August 7, 2007
South Africa's last white president is accused of having blood on his hands, Chris McGreal reports.
FEW in South Africa took much notice when five sleeping teenage boys were shot by a military hit squad just days before the country's last white president, F. W. de Klerk, received his Nobel peace prize for ending apartheid.
But 13 years later the deaths have returned to haunt Mr de Klerk after a decision to prosecute one of his former cabinet ministers for apartheid-era crimes prompted fresh scrutiny of what South Africa's last white president knew about the campaign of assassinations, bombings and torture against the regime's opponents.
The man once lauded for freeing Nelson Mandela and ending white rule now faces headlines declaring: "You're a murderer too, FW!" and accusations that his Nobel prize is "soaked in blood".
Former enemies, and some of those who served the apartheid security apparatus, are questioning Mr de Klerk's claim that he knew nothing about police and military hit squads and other illegal covert activities.
Among his accusers is Eugene de Kock, the former commander of a police murder squad who is serving a 212-year prison sentence. He says he has new evidence against Mr de Klerk whom he described in an interview to a Johannesburg radio station as an "unconvicted murderer".
But the accusations have created a backlash, and some whites say that if there are to be prosecutions for politically motivated crimes, then many at the top of the ruling African National Congress should also stand trial.
Mr de Klerk has acknowledged there was a strategy to murder prominent anti-apartheid activists, but says it was carried out by rogue elements within the security forces and he was horrified when he found out years later.
At a news conference in Cape Town, his voice cracked with emotion as he said he was being unfairly implicated. "On these issues my conscience is clear," he said. "I was never part of policies that said murder is fine, cold-blooded murder is fine, rape is fine, torture is fine."
He said the accusations were intended to strip him, and the 70 per cent of whites who supported his reforms in a 1992 referendum, of an "honourable place at the table as co-creators of the new South Africa".
The spotlight shifted to Mr de Klerk after his former law and order minister, Adriaan Vlok, was charged last month with attempted murder for ordering a police hit squad to poison an anti-apartheid leader, the Reverend Frank Chikane, who survived and is now the director-general of President Thabo Mbeki's office.
Johannesburg newspapers reported that Mr Vlok is striking a plea bargain in which he implicates Mr de Klerk.
The former president has denied that his law and order minister consulted him before ordering the murder attempt. But he has not denied ordering the 1993 raid, in which the five boys were killed, on what was described as a Pan Africanist Congress safe house used to plan "terrorist attacks".
After the attack, the military said the dead were men who were armed and shooting — but photographs of the scene showed the boys still in their beds, riddled with bullets and no guns in sight. Mr de Klerk later described the killings as a tragic mistake.
Sigqibo Mpendulo, a PAC activist who was imprisoned on Robben Island for five years and lost his twin 16-year-old sons in the attack, says Mr de Klerk should be prosecuted because it was the modus operandi of such attacks to massacre everyone in the targeted house, as happened in similar raids in Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
Ten years ago, Mr de Klerk appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to apologise for the crimes committed in defence of white rule, but to deny any personal knowledge or responsibility.
However, among the decisions he was party to was the establishment of a covert paramilitary force, trained and equipped by the army, that was responsible for much of the violence unleashed against anti-apartheid activists in the mid-1980s. He also attended a meeting at which the State Security Council discussed "shortening the list of politically sensitive individuals by means other than detention".
Today he declines to interpret what the latter phrasing might have meant — but denies ever endorsing a decision to assassinate activists.
GUARDIAN
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