APLA

... Barnard Smith. One day we came here in 1993 on the 25th of July. We were very young. We were members of the task force; that is a component part of APLA that helps APLA to attack the farmers and to chase them away. We arrived here, we found Mr. Smith with his wife. I came here with another five ...

... They fired machine guns and threw hand grenades at the congregation of nearly 1000 people. This was one of a series of similar attacks by APLA in the early nineties. The attack lasted for about 30 seconds and resulted in 11 deaths, and 55 injuries. This week some survivors testified at ...

The APLA submission started on a very reconciliatory note with an address by the recently elected PAC leader, Dr Stanley Mogoba. // I have supported the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at all times, even when personal hurt and humiliation was experienced, because I am convinced that this ...

On November 8, 1992 the King William’s Town golf club was attacked by four APLA guerrillas. Beth Savage was seriously injured and psychologically damaged, yet she believes the Truth Commission can facilitate the healing process in South Africa. // I would like to meet that man that threw the ...

... was nearly plunged into chaos. There were mass killings on trains, buses and taxis, the killings at Boipatong, Phola park, the rightwing threat. APLA, the armed wing of the PAC, was carrying out terror attacks on white civilian soft targets. One such an attack was the Highgate massacre in East ...

... dying on the Free State and Eastern Cape platteland [countryside]. One of those who died was the elderly Mr. JJ Fourie. He was ambushed by four APLA members late one afternoon here at the gate to his farm, ‘Stormberg’ in the Verkeerdevlei ...

63rd edition of the Truth Commission Special Report. On tonight’s programme we look at the brutal racial slays of white people by the PAC’s army APLA during 1993. We talk to victims, survivors, killers and politicians in KwaZulu-Natal and we show you a conversation with the last jail master of ...

But the military men had a much harsher message; it quickly became clear that the APLA strategy of attacking white civilians was going to be a central issue.

But there were also the killers from the other side. APLA soldiers who had attacked soft targets like restaurants, pubs and the St. James Church where 11 churchgoers died. For victims the long wait for the truth often ended in an emotional showdown with those who had pulled the triggers and yield ...

... Army takes full responsibility for all the operations that were conducted by the cadres and members of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army. The APLA forces who carried out these operations followed the directives from their commanders and these directives were from the highest echelons of the ...

Karl Weber had stopped off for a drink at the Highgate Hotel in East London on the first of May 1991. A man with a balaclava stormed into the room and opened fire with an AK47. Five people were killed and many injured. Weber lost his left arm and most use of his right arm. // My life was changed ...

Our objective was to reclaim the land so that it could be given back to its original owners, the African people. // The farmers…you must understand that they form part or they were part of the oppressors at that time, because the farmers, you could actually define them twofold: they can be police ...

Seven years later on the 3rd of December 1992 tragedy struck Queenstown again. A limpet mine, claimed to have been planted by the Azanian People’s Liberation Army, ripped the local Spur restaurant apart. Shane Brody and his sister Michelle were amongst those present that fateful night. Both ...

St. James today looks like any other church in the suburbs. Inside its quiet, sun slanting down onto pews, hymn books neatly arranged for the next service. On Sundays more than a thousand people file into its vast interior, but on a stormy Sunday’s night in July four years ago, shortly after the ...

Three of the men who were ordered to kill at the Heidelberg Tavern that evening in December 1993 say now they planned to strike a much harder blow with more casualties than the four bodies that were carried out into the night.

Valentine’s day in 1994. South Africa is run by a transitional executive council and preparations for the first ever democratic elections are well under way. But in the bustling coal mining town of New Castle however preparations of a different kind are being made.

We are proud of what we did. We have no regret, it is unfortunate that people had to die, but it is not something that we are ashamed of that we did go to war. War by its very nature is evil and if there was another method of avoiding it we would have avoided it. So, we are not going to have ...

They were legitimate targets of the struggle because they were occupying the very trophy for which war was all about, that is the land. Because when we say ‘we were conquered,’ what we mean is that our land was conquered and the land wasn’t conquered by the ghosts, by the spirits, invisible ...

The basis for positions adopted in respect of the legitimacy of targeting white civilians, that by typifying white civilians in the manner in which you did carte blanch, you would have violated international law. // We did not attack white civilians but we destroyed European invaders, ...

... three applicants and they have undertaken to do so this coming week. We will ask them the questions that Liezl wanted answers to. Letlapa Mphahlele APLA’s director of operations was the one man everyone was expecting to see at this week’s amnesty hearing for the St. James massacre. He has ...