This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.
Part 2
Padraig O'Malley
August 2000
I am back in South Africa. Since April, when I completed the first draft of the Boipatong massacre, I knew the account was incomplete.
I have reread what the people, from all parties and other public figures had to say in the months following the massacre had told me what, in their view, had happened that terrible night, why it had happened, and what likely consequences would follow. Few, if any would have anticipated that within three months, the government and the ANC would sign a Record of Understanding, clearing the way for a resumption of negotiations in early 1993.
What struck me most when I reviewed what people had been thinking at the time were the incredible differences in the perceptions each had of the event, a measure of the range of distrust and paronia that had enveloped South Africa at the time, perhaps a barometer of sorts of the disappointment that
CODESA 11 had elicited. It became clear that while the media were heralding the breakthroughs at CODESA and talking about how much had been accomplished in so short a time, with even hints of an agreed framework, a sequence of actions that would put South Africa firmly on the road to a settlement of the conflict, [what were the media reporting at this time?] the protagonists themselves felt trapped by the agreements they had entered into, and the main role-players had not only begun to distance themselves from the process, but were desperately looking for ways out.
When talks did stall on 15 May, the day on which the Plenary session was supposed to ratify the agreements reached in the five working groups, the stalemate was adduced to the failure of Working Group2 to agree on what percentage thresholds should be set for taking decisions in a constituent assembly regarding adoption of the constitution itself, and on issues relating to a bill of rights, demarcation of regions and the structure of government.1 Even when the talks were adjourned without the ratification of agreements reached in the other four working groups, the understanding among the delegates was that the adjournment would be temporary, more of a hiatus in the ongoing proceedings rather than a termination of the process. Indeed, all of the principals emphasized how much had been accomplished and expressed confidence that the problems in working group 4 would be worked out to everyone's satisfaction. 2
But, it would appear each was intent on deceiving the other. The huge variations in the commentary on Boipatong give some idea of the breath of difference that existed among the principals and their respective disciples. Nothing was too outlandish to contemplate:
Thus different prisms of perception created a patchwork of interpretations of motives, actions, and events that were not wildly at odds with each other. Protagonists were not only on different wavelengths, but also on different planets. The certainty of each in the absolute correctness of its own views, with no give or take for a sliver of error made efforts to make the incomprehensible comprehensible still more incomprehensible. Intelligent people endowed the irrational with virtue.
Thus, from the ANC's perspective the apartheid regime was following a dual agenda: on the one hand, negotiate with the ANC in Kempton Park with smiles, handshakes and gestures of goodwill; on the other hand, smash the ANC on the ground by direct or complicit involvement in instigating or even participating in violence, intended not only to erode the support the support base of the ANC in the townships, but to project to the world at large that South Africa would continue to need whites in positions of power to act as a restraining instrument, the referee blowing the whistle on black-on-black violence to preclude South Africa, once in black hands, from becoming one more African banana state in which black leaders, interminably obsessed with self aggrandizement crushed any vestige of opposition; that the ANC were not interested in democracy but in accruing all power unto themselves, even if this meant the systematic elimination of other black political parties that did not subscribe to their particular ascriptions. One did not need to have evidence to "prove" the state's support of Inkatha:one simply knew it. The government eschewed responsibility for restoring law and order in the township. Townships erupted in horrific bouts of violence, and the government behaved as if nothing untoward was happening, nothing that demanded immediate attention. Hence Mandela's conclusion: de Klerk put no value on black lives. They were a political football that could be kicked out of touch whenever the occasion demanded, and thrown back into play when opportunity beckoned.
The government was an inveterate masters at ensuring that evidence was systematically and methodically expurgated so investigations led nowhere, were at best "inconclusive," and when, on the few occasions arrests were made, the arrestees were invariably acquitted when prosecutors laid their charges before the courts before the courts, because the cases were either poorly prepared or prosecutors white appointees of the state-did not have forensic evidence to support their cases.
Sure when incidences of violence among IFP hostel dwellers and the ANC supporting communities occurred, the police either did nothing to prevent the ensuing carnage, stood idly by and allowed ethnic hatreds to play themselves out, or even gave a "helping hand to Inkatha. From a policeman's perspective it all made sense. Why put your life on the line to stop blacks from killing each other when black rule would see you pushed out of the new policing arrangements. Where was the incentive to intervene, to risk life and limb on behalf of what and for whom? A government perceived as selling you out or a party dedicated to terminating your job? And sure it made sense to lend a helping hand to Inkatha the enemy of my enemy is my friend -- and if a "little" indirect complicity with Inkatha to prompt violent engagements between the ANC and Inkatha, and a "little " more to support Inkatha in the ensuing engagements, one might delay, or dare one believe, emasculate the ANC's ascension to power. Many police at the "coalface" of the violence would do anything to undermine the ANC, not for any particular ideological reason, but out of pure self- interest the greater the turmoil the less the lilihood of a settlement in the near future, the more secure their jobs. And besides if you were being continuously assailed for being agent provocateurs, the butcher boys of the state, chopping down black lives with egregious enthusiasm, why do anything to tamper with that image since there was nothing you could do to change it. Township blacks treated a "good" policeman as contemptuously as a "bad" policeman; indeed the appellation "good" policeman was simply an absurd oxymoron. The interests of senior police generals sitting in their well-appointed offices in Pretoria and the policeman posted to a township where every black was a potential threat to one's life had no common meeting points. Among many rogue elements in the SAP, self preservation was the guiding beacon.
And thus, from the government's, perspective the ANC was simply continuing to pursue its avowed objective -- the destruction of the South African state and the installation of a revolutionary ANC government; that while the "new" face of the ANC preached negotiations, the agenda had not changed: behind the new rhetoric of negotiations and reconciliation among races, the old aspirations remained unchanged and fixed: overthrow of the state -- the triumph of the "Leipzig option"3 in an African context. If street power could topple authoritarian regimes that had ruled with efficient ruthlessness for fifty years in Eastern Europe, street power could topple the apartheid regime that had ruled with authoritarian ruthlessness for fifty years in South Africa. Once mass action passed a certain critical mass, it believed that the ANC would simply wilt, and that the rest would be history the historic triumph of the masses against the most formidable offensive capacity of Africa's most powerful war machine. History making on a grand scale.
And hence the plethora of confusing, contradictory, unbalanced, biased, analyses of Boipatong, of judgments made in the absent of fact; of judgments adhered to in the presence of facts, of positions staked out with certitude when no certitude existed, of conclusions reached that wholly ignored established facts reiterated in at least three investigations into the incident.
Boipatong was not about Boipatong. It was a bit player in a drama that had a cast of characters, a story line, a well-developed thematic exposition of the events that provided it with the props on which it could unfold; but the dramatist could not bring his play to a close. Not only was he unable to; he did not know how to.
At this point the dramatist was prepared to let the drama's shape take interweaving forms. First you had the entrapment scenario. The government could not admit to not having full control over its security forces. Not being willing to admit this reality, they were incapable of dealing with its consequences. Rather than remove the bad apples from the barrel, they were allowed to poison the entire barrel. When desperation demanded some show of action, as in the case of Boipatong, investigations into police misconduct were carried out under the direction of other; in every case internal investigations not only cleared the accused, but lauded the for restraint in the face of extreme provocation. Thus, the appointment of Davidson to investigate police actions during and after the massacre, was treated with contempt by the ANC. Unless he came up with a report that directly implicated police in the massacre, he would be pilloried for acting to protect the state's interests not to expose the truth. He could produce log after log to show how meticulously, scrupulously, and impartialially he had conducted his investigation, but it would count for nothing if it did not reach the "correct" finding.
The ANC also found itself entrapped by the behaviors of the SDUs, many of whom were ill trained, if trained at all, not particularly responsive to the discipline ANC MK cadres tried to impose, and in many townships had run amuck. Like the government, the ANC could never publicly admit that it had no control over the actions of many SDUs. But in private they would make a distinction; government instigated violence was official policy; ANC violence was not condoned by the ANC leadership and had no place in ANC policy. But the reluctance of the ANC to deal with its young Turks had eerie parallels to the government's reluctance to weed out its rotten apples. Neither could concede ground; to do so would make them look weak, both in the eyes of their own constituents and the enemy's constituents. How could one protagonist make itself party to an agreement with the other that called for it to honor certain restraints, if it had already conceded that it had lost control over large segments of the community it purportedly represented, particularly a segment that had access to arms and militant supporters to draw on? One did not expose one's own dirty linen to the world. And I am not talking here about the ANC and the government. To a lesser extent that the other two, Ulundi had little control over the hostels on the Vaal, other than constantinly opining that the Zulu nation would never submit to being ruled by a Xhosa government. Having little influence over the actions of the indunas in the hostels, Ulundi played the ethnic card; rather than be seen as a marginal role-player in the Vaal, it choose to leapfrog the hostel dwellers and assume the pretense of control, feeding the hostel dwellers' fears that the ANC were set on annihilating them, thus promoting rather than defusing the violence. But the violence promulgated the image of a militant IFP that had a militant base of support that extended well beyond the boundaries of ZwaZulu Natal; it reached into the hearlland of South Africa's First World and was capable of reducing the townships that served the needs of South Africa's industrial economy to repetitious cycles of violence that would in turn perpetuate instability, and bring foreign investment to a screaming halt. In the isolation of Ulundi, Buthelezi wished it to be known that although he was not physically present at Kempton Park, a negotiated settlement would remain beyond grasp, if he were not somehow "wooed" into the process.
