COETZEE, CS

During his amnesty hearing Dirk Coetzee hopes to tell his story for the last time. But he will not be able to bury it. // There’s one thing I will have to live till the day I die, is the corpses that I will have to drag with me to my grave, of the people whom I’ve killed. Remorse I can assure ...

... was killed yes, certainly and for that reason it’s important for us to at least protect his version in that respect. // On this aspect Mr. Coetzee would be an essential witness. ...

Mister Coetzee, do you know the name Ace Moema? // Yes I do Mr. Chairman. // From where do you know this person? // It was the name of an ANC cadre who came to Vlakplaas in the late 1980s, in the 1981s, towards the end of the year as a person that has been debriefed already through all the relative ...

When he addressed the Committee, Dirk Coetzee stuck to his story that Sizwe Kondile had been killed because the Eastern Cape security police had not wanted another Steve Biko case on their hands. // Getting rid of him was because he sustained injuries while being tortured, dived through a window ...

Griffiths Mxenge was murdered by Dirk Coetzee’s hit squad in November 1981. In his amnesty application in November last year Coetzee claimed that he had not questioned the order to eliminate Mxenge because it had come from senior security branch officers. // They were trying to build up a case ...

Former Vlakplaas boss, Dirk Coetzee declared in 1989 already that he fetched poison from the head of the forensics laboratory Gen Lothar Neethling in 1981 and gave it to two activists Vusi Mavuso and Peter Dlamini. Neethling denied this and said he never developed poison, a statement later ...

Gen van der Merwe’s predecessor Gen Johan Coetzee said that he had no knowledge of unlawful operations being carried out within the country and denied ever having issued an illegal instruction. // I did not, I did not sir, give any policeman any illegal instruction, unlawful instruction: kill a ...

In November last year Dirk Coetzee described Sizwe Kondile’s death to the Amnesty Committee in Durban. // Now, drops were administered to Sizwe Kondile in a drink whilst we were sitting around drinking ourselves, opening beer and whatever other drinks, alcohol. And after about 20 minutes to about ...

But for a witness like Dirk Coetzee the nightmare that started eight years ago when he first spoke out is still continuing. // There might be an attempt at any time on my life so I’m always armed. At home of course it’s always a problem because then I’m on my own.

A decision is taken so flippantly and a man’s life is put to an end. I am alarmed by that. // I can understand that Mr. Chairman, I think in those days a black man’s life meant absolutely nothing.

Politics has got something to do with it. That’s my feeling, my gut feeling. Because, you must also remember that my application for amnesty was submitted by hand to Dr Alex Boraine at quarter to three on the 5th of March this year in Cape Town, and I took Albert Nofemela’s application with, as ...

As we still discussing of how next do we break the door down now, two women entered the kitchen with a lit candle and opened the back door. Joe grabbed one of the women and closed her mouth and shot at her at point blank. I heard someone drop to the cement like a bag of bones and the other woman ...

The Harms Commission did not believe his story. // If a judge goes to the extreme where he says in public, and I quote ‘how must I believe this crap you’re talking?’ I mean what chance did I have in South Africa against honourable generals, all church going generals, elderly in the church, ...

You never authorized anyone, and if any person under your command purported to authorize someone to commit an unlawful act, that person would have been acting unlawfully. Is that correct? // That person must be asked. // That person would be acting unlawfully. // That person must be asked… // ...

... is incredibly expressive of those two things: the frown on her brow, the hair in her hand, the anger, the pain that she’s carrying. // I went to Coetzee’s house in Pretoria and immediately I was struck by the phenomenal … that he’s actually incarcerated himself. It doesn’t matter what ...

Here is the place which they then later built where the ministers and Basie Smit and them braaid, had their Chivas Regal whiskey, congratulated the guys where the ‘potjiekos’ was made, you can see big fireplaces. If you have all the liquor and the meat that was absorbed here you can open a ...

The second Maseru is a different operation. It was a Vlakplaas operation; it was led by Eugene de Kock. The operatives were all Vlakplaas operatives, a number of whom have applied for amnesty. The second raid occurred at a time in December of 1985 when the South African government was extremely ...

These are some of the faces of South Africa’s political killers. They want the Truth Commission to grant them amnesty. But why should they be set free instead of going to jail? The answer lies in the political settlement that brought us our democracy in 1994.

No plan, no envisaged plan, no joint venture of that nature was ever discussed with me at all. // I’m not aware of any case where the Defence Force and the police would have acted together internally and where people had been killed and had not been discussed with me. // I in my more than 35 ...

Who gave you the instruction, to go and kill Mxenge? // Brigadier H. R. van der Hofen who was the then the regional commander of security, Port Natal, Durban. I was called in, or reported every morning at Brigadier Van der Hofen’s office and also in the afternoon for instructions, briefing and ...