THE African National Congress had conducted a just war against apartheid which had been condemned as a "crime against humanity" by the UN, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki told South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission yesterday.
Presenting a 100 page deposition to the commission, Mr Mbeki admitted that violations of human rights had been committed by ANC cadres. But he insisted that they were an aberrance arising from the war, not the products of official policy. Mr Mbeki contradicted an earlier statement to the commission by the National Party leader, Mr F. W. de Klerk, that the protagonists of apartheid had been honourable men" who had mistakenly embarked on a disastrous course.
Apartheid (was) not an aberration of a well intentioned undertaking that went horribly wrong, he said. "The ideological underpinning and the programme of apartheid constituted a deliberate and systematic mission of a ruling clique that saw itself as the champion of a super race.
But, according to the deposition, regrettable deviations in ANC policy included neither the Pretoria car bomb explosion of May 1983 nor its sequel a little over two years later the bomb attack on a Durban bar in which three young women lost their lives. The Durban bombers were led by Robert McBride, a descendant of an Irish volunteer who fought for the Boers in the AngloBoer War. The ANC deposition identified the target of the Pretoria bomb as the headquarters of the South African Air Force, asserting that 11 of the 19 people killed had been air force officers and that the building was located in the city centre in violation of the "protocols of war".
The target of Mr McBride's car bomb was a bar frequented by off duty soldiers and policemen and not the nearby Magoo's Bar where the three women were killed. The ANC publicly admitted for the first time that it has executed 34 cadres in its camps in Angola in the 1980s, labelling them mutineers and spies.
The crushing of the "mutiny" and the treatment of detainees by the ANC was investigated three times by ANC appointed commissions, each of which spoke of abuses of power by the ANC's security department. The Stuart Commission found that the 1984 mutiny "involved the majority of our comrades in every camp" and that the origins of the rebellion lay in "open abuse of authority" by unnamed security department officials.
The Stuart Commission report, as well as those of two later commissions, were handed over to the Truth Commission by Mr Mbeki, who, admitting that there had been excesses said: "The ANC deeply regrets the excesses that occurred."
Setting the context in which the abuse of authority had occurred, the ANC noted that hundreds of state agents had been infiltrated into ANC structures to destabilise and discredit it.
Undercover actions by South African government agents intent on disrupting the ANC continued even during the post 1990 transition to democracy began, the ANC said, quoting from an official government document and noting that nearly 12,000 civilians had died.
. The South African government yesterday announced tough new measures, including harsher prison sentencing and the establishment of a squad of gangbusters, to curb the runaway crime rate.
The Safety and Security Minister, Mr Sydney Mufamadi, released a document approved by cabinet on Wednesday outlining steps to eliminate corruption in the police prisons services, speed up prosecutions and set minimum sentences for gang and drug related offences.
The measures include mandatory sentences for police convicted of crime or corruption, tighter police discipline, the development of provincial crime strategies, a witness protection programme for "whistle blowers" and a ban on the carrying of arms in public in flashpoint areas.