Other factors were converging to send both the ANC and the government scampering for the exits, yet neither wanted to be perceived as the one which was responsible for the breakdown of CODESA. At the grass roots, the ANC rank and file was becoming increasingly restless: on television they saw their leaders mixing easily with the hated apartheid government's negotiatiors, images of cordiality, almost of camaraderie; in the streets they saw blood. Something did not gel. Deals were being hammered out behind closed doors, there was no transparency, no feed back, and the media's coverage of the proceedings relied on the carefully placed leak, since coverage of the sessions themselves was off-limits. Their leaders were losing them.
And thus the litany of finger-pointing, the accusations and counteraccusations, of conspiracy and counter conspiracy.
"The break was coming. It wasn't as sudden as all that."
"They appoint police to investigate police. The state prosecutors are white; the judges are white."
"The leadership was well aware that it had lost control of the MK cadres on the ground and was powerless to do anything about it."
"His [Waddington's] statement that he found no evidence that the SAP was not directly involved doesn't prove one way or another that it wasn't indirectly involved."
"The massacre could have been preempted if the police had acted on the numerous representations made to it {that it was about to happen,}".
"There's evidence that the police were warned beforehand and they failed to take action."
"[Waddington] has to rely on the SAP to tell him that it was not involved."
"Boipatong was blacks fighting blacks, faction fights."
"The ANC has been instigating all this violence very carefully."
"You make sure that the evidence is destroyed so that by the time you go to court, you, as the police can't prove the case."
"[The police] have no interest in making sure there's peace."
"If the government chooses to stop the violence, it can."
"Boipatong finished de Klerk as far as his image was concerned."
"De Klerk didn't go to Boipatong like a person who was going there to mourn."
" If the ANC had not been there, there would have been no massacre."
" We came to the conclusion that the regime was using the CODESA process to buty time in order to alter the balance of forces in its favor."
" By destabilizing the ANC, de Klerk sought to win more support for himself."
"In our branches, in every region, in COSATU, there was a feeling that CODESA was just a waste of time."
"The government were expecting that mass action wasn't going to happen, that the AMNC would mess themselves so badly that they would come running back to the negotiating table,"
"Even if the leadership wanted to continue in CODESA our constituencies would never have allowed it."
Anyone doing intelligence work should have realized that de Klerk never have been allowed to go into Boipatong."
"The ANC and its allies were planning to pull out of CODESA long before the deadlock occurred."
"The hardliners in the ANC seized the moment. Mandela is not mater of his destiny anymore."
" Buthelezi can't control on the ground what's happening among his Inkatha members.
"Boipatong was used by the ANC as a strategic move to bring to the world's attention the fact that they could not proceed with CODESA be cause the government wasn't seriously taking its role for stopping the violence."
"When the people in Boipatong recognized de Klerk, they became quite excited, clapping their hands. and waving in an excited way. The resistance had clearly been organized."
When Mandela went to Boipatong, he was met by young people singing in their own made-up songs : You are leading us like lambs to the slaughter."
"Anyone who knew anything about what had happened could have told de Klerk beforehand, 'don't be a fool and go into Boipatong now."
"Why did de Klerk's security people not pick up what all of us knew?"
"We have had thousands of Boipatongs worse ones than this. Boipatong was one of those things that added to an exacerbated situation."
"If you have a murder where Waddington comes from, you would have 10 or 20 scenes-of-crime policemen sifting around looking for evidence. You would not have 1000 people toi-toying trying to get at the police and destroying all the evidence that there is."
" Anything like Boipatong will always come at the right time for the ANC."
"My sense was that Boipatong was not being used by factions within the ANC."
"Those of our members in Black Sash had some of the most appalling reports from people in Boipatong of the police not doing their duty."
"Waddington did not find fault with the youngsters who were actually doing the ground control."
"Boipatong ignited energy into mass action. It was massively successful in sending a message to the government."
"Journalists on the plane to Japan with de Klerk the week before we launched mass action were being told, 'Those guys are really going to get hammered; they're going to come out of the mass action really bloodied."
"When de Klerk went to Ulundi on June 16 the day on which we launched mass action and the anniversary of the Soweto Uprising -- he was sending a message to every impi, warlord, hit squad or whatever that the hunting season was on again,"
"If you discover two dead bodies in an unrest area it's not something you phone the Commissioner about at night and wake him up."
"The same day the government was blaming the ANC for the massacre at Boipatong the National Party announced the launching of its recruitment campaign into black areas."
"The government game plan? Let them do their damndest with mass action. We will ensure that chaos ensues, that there will be terrible destabilization in the townships, that there's an endless cycle of what appears to be black-on-black violence, and that at the end of the day, people will turn to de Klerk as a man of moderation and we'll get back to negotiations but on the government's terms."
"De Klerk has a strategy. He did not plan Boipatong, but he is not curbing his own security forces. He gas to bear the responsibility."
"We can show security force complicity in Boipatong. Omission and Commission."
"Mandela stood up to speak, and before he could begin, several thousand people stood up and they were saying," WE WANT GUNS," and they were singing this song: they are killing us and the ANC is acting like a lamb."
"Waddington could not in a matter of a couple of days come to the conclusion that the police were not involved in Boipatong."
"The ANC took the wrong issue. They took Boipatong, adding so much salt and pepper to make it seem as if de Klerk himself was there with a big knife. It boomeranged on them."
'In some areas of the security forces there's a paralysis. They don't want to go out."
"There are still middle level people in the ANC who believe that with a Leipzig kind of mobilization, you can overwhelm the government."
"The IFP has a very strong presence in Boipatong Then the ANC come up with the Joe Slovo squatter camp. That give s them support in the area."
" A few days before the Boipatong massacre ten houses belonging to IFP members were destroyed by people from the squatters' camp."
"In Boipatong the ANC initiated an attack and they knew that the IFP would strike back."
"Boipatong was not the issue; it was the breaking point, the final catalyst. We had begun to sense government reluctance and insincerity sometime earlier."
"Boipatong was a reaction on the part of the government to mass action."
"In the Boipatong area, no less a person than Tokyo Sexwale4 found that MK members were simply ill disciplined and had taken the law into their own hands."
'The ANC used Boipatong for political propaganda; it was in keeping with the political program of the ANC."
'People from Boipatong had necklaced someone from the hostel. The hostel people saw the body and went into Boipatong to revenge it. They just started killing everyone. But the people from the township who necklaced somebody from the hostel they were to blame for it."
"There's quite a lot of evidence that the black masses have a healthy cynicism about the chances that life is going to get better for them. But they like an outing. They like to go toi-toying down the street and whether they're doing it behind a coffin or a banner doesn't make all that much difference."
But perhaps what had struck me most forcibly was Archbishop Tutu's account of having lunch with Mandela at Kempton Park, after Mandela had returned from addressing the crowd in the stadium at Boipatong. His people were admonishing him: the sound of thousands of voices blended in a single, spontaneous refrain harmonizing, "We are the lambs and the ANC are leading us to the slaughter." a nerve that clearly left hi discombobulated. And in the face of that discombobulating he was galvanized him into taking action that would ensure that there would be no more Boipatongs.
