TRC Final Report

Volume 2

Chapter 2

Subsection 42

■ SABOTAGE AND ARSON

464 While many of the actions described in this section were not in and of themselves gross human rights violations, they were state-directed acts of extra-territorial aggression and a component of the South African government’s counter-revolutionary warfare strategy. They complemented the killings and other gross violations of human rights described earlier and are included as part of the requirement to provide as complete a picture as possible.

465 The targets for these attacks fall into three categories:

a economic, military and other infrastuctural facilities;

b the offices of liberation and other organisations opposed to the South African government;

c houses/residences occupied or used by opponents of apartheid.

466 The Commission has accumulated evidence of acts of sabotage directed at socio-economic and military targets, primarily in the countries of the region that offered concrete support to the ANC. However, even targets in friendly countries like Swaziland were sometimes hit.

467 The Commission has information on attacks by South African security forces or their surrogate allies, on schools and clinics, road and rail networks, bridges, electricity, water, fuel and communications lines or networks, food stores, dipping facilities, farms or fields of crops.

468 One particular target in Mozambique was the Cabora Bassa electricity network, which was so frequently sabotaged as to be inoperative for more than a decade. The oil pipeline to Zimbabwe and the rail route between Beira and Zimbabwe were other frequent targets. In March 1982, SADF Special Forces’ operatives blew up fuel storage tanks at Beira while official records show that the fuel pipeline was ruptured in attacks thirty-seven times between 1982 and 1987, with an estimated loss of over ten million litres of fuel. In an eighteen-month period between February 1986 and September 1987, the Beira railway line was sabotaged by RENAMO on average once a week. Evidence has also been given to the Commission of South African seaborne Recce attacks on port facilities in Beira and Maputo harbours.

469 In the case of Angola, the short-term strategy for that country adopted by the SSC in March 1979 stated that attacks on the roads, bridges, rail networks and airfields of the south should be of such a nature that they could not be used again for the rapid deployment of the Angolan security forces. Perhaps the most economically devastating consequence of this strategy was the fact that it rendered the Benguela railway, which linked the south of Angola with the central African interior, inoperative for ten to fifteen years.

470 The earliest evidence available to the Commission of an external sabotage operation is of the bombing in mid-1963 of a transit centre for South African refugees in Francistown, Bechuanaland, followed soon afterwards by the blowing up of a plane at Francistown airport. The plane had been chartered to fly Harold Wolpe and Arthur Goldreich to Tanzania. Detained at the time of the Rivonia arrests, these two had escaped from the Johannesburg Fort prison and made their way via Swaziland to Bechuanaland. According to Williamson, only Republican Intelligence (RI) operatives would have had the capacity to perform such an operation at that time.

471 In terms of attacks on military installations, South African security forces and their agents were involved in at least four operations in Zimbabwe in the early 1980s. $250 000 worth of arms were stolen from the Cranbourne Barracks in Harare in December 1980. In the same month an attempt was made to blow up thirty army vehicles at the King George VI Barracks.

472 On 16 August 1981, an explosion at the Inkomo Barracks near Bulawayo destroyed weapons valued at approximately $50 million. The commander of the corps of engineers in the Zimbabwe National Army, Captain Patrick Gericke, was arrested soon after the attack. Gericke was suspected of having led a group in the attack, which resulted in bombs going off at intervals over a four-hour period. The fact that his release from prison in December 1981 was engineered by a Zimbabwean police inspector, Mr Fred Varkevisser, who may also have been a South African agent, suggests that he may have been acting on South Africa’s behalf. Along with Varkevisser’s family, they were then flown to South Africa in a light aircraft, after which Gericke joined the SADF.

473 Zimbabwean agents and SADF Special Forces operatives were involved in the attack on the Thornhill airforce base near Gweru on 25 July 1982, in which thirteen fighter trainers of the Zimbabwe Air Force were destroyed. Four senior air force officers, including Air Vice-Marshall Hugh Slatter, were arrested for this operation. Under torture, they confessed their involvement but were acquitted when the trial judge deemed their confessions inadmissible. They were almost certainly not involved. Evidence gathered by the Commission suggests that this operation was undertaken by a South African Special Forces group led by a long-serving member of the Recces operating as an agent in Zimbabwe. The Commission has the names of four SADF Special Forces operatives who participated in that attack.

474 Two days prior to Thornhill, on 23 July 1983, six foreign tourists (two British, two American and two Australian) were abducted in the Lupare area on the road between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls. They were murdered three days later. The negative publicity badly affected Zimbabwe’s tourist industry.

475 In October 1996, the Zimbabwean journal Moto published a report that the abductions had been the work of eight former Selous Scouts acting “on the orders of ex-agents of the Rhodesian intelligence who also doubled as South African agents” (p. 7). The Commission has obtained no information to corroborate the allegation.

476 Six months prior to Thornhill, on 18 December 1981, the offices of the ruling ZANU Party in Zimbabwe were blown up in Harare in an assassination attempt on senior Zimbabwean politicians, including Mr Mugabe. The central committee of the Party was due to meet at the time of the blast but was delayed due to the Prime Minister’s late arrival. Seven civilians on the street and in shops nearby were killed in the blast, and 124 were injured. Double (South African and CIO) agents Mr Colin Evans and Mr Philip Hartlebury were arrested for their involvement in the attack. According to a report in a Zimbabwean journal , another double agent alleged to have been directly linked to the blast was Mr Peter Stanton. After leaving Zimbabwe, Stanton became a member of D40 and Barnacle and eventually the CCB.