. Friends warned her that De Kock might try to manipulate her, or play mind games, and her fears deepened when De Kock subsequently said the hand she touched was his trigger hand. Did he tell her that to reclaim some of his old power to instil dread?
 “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.” - Winnie Mandela  Necklacing refers to the practice of summary execution carried out by forcing a rubber tire (tyre), filled with gasoline, around a victim's chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The victim may take up to 20 minutes to die, suffering severe burns in the process. The first recorded lethal lynching by necklacing occurred in Uitenhage on 23 March 1985: ANC supporters necklaced a councillor, for being a collaborator.  Necklacing was frequently carried out in the name of the ANC. An example of necklacing was the case of a young girl Maki Skosana in July 1985: “Her body had been scorched by fire and some broken pieces of glass had been inserted into her vagina,” Moloko told the committee. |
"I had touched his leprosy, and he seemed to be telling me that, even though I did not realise it at the time, I was from now on infected with the memory of having embraced into my heart the hand that had killed, maimed and blown up lives."
But she decided that the side of De Kock she had touched was the one that had not been allowed to triumph over the side that made him a killer, a glimpse of what might have been. So the interviews continued, fuelled by De Kock's apparent desire to understand and atone for what he had done.
"What struck me was this little boy's frightened face." He was a desperate soul seeking to affirm to himself that he still belonged to the human universe, she said.
De Kock's father, it turned out, drank heavily and abused his mother. As a child he was ridiculed for stuttering, leaving feelings of shame and aggression, which he learnt to relieve through his own violence, says Gobodo-Madikizela, adding that that is only a fragment of the explanation.
If abuse corrupts a hitherto innocent person's psyche and predisposes them to evil, do they deserve sympathy? Or should they be condemned for not exercising free will to suppress evil impulses? Or both? Which is worse, she asks: Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann who commit evil acts not thinking they are evil, or De Kock committing acts that he knows are evil? The latter, she suggests, has a more normal moral compass, albeit one that is ignored.
And what, she asks, of the black mobs who placed burning tyres around people's necks - the sadistic necklace murders? And of the communities that allowed them to do it? Gobodo-Madikizela recalls being caught up with a jubilant crowd in 1990 celebrating the capture of a police captain, a suspected apartheid agent, who was subsequently mutilated and killed.
The line between good and evil is thinner than we think, she says, which is one of the reasons forgiveness is so valuable. Rather than overlooking a wrong, it rises above it and can empower the victim. "Just at the moment the perpetrator begins to show remorse . . . the victim becomes the gatekeeper to what the outcast desires - re-admission into the human community."
Forgiveness can sometimes humiliate the victim, she says, citing Winnie Madikizela-Mandela hugging the mother of a 14-year-old boy she denied killing, but in the right circumstances it eases victims' resentment and pain.
Having pardoned several apartheid-era killers, she believes President Thabo Mbeki should also pardon De Kock. The irony is that Gobodo-Madikizela cannot forgive Mbeki for his foot-dragging on the HIV/Aids pandemic, which kills 600 South Africans daily.
One of the many critics who say the President's controversial views on the causes and treatment of the disease have cost countless lives, she is careful not to compare him with De Kock, but notes that traumas during apartheid and exile left some ANC leaders "psychologically incomplete".
Silence from Mbeki makes it difficult for women to leave partners infected with HIV, says Gobodo-Madikizela, who defied her family's wishes by leaving a husband who had AIDS. Her book is dedicated to a younger sister, Sesi, who did not dare leave her own husband and died from the disease. It is the only time in the interview that Gobodo-Madikizela looks angry. "For a leader to lead young people on this path is unforgivable." - Guardian
A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness, by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, is published in the US and South Africa by Houghton Mifflin.
» » » » [The Age.AU (PDF)]
The voice of 'Prime Evil'
Greg Barrow, BBC
Wednesday, October 28, 1998 Published at 11:28 GMT
 Eugene de Kock: a killer applauded for his honesty |
Greg Barrow in Johannesburg looks at the role played in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by a shadowy figure from the apartheid era known as "prime evil".
When you find yourself standing in a gentleman's toilets and someone comes up behind you, it can be quite unnerving.
When you turn round and see that the individual is a mass murderer serving a 212-year prison sentence, it is downright terrifying.
But that is what happened during an adjournment at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission amnesty hearing in Pretoria in July.
Joker in the pack
Eugene de Kock, a former police colonel and apartheid arch-assassin had come to relieve himself, during a break in his testimony.
In the deck of cards which makes up the apartheid era government and its henchmen, Eugene de Kock is the joker in the pack.