The days of going almost cap-in-hand like to de Klerk to present him with what he considered serious allegations of police complicity in violence, and de Klerk's constant rejoinder, " But where's the evidence; bring me the evidence," were done with. He could not get the images of the people of Boipatong's disappointment disillusionment? -- with the ANC as the guardians of their community out of his mind. The ANC was failing to effectively exercise its most important function in the PMW area protecting the lives of those who supported it with the result that even its most avid supporters were beginning to harbor doubts. The ANC had failed them, lending more credence to the whispering campaign that the Old Man was not up to it, that the years in prison had sapped his will, that the iron determination was becoming paper-thin, porous, and that de Klerk was beginning to run rings around him. Boipatong became for him, a personal crisis; the decision to terminate discussions with the government, to threaten ground zero, were decisions made in the conscious knowledge that not to so would dismember the ANC in ways the government had not succeeded in doing over a span of forty years, even though it may have infiltrated many of its structures. Though slow to move on many occasions, once moved to action, Mandela would become implacable in its pursuit something Winnie would learn to her bitter cost.5
I found Mary Burton's rather apologetic admission that Boipatong was perhaps one of the many cases brought to the attention of the commission that it failed to investigate with meticulous attention unsettling. That many cases hundreds, perhaps, received scant consideration was understandable. The commission had limited resources, a deadline to meet, and had to have some criteria to decide what cases should be investigated in depth, given their significance, and at the other end of the spectrum which were marginal. However, the possibility that Boipatong, a massacre that had led to the collapse of negotiations, traumatized the country, and a string of investigations ranging judicial prosecutions, which came to conclusions in one form or another to which the ANC took vehement exception might have fallen into the cracks between the two categories seemed out of the question. And if it were true then it opened a Pandora's box of sorts: what were the defining criteria that led to "thorough" investigations; how professional were these investigations and how were they conducted? And what "evidence had to be forthcoming in order for commissioners to reach findings that were set in stone? And more troubling still how could the commission make a finding on a case still before the amnesty committee in which its findings were at complete variance with the submissions applicants for amnesty had made before a finding had been made with regard to the veracity of the submissions? In fact, given the commission's findings with regards to Boipatong, it dubbed the amnesty applicants liars before they had their day in court, thus making them ineligible for amnesty.
Where better to start than with the commission's investigators, the persons charged with unearthing the facts that appeared to be pertinent to a given case; of disentangling the knotted webs of myth, disinformation, allegation, and presenting the gathering the documentation, conducting the interviews, seeking collaboration when particulars were in dispute, closing the chasms between accepted wisdoms that had established themselves over long periods as verifiable truths and the questions, often running against and sometimes challenging the orthodoxies that had become the vernacular of the new political culture difficult undertakings by any measure since the commission's frame of reference had little to do with the politics of the commission.6
2
16 August 2000
From what I can gather, Piers Pigou was the investigator who headed investigations into massacres in the Vaal Triangle. He readily agrees to a meeting and we get together one afternoon in his offices in CASE, an office with all the hallmarks of over work computer printouts stacked in piles all over the place, a desk scattered with an untidy mess of documents; a phone ringing off the hook, and the ubiquitous cell phone calls, books and reference data thumb marked. From the start the interview was cordial, although the constant flow of interruptions precluded Pigou from giving his undivided attention to our discussion.
Pigou was at best in hid mid thirties, and we called each other by out first names. Pigou begins by giving me a little bit of background on the role he played in the TRC investigation and research department, and specifically his role in relation to Boipatong.
I was engaged as a researcher, an investigator with the Truth Commission at the beginning of 1996. I was actually approached to join the unit and was interviewed on the basis of my experience and I suppose working knowledge to a certain extent of work in the Vaal Triangle where I had been primarily working for the last three or four years from 1992.[what had he been doing} I came to South Africa actually two weeks after the massacre [what do you do in the UK that qualified you for commission?}
I wasn't here at the time of the massacre. I came from the UK. I grew up in Zambia, was educated in the UK, finished my Masters, couldn't find work and eventually came here in July 1992. I joined [what?] at the beginning of 1996 and ended up doing very little ?? investigation in the Vaal Triangle [for the commission???]. I left the Truth Commission as an investigator in May 1997 but continued to do a lot of work around the Truth Commission and was brought back in on contract to be the investigator in the Winnie Mandela case7 and continue to work on some of the other cases including Boipatong, and had a fair amount of interaction with Jan-Otto Schelberg, the Swedish policeman, who was the main TRC investigator.
When we talk about Boipatong, I think the word 'investigation' is a bit of a misnomer. I had worked primarily on investigations in 1994 I was working for the Independent Board of Enquiry and was involved in 1994 and 1995 with a very big investigation, I think it was the first joint one between the police and an NGO investigation into torture allegations in the Vaal Triangle against the Vanderbijlpark Murder & Robbery Unit8 which included some of the characters that were involved in the Boipatong case. So that was one of the reasons why I was brought on board -- non-police people to work on an investigation if we could call it that. And I primarily did work on those issues and some of the other conflict issues in the Vaal relating to IFP/ANC problems, things like the???? Hit Squad, the drive-by shootings, the massacres in that area, and of course Boipatong, which was the the centrepiece, or one of them, along with the night vigil massacre, { what areyou referring to]} the two sort of big massacres in the Vaal during the early nineties.
Pigou was more than willing to review the findings of the TRC in relation to Boipatong. I read him the TRC's first finding, which said: 'The Commission finds that KwaMadala Hostel residents together with the police planned and carried out an attack on the community of Boipatong and surrounding informal squatter settlement, Slovo Park, on 17 Jine 1992. The Commission finds that the police colluded with the attackers and dropped them off at Slovo Park. On what investigation did it base that finding? How was it determined who planned and directed the massacre, who carries it out, how the getaway was arranged, and what was the motive behind it. Without hesitation Pigou says, "I would say on no investigation."
Rian Malan's criticisms of the reports of the Commission's Human Rights Committee on what happened at Boipatong are an important observation. Anthea Jeffries repeated them in her book. I think they are fair observations. There were no investigations and this is not unique to the Truth Commission. The Truth Commission by and large has done very few investigations and has made its findings on the basis of very limited information. I would imagine that they justified those findings on a range of very spurious inter-connections between admissions that were made in various amnesty processes from Inkatha members, not necessarily in the Boipatong trial, submissions to the Human Rights Violations Committee, other people came forward and made submissions, and possibly what Andries Mosenge9 was saying.
Wouldn't there be two sets of investigations? One into the case itself to establish what in fact had happened, and a second investigation into what applicants for amnesty said in their amnesty applications to establish the veracity of their accounts of what led up to the massacre, who planned and directed it, how it was carried out, and who assisted in their getaway?
The point I make was that there has never been an investigation into police collusion; there has never been a proper investigation.
So you are saying that when the Committee's finding that the police colluded with the KwaMadala residents in planning the attacks that took place, they never investigated whether that was true or not?
No. There was no investigation.
And what about the replication of the language in the Human Rights Commission report of 1992 where it made a series of allegations that were repeated verbatim as fact in the TRC report? What would account for that?
Well, Rian made the connection with the particular researcher, Vanessa Berolsky,10 who was involved. Vanessa was the researcher, I think, who wrote up some of the background material on what happened in the Vaal. So when she was writing she probably this pulled stuff out. Rian tried to make a connection that she had been working with Peace Action11 at the time of the massacre, even though the stuff came out of the Human Rights Committee but you've got to remember the Human Rights Committee12 as it was called, relied on the reports of Peace Action because it had no personnel actually on the ground. Peace Action was on the ground.
But wasn't Peace Action regarded as having a pro-ANC bias?
This is what Rian peddles -- that they were ANC sympathisers. Now they're an organisation that I was very much involved in, an organisation that a lot of other people I know were involved in. I think the basic assumption is if you were anti-apartheid or anti-repression you were automatically pro-ANC. The fact is it was made up of a broad church of people. I suppose you could say that some of those people were on the ANC bandwagon, if you wanted to, but to say they went out there doing the ANC's bidding is patent nonsense. The connection, the conspiracy connection that Rian tried to connect Vanessa to doesn't hold up to scrutiny; she wasn't even working for these organisations at the time.
But isn't it a little more than unsettling that someone put the untested allegations that had been collected in June immediately after the massacre and incorporated them into the TRC report as fact.? Wasn't this a case of plain plagiarism?
Well, I think it's a shocking thing. I don't think there's any excuse for what they say in this matter. And I would repeat, the bottom line is that these things simply were not investigated and it's repeated throughout the TRC process that there were by and large no real investigations. There have been a few but not many.
Does this pose an ethical problem? Findings were made in respect of individuals and organisations that damn them for life on the basis of no real investigative procedure? named?
I think it's very difficult. With regard to Boipatong my understanding is that no specific SAP members were named but one can obviously identify, by inference, one can say that people like Christo Davidson for instance, came out of this thing pretty badly. I've had some problems with him as well. I think they [the police] were making findings on the basis of contextual understandings and findings in other areas.
The big problem in the TRC, and particularly up here in this unit, was establishing what happened in the early nineties. In the Vaal Triangle, for instance, there have been three amnesty applications, for the whole period under review, by policemen. Three. By policemen, that's it, for all the violence that happened there. [insert re violence]Now that relates directly to an incident of IFP/SAP collusion in the Vaal Triangle when the late Themba Khoza13 was arrested with guns at Sebokeng Hostel in September 1990. That's one case I did work on where we managed to basically trap the three policemen into applying for amnesty. We called their bluff [how?] and they panicked and they applied. We didn't really have much evidence except for what the cops were saying. Again, it wasn't really investigated to any great depth but it was a confirmation of collusion in the Vaal Triangle between the police and Inkatha. I was very keen to see us start to unpick those threads as we could have unpicked a lot of other threads and start moving out in the directions the unravelling threads were pointing to, but it was never done. So in terms of collusion in the Vaal Triangle, that was the only evidence -- the three guys having applied for amnesty and they did it in a very contrived and sanitised way.
