TRC Final Report

Volume 2

Chapter 2

Subsection 9

■ POLICE AND MILITARY COUNTER-INSURGENCY OPERATIONS IN SOUTH WEST AFRICA

The third specific incident that I remember is chasing a SWAPO unit commander or political commissar. We picked up his spoor and chased him for two days ... this was typical of the style of contacts that I was involved in. Five Casspirs, fifty men chasing one or two people running on foot. We finally did catch him, hiding in a kraal. The unit commander … lined up a bunch of Koevoet people next to the hut he was in and drove over the hut with the Casspir. Everyone then fired into the rubble ... The SWAPO commissar was pulled out of the rubble and given to me to keep alive. He had been shot in the arm and the leg and had been driven over ... because he was a commissar, he would have been carrying a handgun. John Deegan [acting unit commander] started to interrogate him while I was putting up a drip. The purpose of this interrogation was to find the handgun ... We never found the handgun because John shot him in the head out of frustration while I was still attending to him. The incident and the face of this SWAPO commissar haunted me in dreams for years. (Lance Corporal Sean Callaghan, amnesty application, December 1996.)

[The SWAPO commissar] was a veteran ... he would have been an excellent source of information but he was so fucked ... each team had an army medic and Sean started patching up this guy while I was busy interrogating him ... and he was just going “kandi shishi”, even at this stage he was denying everything ... and I just started going into this uncontrollable fucking rage and he started going floppy and I remember thinking “how dare you, I’m talking to you, how dare you ignore me...why don’t you answer me” and then this is what I was told afterwards. I had my 9mm in my hand and I was just pushing my way through the team ... and apparently what happened was I started ripping … Sean had put a drip into the guy’s arm and started plugging the bullet hole to get him together ... he would have pulled through ... I ripped all the bandages, the drip off the guy, pulled out my 9mm, put the barrel between his eyes and fucking boom I executed him ... and they told me afterwards I was just screaming, I was raging ... (Warrant Officer John Deegan’s account of this incident to the Commission’s conscript hearing, Cape Town, June 1997.)

73 Three factors are central to the human rights situation in South West Africa (Namibia) in the Commission’s mandate period. The first is the fact that the South African presence in the territory was a violation of international law, and that the South African administration and its courts and security forces had no right in international law to carry out any actions affecting the South West African people. If this did not apply for the full Commission mandate period, it certainly applied from October 1966 when the UN General Assembly terminated South Africa’s mandate over South West Africa, a decision affirmed by the Security Council in 1969. In June 1971, the International Court of Justice in The Hague declared South Africa’s presence in South West Africa illegal and demanded its withdrawal. It further declared invalid all South Africa’s acts on behalf of or concerning South West Africa. The Commission’s analysis of the situation in South West Africa is informed by this position in international law, from which it follows that all security-related actions initiated by the South African and South West African administrations and their security forces were those of illegal and illegitimate authorities.

74 The second factor relates to the fact that, for twenty-three years, these authorities were engaged in a guerrilla war against an indigenous liberation movement whose armed struggle was legitimated both in terms of international law and by the overwhelming moral support of the international community.

75 The third factor relates to the sheer enormity of the topic. South Africa’s occupation of South West Africa would merit a separate truth commission of its own.

76 In the account that follows, emphasis will be laid on two particular factors – torture and extra-judicial killings. In regard to the latter, the focus will be on the bounty or ‘cash-for-corpses’ policy employed by the police counter-insurgency unit, Koevoet (crowbar). Where possible, reference will be made to those human rights violations and amnesty applications pertaining to South West Africa that were submitted to the Commission. These were, however, relatively few: only one human rights violations submission and thirteen amnesty applications were received.