I watched him as he washed his hands at the toilet sink. A meticulous man, he soaped his arms right up to the elbows, scrubbing every inch of skin before fastidiously drying himself and returning to the hearing.
De Kock's victims say he took the same painstaking care as commander of the notorious Vlakplaas government hit squad during the apartheid era.
First he would kill his target. Then he would incinerate, burn,or even blow up the remains so that no scrap of evidence was left.
An unlikely villain
In the South African media, Eugene De Kock has been described as a mass killer, a psychopath known to the public as "Prime Evil".
He's an unlikely villain. With his carefully combed hair and thick glasses, he looks more like a librarian than a ruthless assassin.
 “Accordingly much of what occurred at Camp Quatro and the crimes committed by ANC cadres against dissenting ANC members, or IFP members or otherwise, on behalf of the ANC Politburo; the coercion of young African women to participate as slave and cannon fodder "Operation Production" Breeding factories on behalf of the ANC (behaviour vilified by the West, when conducted by Hitler) was covered up and never exposed by the TRC.” » » [How many 2010 WC fans will leave SA burned, duped, fooled, conned, scammed and screwed over by Proudly SA Lies?] |
And in the post-apartheid era of truth and reconciliation he has also become something of a hero, a man of integrity in a community of denial.
Truth and reconciliation has been hard to come by in South Africa. Only one former apartheid cabinet minister has sought amnesty for his role in the political crimes of the last white government.
Every other minister has dodged the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and passed off the crimes of the apartheid era as the work of a few rotten apples.
De Kock is one of the foul fruits grown from the tree of apartheid. When he admitted to his crimes in front of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission he was applauded by a black audience.
They were commending him for his honesty, and his willingness to identify senior politicians on whose orders he carried out his dirty work.
Sleepless nights
De Kock disputes the label of psychopath, arguing that he never took pleasure in killing his victims. It was a job he said, and he was acting under orders from the very top.
Eugene De Kock is on a crusade to finger his old bosses who let him fall for his crimes once he had outgrown his usefulness as an apartheid killing machine.
He still gives them sleepless nights with his clarity and vision in recalling that dark era when a white government was prepared to cling to power by any means necessary.
The flaw within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be that such brutal honesty will not be put to good use.
When Archbishop Desmond Tutu opened the first hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in April 1996, he set out its charter - to expose the truth about South Africa's dark past, and lay to rest the ghosts of that era so they could never return to haunt the nation.
Justice was being exchanged for reconciliation, there was to be no Nuremberg trial in post-apartheid South Africa.
Truth when it comes is painful to everyone concerned - only the incredible moral leadership of Archbishop Tutu, and his comrade, President Nelson Mandela seems to have held the whole exercise together.
As a human personification of the power of forgiveness, these two men alone have shown the lead in promoting reconciliation.
Some South Africans have found it within themselves to follow the example of Tutu and Mandela - but human frailty and the desire for revenge has left many others frustrated that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission may have stolen their right to punish the perpetrators of the crimes of apartheid.
A colleague of mine commented that South Africa needs to invent a new word before it can come to terms with its past. That word is "concile".
"How can we be reconciled," he said, "if we have never in our history been conciled".
Stretching all the way back to the arrival of Dutch settlers in the 17th Century, through the Boer War, and on to the foundation of the new republic, South Africa has always been a country in which whites have been at loggerheads with blacks.
'A huge lie'
 “A SADF soldier, named Eugene de Kock – the most honest man in Africa, in my personal opinion – is in prison for 212 years, for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about his politically motivated criminal acts during apartheid; to the ‘Truth (sic) and Reconciliation’ (sic) Commission; while his political superior, runs around the world with a Nobel Peace Prize Medal, and -- it appears -- a morally bankrupt conscience!” » » [Letter to Nobel Peace Prize Recipients: Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk & Desmond Tutu; c/o & via: Nobel Institute: Nobel Prize Committee] |
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission chose only the last three decades of the apartheid era for its frame of reference.
It's a small period of South African history in which an awful lot of crimes were committed under the name of apartheid.
But almost two and a half years on from the first investigative hearing, this Commission of Truth has been left with a huge lie: that it was not the apartheid leaders who were responsible for the heinous crimes of that era, but the foot soldiers like Eugene De Kock.
The ministers who guided and co-ordinated the evil strategy of apartheid have used the Truth Commission like a Catholic confession box.
They have taken their pew and spoken softly only of the crimes they want to confess - and the Commission has absolved them of their sins, blessing them as they leave to forget about that awful past.
» » » » [BBC]
» » [Sunday Ind.: Eugene de Kock Followed Orders in Murder (PDF)]
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