But Waddington's conclusion is striking for its conclusiveness. He doesn't leave much room for counter opinions. He said that "There is no evidence that the police had any forewarning of an impending attack on Boipatong.' A rather open and shut statement. And you had the Goldstone Commission, which received submissions from XXXX people, and took oral statements from YYYYnumber of people, and subpoenaed ZZZZ people, reaching no finding with regard to anything other than that there was no evidence of police complicity, but being at pains to point out that the fact of there being no evidence of police being involved was based solely on the basis of the information the commission was able to unearth and left open the possibility that a different form of enquiry with more sweeping powers might come up with information that would find otherwise. In fact, the Goldstone never issued a Final report of its findings with regard to Boiptong. Then you have the trial of the 17 hostel dwellers that were accused a mammoth trial lasting 18 months, with something like 50 volumes of evidence. When I talked to Advocate Rian Strydom,14 who represented the accused, he said that the core of the defence's strategy was to put the police on trial.
Pigou: "It was a rather set tactic wasn't it?"
Perhaps, I say, but isn't it the duty of a defence advocate is to devise some strategic argument that is plausible, if they are to convince the judge that their clients are not the guilty parties or that there are other guilty parties who have not been brought to book?
Piers doesn't care to pursue the point.
"But," I continue, "he said that at the end of the trial he himself had become convinced that on the question of the erasure of the tapes, it was a screw-up, he himself was now convinced of that."
Pigou: "A screw-up or a cover up?"
His reply is what I had expected.
But the point I'm really driving at, I continue, is that Judge Smits said at the end of the trial of the 17 KwaMadala hostel dwellers that stood in the dock, after hearing hundreds of witnesses, that there was no evidence of police complicity. All of these guys have now applied for amnesty, and they say -
Pigou: "No police involvement."
"That's right, " I say. "No Police involvement and the TRC says screw that, we say the Police were involved, period. We say the police were involved, not in a peripheral way but in the most intimate way in setting up the chain of events that led to the slaughter; which is very different from saying that there might have been a policeman here or a policeman there, or even three or four of them "
Piers cut me off. "I think those statements of the Commission are unjustifiable."
I do think they are unjustifiable but I don't think that you can twist that around and portray the KwaMadala residents as somehow being victimised. It doesn't mean that there wasn't anything there; that there wasn't any form of collusion. My point all along has been there has never been an investigation. You are absolutely correct and I agree with the criticisms of the TRC with regard to those findings. They're not findings. The commissioners had no basis on which to make those findings.
I want to take him one step further. "What I'm getting at is something different," I say, "it's the question of truth. What attempt was made to ascertain the truth?"
Pigou:
I think they made a call, I think they made a call in which they said we believe the victims in this particular matter even though there's a whole lot of contradictory versions as to who precisely the perpetrators were. We believe the victims in this matter and we do not believe the perpetrators. We do not believe the police because the police have not been honest with us with regards to their relationship with Inkatha, we do not believe Inkatha because they have not been truthful with us in the sense of their complicity with the police and their involvement in things.
We reject the findings of the Judge?
Absolutely.
We reject 50 volumes of evidence. We reject the fact that there are 120 witnesses from Boipatong, were called as a witness and not one of them said that they saw anything that would suggest police involvement. We reject in a way what the families of the victims said. We've already made up our minds?
Pigou:
Well in terms of the victims, there were approximately 40 people that made allegations about white police involvement, and I think Rian is also right to point out the negative role played by certain ANC leaders in terms of controlling access to the hostel.
At the same time one has to understand the conditions at that particular time and I believe that one of the reasons Rian has been angry is because I know the people who refused him access to those victims. He was refused access. I mean he's got his own axe to grind in this particular thing for many years. I have to emphasise there has never been any attempt, proper attempt to investigate these allegations. You might say there was a trial, but the trials in this country and investigations by the police, because the Judge will only hear what's put on the stand, and the people put on the stand by the prosecution as a result of Police investigations and we are relying on Police investigations by people who have a lot to hide, who have no real interest in proving the allegation true. That's a major point.
They had a stake in disproving that the police were involved, if anything. This is why when Christo Davidson stands up within two weeks [check] saying there is no evidence, I have disproved police complicity, the allegations false, as opposed to saying this is what the Swedish policeman was shocked at in terms of Christo Davidson, he said, 'How could any policeman stand up after two weeks and say I have disproved the allegation'. You turn up and you say, "I have no evidence to support the allegation." But Davidson was there disproving everything. Who was in charge of all these investigations? Former Security Branch members, we'll come back to that.
I refer him to the trial and Malan's account of its proceedings.15 The State called about 120 witnesses, someone from almost every house where death or serious injury had occurred; yet, no one claimed that whites were present. Not one actually saw police vehicles assisting the attackers. "But determined to prove otherwise Inkatha lawyers bombarded them with questions based on the ANC's and Goldstone's allegations but not one was able to provide corroboration. Facing a monolith of evidence to the contrary defence witnesses who alleged Police complicity fared poorly''16
Pigou:
They did, there is no doubt about that, but I think the other thing is first of all a lot of witnesses didn't want to go near that trial because of possible ramifications and danger. There was no protection at that time from the police. [protection for whom/for what] This might be post-1994.17 There was no protection from the from the government.
Also, think that the prosecution was hardly likely to call witnesses that would actually stand up and say police were involved because the whole basis of their case was that there wasn't police involvement the prosecution's case was about these guys operated on their own. So they [who] selected those 120. There were approximately 40 people of which, I think, five or six were called and questioned and the ones that didn't fare particularly well. ????
There were other witnesses in front of Goldstone, like Mr C. Mr C was one of these secret witnesses who had been inside the hostel. He was brought before the commission by the ANC and then sort of basically fudged what he was saying with regard to police complicity. But I know the Advocate who was involved in that matter and although it wasn't a legal thing to do, he spoke to me off the record about Mr C's confession to him back in 1992/93 about police involvement in the massacre
But of course people were terrified to talk about these things. So I think the context is a very big thing. Unfortunately, I'm very cynical, having seen a number of these cases about relying on court transcripts and testimony led ??? in court. For me, in many instances it's [what] meaningless because these [what] are contrived destructive ??? processes as trials are in any dispensation
In South Africa they're even worse. Bear in mind, Padraig, this is a country where there has never been an official acknowledgement of a miscarriage of justice. How much faith can we have in the old judicial system? It's always upholding the law and finding out the truth of matters? Of course, justice doesn't mean the truth does it? Again, I suppose, I'm going back to my initial point -- I don't think you can make conclusive statements one-way or the other.
I acknowledge that the trial took place under the auspices of a judicial system stamped with the ??? of the apartheid system, yet Judge Smit enjoyed, as far as I could ascertain, a reputation for fairness and impartiality, that while the system a whole was bankrupt, individual judges frequently reached judgments that rejected the cases put before them by state prosecutors where, after all had the Goldstones, the Krieglers, the judges Mandela had appointed to the Constitutional Court come from? trials are.[of appointees to Constitutional Court or panel presented to Mandela, how many came from the apartheid system???] They tried, as far as it was humanly possible, to administer justice in an inherently unjust system.
Pigou:
Goldstone made an interim report. He promised in his November 1994 report, his wrap-up report that a final report would be produced once the trial had been finished. He never did and he still hasn't produced one. I would imagine he is obliged to produce one because he still has to make a finding on the basis of matters subsequent to his interim report. He's never said anything. In November 1994, the final report of Goldstone, he indicated that he wouldn't do anything, he wouldn't write anything, make a finding or whatever it was until the court case had been finalised. Now I suppose, in theory, the court case has been finalised, and the convictions were upheld in the Appeals court. His reasoning was that a final report would be produced after the court case was finalised, that it would be prejudicial to issue one before the court case was finalised. To date, Goldstone has issued no final report on Boipatong.???
We had the court case, the guys were found guilty. They then applied for amnesty and I think we need to talk about this whole amnesty process as well. In theory the appeal is suspended pending the amnesty outcome. [see above for consistency]. No, it's not suspending pending well it's a bit peculiar to me because I read that they were rejected, their appeals were rejected. [the facts]
They still haven't finalised the amnesty applications. So we don't know what the situation is. If they don't get amnesty, they will go to jail for 20 years. I believe they will get amnesty. I mean the TRC are bending over backwards to give amnesty at the moment whatever the circumstances.
