Special Report Transcript Episode 69, Section 6, Time 41:50

I went and looked at just a school dictionary, initially about the word ‘elimineer.’ Then I went to a more authoritative dictionary sir, the HAT as we call it in Afrikaans and there on page 194 it says ‘elimineer’ means ‘uitskakel’ or ‘verwyder’ and it gives an example there of a sentence. ‘Al die foute probeer elimineer.’ To my mind sir it is this obvious that the word per se does not mean when it’s used in connection with a person that that person should be killed or assassinated. // Maybe the terms in and of themselves ‘neutraliseer’ and ‘elimineer,’ may be ambiguous and one may have to look in each and every instance at the particular context in which those are used, but would you agree that one interpretation of particularly the term ‘elimineer’ when it is used in the context in the document that was provided to you is that ‘vyandelike leiers geneutraliseer of geelimineer moet word,’ that one of the interpretations of that is that those people should be killed. Would you agree with that? // If you asked me what I understood by that I would say no. At that stage, on that level it was not meant that people had necessarily to be killed. Every person involved in the State Security Council has to explain what his specific viewpoint was. // From your experience and your perspective within the security police at the time how did you understand that terminology, those phrases? // It means what it says, to kill, that’s clear. // I might be wrong but I believed in all the time I was involved that the language used was perhaps deliberately vague or all encompassing, I’ll use the term all encompassing rather than vague, so that it could perhaps mean this and it could in fact perhaps mean that, but what it definitely meant was that those problems must be eliminated or neutralized. // I don’t want to be involved in a semantic level regarding the meaning of certain words in this document. I want to emphasise words like ‘eliminate’ and ‘take out’ for the members on the ground who were in a war situation referred only to killing people.

Notes: Johan Coetzee; Glen Goosen; Van der Merwe; Glen Goosen; Alfred Oosthuizen (Former Security Policeman); Craig Williamson ; Willem Schoon

References: there are no references for this transcript