TRC Final Report

Volume 6

Section 5

Chapter 4

Subsection 2

RESPONSE TO THE COMMISSION’S FINDINGS

11. The IFP criticised the Commission’s report and, in the parliamentary debate on the report held on 25 February 1999, Mr MA Mncwango of the IFP said of the Commission that it:

has remained stuck in the mind-set of the total onslaught against the IFP that is the legacy of yesterday’s politics. Its final report is a clumsily crafted anecdotal mythology through which it has sought to give credibility to yesterday’s liberation propaganda ... The final report of the TRC will be consigned to the dustbin of history .⁶⁷

12. He suggested that the work of the Commission had been negatively affected by its bilateral origins as a political accommodation between the ANC and NP and consequently was ‘clueless’ in its analysis of ‘black-on-black conflict’, unlike its work in regard to the white/black conflict.

13. With regard to findings made against Dr MG Buthelezi, he said that the Commission’s main source of information came from the ‘twisted’ confessions of people seeking amnesty who had told the Commission what it wanted to hear. He noted with regard to the Caprivi and Esikhawini hit squad operatives:

This distortion clearly happened in the testimony of discredited witnesses and self-confessed killers such as Daluxolu Mandlanduna Luthuli, Romeo Mbambo and Andries Nosenga, who are changing their versions of the facts of their crimes until they concocted lies to implicate Minister Buthelezi in their activities (interjections). In due course, all these were proved to be lies.

14. In respect of the findings made against Dr Buthelezi as President of the IFP and former leader of the KwaZulu Government, Mncwango said that:

While the TRC found no evidence of wrongdoing, or a specific violation of human rights by Dr Buthelezi, it seeks to hold him accountable for the generic violation of human rights. This is legally obscene and morally repugnant. …. One is politically accountable when certain actions may be the consequence of the policies adopted by a leader. But Minister Buthelezi never adopted any policy other than non-violent passive resistance and the echoing demand for all-inclusive negotiations, which in the final analysis were exactly what caused the demise of apartheid and led to the birth of the new South Africa.

15. Mr Mncwango is not correct in his assertion that ‘the TRC found no evidence of w rongdoing, or a specific violation of human rights by Dr Buthelezi …’. The Commission did in fact make findings against Dr Buthelezi himself. The Commission found that Dr Buthelezi knew that the Caprivi trainees were to be illegally deployed in an offensive manner against people perceived to be anti-Inkatha and was aware that such armed resistance would entail the risk of unlawful death and injury. He was held accountable for killings and attempted killings. The Commission also found that, with re gard to the SPUs and the establishment of the Mlaba Camp in the 1993/4 pre-election period, one of the aims of the training was to furnish Inkatha with the military capacity forcibly to p revent the holding of elections, and that Dr Buthelezi was aware that such armed resistance would entail the risk of unlawful death and injury. The Commission found that the SPU project constituted a conspiracy to commit g ross human rights violations, for which, inter alia, Dr Buthelezi was held accountable.

16. In coming to its findings on Dr Buthelezi’s involvement in the Caprivi trainee exercise, the Commission had regard to very substantial quantities of former State Security Council memoranda and documents, which recorded the progress of the training project in significant detail. These documents, the authenticity of which was never challenged, established that senior SADF officers (Lt. Colonel van Niekerk and Colonel van den Berg) met with Dr Buthelezi on 31st October 1989. This was after the SADF had withdrawn from the Caprivi project. Van Tonder summarised this meeting in a report to a superior officer ( Vice Admiral Putter) as follows:

The Chief Minister expressed his concern over the situation in Mpumalanga and the fact that he was losing the ‘armed struggle’. He referred to the ‘cell’ idea for offensive action, which did not get off the ground.

17. At the same meeting Dr Buthelezi expressed concern that he was:

losing the armed struggle and in that regard emphasized that ‘offensive steps’ w e re still a necessity; meaning the deployment of ‘hit squads’.

18. Van Tonder was specifically subpoenaed by the Commission to comment on this report, and he confirmed his recollection of the meeting. He records Mr MZ Khumalo as saying that, at the very least, Dr Buthelezi still required ‘cells’ capable of taking out undesirable members.

19. Mr Mncwango went so far as to accuse one of the Commissioners, namely the Revd Dr Khoza Mgojo, as having been ‘personally involved in supplying arms used in the seven-day war to the fighting units in Richmond’. According to Mr Mncwango, the late Mr Sifiso Nkabinde said in an affidavit that Dr Mgojo had ‘used the Federal Theological Seminary (Fedsem) in Imbali as a stock facility for the weapons and he personally handed out these weapons’. To date, no evid e n c e has been tendered to the Commission or to any other structure to support t h i s claim in any way.