I remind him that he had said earlier that he had more to say about Davidson. Waddington singles Davidson out for praise, not just for praise but practically for canonization, in his report the only policeman he has a good word to say about. Waddington says, "this inquiry has uncovered no information that suggests any complicity on the part of the SAP in the attack. Indeed, all the evidence suggests a genuine desire to identify the perpetrators and prosecute them. It is also pleasing to note that a star that shines brightly to the credit of the SAP is the investigation of allegations made against the SAP under Major Davidson. This investigation is thorough, well manned by a team of 12 detectives, well led and properly structured. Most impressive of all is the fact that these investigators have not waited to receive formal complaints or allegations, but have pursued any accusations of wrongdoing by the police from whatever source. Thus, complaints made through the news media have been treated with as much thoroughness as allegations from specific individuals. The Commission can be confident that all allegations about police complicity are being thoroughly investigated. For example, the suggestion that the 'Apollo' lights were turned off shortly before and during the attack has been investigated. Only one of the lights can be turned on and off manually, and the records of the power utility have been examined to confirm that the remaining lights continued to function during the material time."18
Davidson, after having made such a singular impression on Waddington for his expertise, dedication, and the thoroughness of the search he is conducting goes before the Goldstone Commission, presents a report, makes a submission to the Goldstone Commission in he says there is no evidence of police complicity, goes on the witness stand at the Smit trial, is cross-examined, is called twice. He also makes his submission on behalf of the SAP and the SADF to the TRC. He says he handed it personally to the offices of the TRC in Cape Town, and said, 'I will be available for any questions you have to ask me. I'm available'.
Pigou: "And was never asked."
"Yes, he's never heard from them again."
Pigou: "I'd be curious to know whether Jan-Otto Schelberg was ever informed that that information.
was handed to the TRC."
I would be curious if Jan-Otto ever saw it because knowing how that organisation operated it's quite likely Davidson handed that in and Schelberg, as the investigator, was never even informed about it. It's quite possible. So Davidson looks good on the face of it. On the surface it looks as though he's done a professional job.
But bear in mind when Waddington's statement was made again. It was made in 1992. At the time, of course, no one could believe the Police were complicit in these things. This is the time when Goldstone himself did not believe it. [but the ANC and Mandela were screaming from the high heavens!]
My own particular concerns about it -- and I'm going to give you a little anecdote now about why I had very little faith in the Goldstone Commission during this period anyway, certainly right up to before it actually started making statements in March 1994 on the basis of the Q Registers.19
In 1992/93 there had been a lot of killings in the Vaal Triangle and we had a witness who said she was working for an employer on the outskirts of one of the townships in the Vaal and that he and his sons were regularly going into the township at night in Casspirs with other people, being dropped off God knows what. We wanted a surveillance operation mounted related to Goldstone, including international policemen. This is why also I've got some hesitancy about international cops. Bear in mind that a lot of international cops say 'We've come to work with our colleagues'. That's wxactly what the British policeman that I worked with here in 1995 said when he arrived, it's exactly what he said. When he left six months later he said the only way to deal with the SAP is to chop its head off.
Can I explain why I have a problem with the Davidson investigation? I think the first thing is that this statement that he made within a couple of weeks of the investigation start, which was that he had found that there was no truth the words he used were: "It's proved." [get exact wording]. I think he said that in front of the Goldstone Commission. This was the text, that he had disproved the allegations. Now that might be a bad translation of his Afrikaans, I don't know. My understanding was that he was English speaking but never mind. The other thing is he had a 12-member unit. Now some of these members were former Security Branch members based in the Vaal Triangle. At least one of them was implicated, and has applied for amnesty, a man by the name of van der Gryp has applied for amnesty in connection with the cover up around Themba Khoza in 1990.20 { check with Davidson re}
He's one of the three policemen that I was referring to. I don't know who the other members were, never got that information, but anyway we had suspicions about the background of Christo Davidson. I suppose we had an immediate knee-jerk reaction whenever we hear that people have been members of the Security Branch. He was a Security Branch member in the Midlands. They {who} never did any real investigation to find out much about him.
Let's look at how investigations were conducted during the 1990s. Who did they [who] put onto these kinds of investigations? Bear in mind Waddington is turning round and saying everything is being done to look into these matters. Now van der Merwe who was Commissioner of Police gets the Witwatersrand Commissioner, who is at that stage Gerrit Erasmus, another perpetrator and man who has applied for involvement in gross human rights violations, along with Mr van der Merwe they go and [and what??] put what I'm leading to is that investigations conducted in this period were not designed to uncover the truth, they were designed as damage limitation. Another example of this might be van der Merwe putting one Krappies Engelbrecht onto the investigation into the Bophati(?)21 disappearance in 1993.22 Krappies Engelbrecht was the big cover up man. He will be prosecuted probably in the next couple of years in connection with hit squad activities. [ [what happened to Krappies?]
So I have immediate question marks about the integrity of the investigations involved and the intentions of this investigation. With regard to Waddington I think one can easily pull the wool over a policeman's eyes like Waddington. He was here for all of two weeks. He did make some fair comments about a number of things and I am sure in terms of his limited interaction with Davidson at one level his comments might be fair, but on another level I don't think he's really in a position to determine whether or not the unit Davidson headed up could ever determine whether the SAP were involved in the massacre and I don't think he's really in a position to say whether Davidson has done a thorough investigation on the basis of his two weeks here.
He was here for such a limited period of time and, as you know, his responsibility was to look at the police response to the massacre, in which he was very critical in terms in terms of the response, shockingly critical in the police's viewpoint -- as you know the police themselves were very critical of Waddington's findings. So I'm not sure what Waddington's findings bring to the debate about police involvement. I think he made some comments that had relevance but they had a limited relevance to the broader issue. They cannot be called an investigation into police involvement.
I refer him to some articles he has published, which reflect his thinking on the massacre. In one he says "The stated political objective in Boipatong that night was to attack members of defence units.{SDUs} When the special defence units could not be found the attack degenerated into a free for all, they descended on the unsuspecting township"23. Was any attempt ever made to find out why there were no SDUs on the street that night?
PP. My understanding is that first of all there was only ever a limited SDU presence in Boipatong. It is a very small township, but also a very small township, very disorganised and not particularly well controlled where the organised self-defence units are concerned
The main SDUs in that area are the Sharpo(?) SDUs that were very well organised and by that stage I think already nicely getting to chop each other up they were at each other's throats. Sebokeng also had SDU structures [were they also at each other's throat's?] There is some talk of course that those people that were in the streets, if one can call them SDUs, and that they were chased away by the police. The police deny that and say there is no mention of it, according to their records in the Occurrence Book.24 I don't know what to believe, I must say. I think it's quite possible that the SDUs were simply not out and that they were not suspecting any particular massacre on that particular night. The amnesty applicants, in their statements, say they went to Boipatong with the intention to kill members of the SDUs.
We return to the question of Davidson's competence to carry out an impartial investigation of the police who were, in every sense of the word his colleagues. In another article Pigou had questioned Davidson's credentials to head up an investigation into allegations of police complicity, direct or indirect, that the massacre called for. Davidson was a member of the Unrest & Violent Crimes Unit based in Pretoria; he was a former long term member of the Natal Midlands Security Police, a close associate of General Basie Smit, who had been implicated in what Pigou referred to as the "watershed Goldstone Report of March 1994".
[What report is he referring to? What significance?]
"It seems, " I tell him, " that you are saying that Davidson's investigation was tailored to disprove the allegation that the police were involved and within a couple of weeks he claimed that the allegations were false, that Judge Richard Goldstone was largely dependent on Davidson's investigations and on that basis he deferred judgement; that no mention was made at the time that the investigations were inadequate and biased. But the fact that he had been a member of the Midlands Security Branch or that he was an associate of Basie Smit doesn't mean that he could not have carried out an impartial investigation"
Pigou: "I'm questioning his integrity."
"But you've no basis on which to question it."
Pigou:
I suppose it's based on association and it's based on the broader context of cover-ups during this period by the SA Police and the fact that they were still in collusion with the IFP and that there were still a lot to cover ups even while Davidson's investigation was going on. It's based on those suppositions. In those contexts, with the international glare of publicity on what's going on, my God, they'd do anything to stop this coming out. If it had been proved the Police were involved in that massacre all hell would have been let loose within the security services.
The Police and certainly Police management, and senior people like van der Merwe and Gerrit Erasmus, had to prevent this. They may not personally have been involved or known or whatever -- I'm not saying that --, but what I am saying is that they had to prevent at all costs anything getting out that there might have backed up allegations of police involvement in the massacre, thus backing up the ANC's claim.
Can we really believe that the very people charged with this investigation at a senior level had any interest in proving ANC allegations? These are people that have subsequently applied for amnesty for murder, abduction and God-knows-what of the ANC. They're hardly likely to want to prove allegations levelled at them by the ANC. So it's within that context that I'm saying there's no way there could have been an unbiased investigation.
"So, in your view, there was no way, no-one could have been appointed from the Police who could have carried out an unbiased investigation?".
And certainly not from the Security Branch. There was a deliberate policy in the early nineties, as the SB was officially disbanded, where these people went. They went into specialised units in terms of crime intelligence. The head of Crime Intelligence in the Vaal Triangle was the former head of the SB there. The other specialised crime units they went into - the Murder & Robbery Unit they got placed in all the specialised units. So, yes, I am questioning Davidson's integrity.
I'm raising this issue about the long-term complicity between the Midlands Security Branch and Inkatha in the Midlands. There is a long history to this; it is well documented.[where] There have been amnesty applications linked to this. I've got no proof against Davidson, all I'm saying is that I do not believe it is possible that he could have been unbiased in this process and I think that's proven by the fact that he said within two weeks that these allegations are false.
Again, I'm quoting you: "Many of the then ??? Police Chief including the former Commissioner of Police, Johan van der Merwe, and General Gerrit Erasmus who were charged with searching the hostel after the Boipatong massacre had now applied for amnesty professing murder and torture and other matters, which they feared, could result in prosecution. These can hardly be regarded as individuals who are predisposed to validate allegations made against the very organisations or supporters they had committed criminal acts against." 25
Now why would you not raise the same kind of queries about the statement issued the day after Boipatong by Ronnie Mamoepa, the spokesman for the ANC, which said the Police were this, the Police were that and the other, essentially you could say the TRC took his script as the framework and said OK, let's fits the pieces of information to essentially bear out what he said in the report issued the day after the massacre? He didn't wait for two weeks.
Pigou:
Yes, you must bear in mind you've got different groupings here. You've got a political organisation, or a spokesman of a political organisation that arrives down in Boipatong, is informed by residents in Boipatong and by organisations like Peace Action who had already started to take statements; this is what is coming out of the allegations, the cops were there. Peace Action would already have told Mamoepa, "but we phoned the police and we told them that we had received reports there's going to be a big massacre in the Vaal Triangle." They didn't identify Boipatong but they had received reports that there would be this massacre. Mamoepa then goes and makes a statement. Now it's not uncommon for political parties in that period to make damning allegations without, I suppose, conclusive evidence of these things. This is significantly different to a policeman who is charged with an investigation. And I think Rian is not wrong to say that the ANC did make political capital out of this. Clearly, there's evidence of this. I think it would be wrong to make a comparison with a policeman making a statement and a member of the ANC making a statement.
Again, you write, that Davidson's investigation had been discredited in an article you wrote in July 1999. You write that: 'Coupled with concerns that evidence that Davidson's investigation was neither impartial nor thorough other major discrepancies occurred such as the mysterious wiping out of the Police tapes and the destruction of ballistic evidence. It is reasonable to conclude that investigations are warranted."
Pigou:
I can only think at this stage that in terms of evidence, the evidence that I would put there is that his statements that the allegations were false is sufficient evidence for me to believe that he is not impartial. It goes back to what I said earlier that as a senior investigating officer in a massacre like this, there is no way you could claim that an allegation is false. How does he prove, there was no proof that he the allegation of police complicity was false. If it was false then it was fabricated and those 40 odd witnesses or 30 plus witnesses or whatever have fabricated that evidence or their statements at the ANC's behest or at whoever's behest. That is the inference, if these allegations are false. That for me is evidence that he is biased in his impartiality.
What about the allegations made by Mosenge? Suddenly, he appears out of nowhere
Pigou: "Not really, but OK." [what does this mean?]
"Mosenge hadn't been one of the accused, he hadn't been convicted of the murders and my understanding from the Advocate representing the convicted at the amnesty hearings was that he was a very poor witness
Pigou : "Terrible witness."
"That it couldn't even be established that he was in KwaMadala Hostel on the night of the 17th June, that he might not have arrived till a couple of days later. But he specifically fingers this Sergeant Pedro Peens [more on Peens} as being the mastermind behind it. Yet Peens has never been called before the Amnesty Committee. Why?"
Pigou:
They didn't want him. They said he brought nothing to the case even though he had admitted to Rian and we had given that evidence to the TRC that he had admitted to being in Boipatong. Rian tape-recorded his statement that and gave me a transcript which I gave to the TRC in which he admitted he was in Boipatong on the night of the massacre.
"So why did the amnesty committee not call him?"
Pigou: "It is a question I would like to ask Ronnie Pillay the Chairman of that particular committee.
I cannot explain why he was not called."
"It looks like a gaping hole. Here is somebody specifically named by an individual, of whom we have a tape recording saying he was there that night, which means that at least one Casspir couldn't be accounted for in the Occurrence Book or whatever {does Davidson say that the movements of all Caspirs were accounted for?] and the Amnesty Committee doesn't bother to call him?
Pigou smiles and says, "Welcome to the inconsistencies of the Amnesty Committee. I'm sorry, I know I'm quite facetious about it but people that have worked on it are shocked with that kind of behaviour."
I tell him what my fears are: that if the massacre at Boipatong was handled so poorly, and the TRC's "non-investigation" was the basis that led the TRC to reach such far reaching, and absolute findings -- bang, bang, bang, like Luther nailing his theses to the gate of ????, then one must at least entertain the possibility that the same thing perhaps happened in the case of numerous other incidents on which findings were made.
Pigou:
It's quite possible that a number of other incidents happened, but I'd be surprised if there were systemic problems relating to TRC findings of that magnitude. I haven't read the entire report, but from what I have read and the little I know about conflict and all the various manifestations and incidents, Boipatong sticks out like a sore thumb. I think those that have criticised these findings are right to criticise those findings. If I had been the researcher, I would have recommended the Truth Committee to inform its findings with strong recommendations for full and a detailed investigation.
There are a number of questions outstanding in this matter, and that the opposing viewpoints, the contractions haven't been squared basically in this particular case. You've got people on the one side swearing blindly that the police weren't involved and on the other hand you've got a range of people, not everyone -- and that for me also adds credibility, that you haven't got phalanxes of ANC supporters saying yes the police were there. If you look at who is saying this, this is not necessarily people that you would think could be primed for feeding the conspiracy or ANC hacks. These are old ladies who saw people being killed. My bone of contention with Rian has been very much on the point that he is saying that these people are lying and that they were primed to do this on behalf of the ANC. The other problem I have with his analysis is the suggestion that the police monitoring organisations were somehow part of this conspiracy. This is patent nonsense and for me the credibility of why the door is still open on this particular matter is because of what those people have said, whatever the inconsistencies. I would be very surprised if you ever got a consistent version out of people in those kinds of circumstances. And adding to my scepticism is the fact of the involvement of the police with Inkatha in the Vaal Triangle and the consistent failure to investigate these things.
There are a number of questions around Mosenge and I wish I had my notebook about it because one of the prisoners, one of the investigators interestingly enough the case that Mosenge is in jail for at the moment, the complainant is Mr van der Gryp, the same police officer who was involved with Davidson in the investigation, and my understanding is who was responsible for the losing of those bodies {losing bodies!!}
IN fact the whole set-up is quite bizarre. Van der Gryp is in the Unrest & Violent Crime Unit; he was part of Davidson's investigation team; and he is one of the policemen that has applied for amnesty for the cover up in Themba Khoza's case, and he is the complainant in the Mosenge matter. {What's the complaint about?}
On the front of the docket, the police docket, the investigation docket, it says the complainant in this particular murder investigation is the Police officer van der Gryp. Now that's not unusual. If it was a drive-by shooting and someone didn't come forward, a policeman would sometimes put his name down, that's not unusual. But the fact that he seems to be "dotted" around all these instances and he's involved in a drive-by shooting but there is something very peculiar in terms of the timing with Mosenge because that drive-by shooting occurred the day before or two days before, 15th June 1992, before the massacre.
"The massacre Mosenge says he was involved in, although he was never charged or convicted of anything in connection with Boipatong".
Pigou:.
Yes, Mosenge said that he was involved in that with Keshwa.{who is Kewsha} They {who is they?} claimed that Keshwa was in jail during that period, I think they claimed that he was in jail throughout that time period, the Police. Now theTRC spoke to other policemen who said that Keshwa was treated very favourably in terms of letting him in and out and so forth. Whether or not they got an affidavit, I know that the investigators talked to them. We spoke to a lot of policemen who simply would not put their details down in affidavit or statement form. We spoke to a policeman that claimed he himself was involved in the Swanieville massacre on 12th May 1991, a similar incident to Boipatong. You've probably come across this massacre. He gave me crazy detail about that particular incident, but would he sign anything? No he wouldn't, because there's still an enormous amount of fear. You've got to bear in mind that those that come forward in the amnesty process largely have come forward because they've been implicated in the resultant investigations, the investigations by the Attorney General's office that sprung out of de Kock and then subsequently Mamasela. There is a direct correlation between the key amnesty applications.
POM. Could there have been a TRC without Eugene de Kock?
PP. To be fair to d'Oliviera, and I'm not a great fan of the Attorney General's investigations either because I think we've had politically managed investigations, yes I think we would not have had hardly anything without what happened with de Kock and subsequently with Mamasela coming forward. Mamasela was also very important particularly for the Eastern Cape investigation and significantly for the Northern Transvaal Security Branch hit squad, Jack Cronje and his team of four guys who applied for amnesty for 60 murders.
POM. Sixty?
PP. Sixty.
POM. Does the name Jac Buchner that surfaced once but he was never
PP. He was questioned in camera by the TRC. He never applied for amnesty as far as I know. Again, no direct evidence I think linking him. A lot of allegations about Jac Buchner over the years, his involvement in C Section, the counter-insurgency section. C Section of the Security Branch.
POM. When he was in Pietermaritzburg?
PP. Pietermaritzburg. He was infamous for turning people and he was also the first chairman of Trewits, the counter-revolutionary intelligence task team which was a sub-unit of Section C of the Security Branch which Jack Cronje in his hearing said was used to identify people to take out for assassination. He said that that particular unit which was a joint Police/Military Intelligence and National Intelligence Unit drew up profiles on ANC and PAC members, MK members, and in its later years in 1990, 1991 on right wingers, essentially on They claim that some of the people inside that unit, there was never a proper investigation in Trewits either by the TRC, but there are differing opinions depending on who you talk to. Operatives applying for amnesty say it was to identify people to be taken out. Those who didn't apply for amnesty that were involved in it said, no, no, we simply just
POM. Was Louis Botha involved in that?
PP. No I don't think so. Jac Buchner, there were three or four chairman, the last chairman was C J A Fichter(?). Sorry off the top of my head I can't remember. But Louis Botha doesn't ring a bell.
POM. Where does one come from, if I agreed and said I don't want to give much credibility to Anthea Jeffries, but if I read her sense, you say no wrong, right comment just in terms of one paragraph of what she says, she says: 'The TRC fails to explain how it reconciled its views that Police investigations were biased in favour of the IFP with the fact that 17 residents of a hostel that primarily housed supporters of the IFP were successfully prosecuted for murder. Nor does the TRC explain its rejection of the conclusions reached by Dr Waddington, Justice Goldstone and Judge Smit that the Police had not been involved in the killings.'
PP. True, that it hasn't been explained because the explanation is not there. That's true. In terms of bias towards the IFP I think that that was made out of a much broader understanding of a whole range of evidence placed before the TRC, not just in the Boipatong case. I think they would have been able to by that stage have seen a number of patterns and systemic patterns emerging of bias towards the IFP and collusion with the IFP. So I think they probably made this comment on that basis with regard to Police bias. I think they took things like the erasure of the tapes and they came to the conclusion, even though other people didn't make this finding, they said that given the circumstances it had to be manipulation and tampering. It's just unacceptable to think that six months of having this new system and this is the first time that it goes wrong.
POM. That's what I was going to ask you.
PP. Sorry, the final thing based on the findings of Goldstone or whoever, Goldstone never made any final findings, Waddington was not commenting on and you were relying essentially on what Justice Smit said.
POM. She goes on to say, 'It also fails to explain. that the reasons for discounting Judge Smit's findings that the erasure of the ISU tapes and destruction of the eight shells was the result of incompetence rather than anything sinister.'
PP. She's quoting what Judge Smit is saying, so she's believing the Judge. The Commission is not prepared to believe the Judge on that. So I think it's a judgement call I suppose as well. The thing is if you want to believe everything this Judge says - Anthea Jeffries is taking the line of a very sort of positivist line that anything that comes out of a Supreme Court Justice's mouth must be the truth, this has been based on a process. She is not accepting that the process may well have been flawed. That is the point I made.
POM. That the trial itself was flawed?
PP. The trial and the investigation and the prosecution. You talk to people like Anina van der Westhuizen, who you may already have done
POM. No I haven't.
PP. - and you ask her about how many of her clients were tortured, for instance, if you want to talk about due process, I mean those IFP members were tortured. Rian will tell you in graphic detail how they tortured those people. Now Rian says, 'Come on, if they'd been tortured so badly surely they would have confessed to Police involvement and what the Police did to them?' I said to him, 'How do you know what they were tortured for?' People could be tortured not to say things as well. It cuts both ways but in terms of process of course none of the evidence would have been acceptable would it?
POM. 'It makes no mention of the ANC's apparent instructions to residents not to co-operate with the Police, that the likelihood of this would have increased the difficulty of mounting aproper investigation. It gives no reason why the untested allegations put before it should have prevailed over the conclusions of the trial put before the court. These conclusions, furthermore, have been based on the fact that three accomplices and some 120 residents of Boipatong had all testified that the Police had not played any part in the attack. Moreover the witnesses who had alleged the opposite had been shown under cross-examination to be unreliable and dishonest.'
PP. OK, again I will repeat my comment about the 120 witnesses. They were selected by the prosecution and they would not have selected people that would put forward the argument of the Police involvement. Certainly with regard to those that were poor under cross-examination, I think only five or six came forward out of the total possible of thirty. I find the statement meaningless.
POM. So the defence called upon 20 people that said we saw no Police and the prosecution, which could have called up to 40 people which said the contrary didn't call the 40 people.
PP. Yes. They didn't call those people. It was not in their interests the prosecution, like you do with any trial lawyer, they have their game plan, their game plan was to get convictions. Their game plan was not to get convictions and implicate the Police. So it was not part of their they were under immense pressure and that's why they put these people up, these six people. I'm not going to sit and debate the merits of what they said and how accurate or inaccurate, the point is there are still a number of people that weren't called who could have been called. I think the comment is irrelevant.
POM. Then she says, 'According to Jan Schelberg, a Swedish policeman serving the TRC, the Commission conducted no real investigation of the massacre.'
PP. Correct.
POM. 'It found no new witnesses and listed no novel or compelling testimony to cast fresh light on the killings.'
PP. Correct.
POM. "The TRC seems to have taken as evidence virtually verbatim from a report of the Human Rights Commission which was compiled within a few weeks of the massacre at most and before the allegations against the Police had been put to any test.'
PP. Correct.
POM. 'It also ignored attacks on IFP supporters that it seems had immediately preceded the massacre.'
PP. Incorrect. Can I just say why? Again, this is a line that I mean bear in mind Anthea's pulled most of this from Rian and Rian's worked on this stuff. There were a couple of attacks in Boipatong during the week before of people associated with the hostel. The impression given is that there were a whole range of attacks. The last attack was three days before the massacre so in terms of was this a spontaneous response to attacks on hostel members, no it was not. If you look at the chronology of violence in the Vaal Triangle during that period a lot more people in Boipatong than in other communities that were being attacked and killed by IFP supporters and other peoplefrom KwaMadala Hostel and elsewhere.
POM. So there were more people in ?
PP. A lot more community people being attacked than certainly IFP people.
POM. Were being attacked in other communities?
PP. In other communities and in Boipatong itself. So to say that the attacks on those people were a trigger to the attacks, some sort of spontaneous response from the hostel dwellers is nonsense. Absolute nonsense.
POM. You're saying more IFP people had been killed in other communities?
PP. Yes, in Sharpeville. In Sharpeville for instance many more were killed. You just have to look at their own incident list that they gave to the TRC which is available, I can give you a copy of it, and I refined it down to pull out the ones just in the PWV and I refined it down to pull out the ones in the Vaal Triangle, and you can see the list of attacks that they reported to the TRC, the IFP.
POM. The IFP reported?
PP. Yes. It doesn't marry with what Rian and Anthea are saying.
POM. I'd appreciate the list.
PP. It's on my computer at home.
POM. You were viewing just from your knowledge, a couple of people have said to me there may well have been Police involvement, one just simply doesn't know whether it was planned by the Police in collaboration with the IFP and executed almost in a military style according to that plan. That's very far-fetched.
PP. I think what's difficult for the TRC to reconcile in this process, and perhaps most of all why they made these statements, made these findings, is based on what Waddington said to a certain extent although he didn't say that there was conspiracy but the lack of reaction to the massacre look at where that massacre took place over a period of X number of minutes, 45 minutes, an hour or whatever, it varies depending on who you talk to, but a considerable amount of time, there are something like five Police stations within a 10 km radius or 15 km radius of Boipatong, Vanderbijlpark Police Station, Vereeniging Police Station, Sebokeng Police Station, Sharpeville Police Station, Boipatong Police Station, let alone others in the area, but reaction for such a long period of time, tapes get wiped, there are a number of serious question marks. Was this all a series of unfortunate coincidencesfor the SAP which some people would like us to believe that it was and it just so happens that the only evidence we've got in the Vaal of Police applying amnesty is about collusion with the IFP in another massacre that happened a couple of years previously. I think they put two and two together I mean in their minds they put two and two together and said it has to mean this and therefore they did. I do agree though that they needed to actually make those statements in the TRC's findings but they needed more evidence to do that. This is why I think they should have pushed for more investigations, more subpoenaing and so forth.
POM. When you mention the tapes, and I raised this with Davidson who was very if they say it's new equipment and that the person using the equipment was using it the wrong way, turning the tape in one direction and the person using it, charged with turning over the tape at the end essentially turning over was If they were using the tapes or the equipment in the wrong way then that wouldn't have been the only night that occurred. Infact that would have been a pattern that had existed from the time the, assuming it was the same people who were using it, operating it
PP. And they claimed it was the first time it had happened. Now they had been putting this equipment in around the country at different units for a period of six months by the time they came to put it in the Vaal Triangle. They claimed, they want us to believe that during that period first of all the guys who were installing it said, 'Oh we never knew you couldn't do that and this could happen.' And they claim during that period they had never had one report back that they had lost information, that people had never asked given the levels of violence and abuse that were going on around the country at that time it is simply unbelievable that people would not have wanted to go back and listen to the tapes and if people were turning them over and they had obviously not told people, from their version, whether you could or you couldn't turn these things over, it just doesn't stand up, it's just not credible.
POM. Shouldn't the same thing the tape should have been in a similar state on 16th June and 15th June?
PP. You'd think so wouldn't you? That it would all be wiped over.
POM. Were those tapes examined?
PP. Well it's not clear, it's not at all clear. I don't know what the British experts found
POM. They were given the tapes for the night.
PP. My recollection of reading the transcripts, there was a whole lot of discussion about this.
POM. Transcript of the?
PP. Of that particular night. But I am sure they would have looked.
POM. Whose transcripts?
PP. Sorry, the tape itself for that particular night, they tried to get a transcript and of course they got all this gobbledygook because it had been taped over again or whatever went wrong. It's one of those things that was never completely proved one way or the other. Again, you're expected to believe it was an honest mistake. I think the point is why didn't that happen all the time? You see the thing that
POM. Did it happen the night before and the night before and the night before?
PP. If it was the same person operating it. There were only a couple of people operating that of course. Yes you would expect so and what are they expecting us to believe. If that was the case -
POM. No-one asked for the tapes of the other nights?
PP. As far as I am aware, no, I don't think they looked into it in that sort of detail.
POM. Because if they did and all the other tapes were fine then you would say it doesn't make sense.
PP. But if they had wiped everything
POM. If everything from every other night was in the same condition you could say, well it seems to point towards them using or putting it in the wrong way, but that was never established.
PP. Again, I must go back to the transcripts. And it's worth having a look at, I'm not sure whether they went on this continual with this stuff, so they actually went over the same tapes again and again and again or whether they kept back-dated records or they only kept records if they wanted to get a particular thing. So that might be the concern. I seem to remember clearly that my problem with this was that they were asking us to believe that in the 6-month period prior in the stations where they had put this thing in they had never experienced this problem and suddenly for the first time on the night of the Boipatong massacre, suddenly thiswas the first time it ever happened.
POM. When you say 'they'?
PP. The Police experts, the experts that installed it and were teaching the people how to use it.
POM. You're saying the TRC never investigated.
PP. As far as I'm aware.
POM. But when you say 'they' were saying to whom? They were saying - ?
PP. To the Goldstone Commission in terms of the transcripts.
POM. Oh, OK. So that would be available in the transcripts of the Goldstone Commission hearings at HURISA?
PP. Yes. I might even have an electronic copy at home, I will have to go and have a look again and if I have you are most welcome to anything I've got.
POM. I've got a bit obsessed about it. What I'm trying to get at is I have to do this one book which will be 700 pages, no more, I have a contract. Then I will do kind of ten volumes for each year and have them done by University Press which will detail everything, every conversation with every person. First the book is a commercial book, a book to sell. One of my approaches was to look at different prisms of truth then it comes down to what is the truth and the Commission begins with there being revealing truth, there being truth, factual truth, looking at incident and if you look at the prisms of different kinds of truths, can one look at SA over a ten-year period in the same way. What do you come up with?
PP. It's a huge and on the issue of truth, and I think it relates directly to this issue of Boipatong, is that there was a significant failing by the Commission to get to grips with what happened in the 1990s in terms of the violence on the Reef in particular, and the level of they made statements, they made findings I think which are difficult for them to substantiate. I think they made findings on train violence and stuff like that. My sense is that it wasbased largely on gut unconfirmed intelligence reports and those kinds of things. Everything pointed in this direction.
POM. Even though most of the statements and
PP. Relate to that period.
POM. - kind of grievances, grievances were made from 1990 to 1994.
PP. Yes, most of the amnesty applications relate between 1986 and 1990 though in terms of the Security Branch ones, and that relates directly to the de Kock very little de Kock activity came out in terms ofthe post-1990 stuff and that I think may be largely because of the tailoring that certain individuals that became state witnesses tried to it's also a difficult period for when they operated. Most of the de Kock stuff is in the heavy years of counter-insurgency in the late eighties, a couple of cases in 1990. You see the few cases in the nineties some of them relate to like this Themba Khoza relationship and that Themba Khoza was a Police informer, wason the Security Police pay roll. Themba Khoza as you know is involved in the Boipatong case in terms of telling people to get rid of their weapons and Mosenge claimed that he had brought weapons there. I spoke to other IFP prisoners who were involved in violence on the East Rand who claimed that he was involved in bringing guns to hostels on the East Rand and so forth. I'm actually ironically involved in a project which is interviewing people in the hostels in Soweto, IFP hostels in Soweto, not named people but it's been confirmed in interviews there with IFP indunas that the Police gave guns to them and so forth. So bit by bit the information will come out. I am absolutely convinced in my mind that we scraped the surface of the nature of the collusion between the Police and the IFP. That's why I'm absolutely convinced that it needs further investigation into Boipatong. I'm quite sure that many of the strong findings which the TRC has made with regard to Boipatong may actually be the truth. I'm quite sure that there is a strong basis for continuing to investigate those allegations or those findings. We don't know the half of it for the nineties I'm afraid.
POM. I was out there this weekend and I talked to four families and they said it was a mixture I was told that there's a church service every Thursday at the Roman Catholic Church for the families to get together.
PP. I'm trying to find my Mail & Guardian stuff that I wrote on Boipatong. I think it must be on my other computer but you're most welcome you will find other on the website, the earlier article on Boipatong, the one thatI initially criticised his (Rian's) question as a spin article.
POM. On what website?
PP. On the Mail & Guardian website, mg.co.za. You should find it there. I'm sorry I thought I had it.
POM. What is it again?
PP. www.mg.co.za. I think for me my big thing, Padraig, really has been that with so many aspects of the Truth Commission matters were not properly looked into and we haven't got the truth yet. In the cases quiteclearly where I think disinvestigation would go and I think that this is not about excusing or trying to mitigate the ANC abuse or whatever it might be with regard to that side of the fence, but the collusion and collaboration and the involvement of the Police and particularly in an area like the Vaal and having worked in that immediate period after the Boipatong massacre, that's 1992 through to 1996, beginning of 1996, in the Vaal, almost every day in the Vaal Triangle, much of that but especially the last three years from 1993 onwards I am convinced of the complicity of the Police in abuses in that area. I am convinced of the complicity of the IFP in that area and I believe we haven't seen the half of it. I wrote, one of the other things I may have raised on this one is that the leader of the IFP in the Vaal Triangle was a man by the name of Mwezi Twala who was formerly an ANC cadre who wrote his book about inside Bokodo(?). He was one of the gang of ten or whatever that was very badly dealt with in one of the ANC camps after a mutiny in 1984. He came back and was a member of RECOG(?). Now RECOG was the Returned Exiles Committee which was a Security Branch operation.
. What I'm pointing out to people is that there's a whole load of Security Branch connections related here. The fact that people haven't come forward for amnesty means nothing as far as I'm concerned, it just means that the Attorney General has not got round to perhaps pulling strings around those investigations and if we are to believe that the Vaal Triangle, which was one of the epicentres of violence during the eighties and the nineties only produced three amnesty applicants from the security forces, then we've got a big problem in terms of what truth there is in this area.
. I would like to say also, with regard to the IFP, and I deliberately mention what Koos van der Merwe had complained about me, of course they didn't follow it up because they had no evidence to substantiate these things. The point was that senior members of the IFP had been visiting IFP members in prison telling them not to apply for amnesty. You see in the Boipatong case Victor Ntembu, one of the main applicants, applied individually on his own. The other 16 didn't want to apply, they did not want to apply. I didn't speak to those people but I was told that they had been visited by the IFP, senior IFP, Members of Parliament, and told to shut up and take the pain, as the guys that I spoke toin various prisons from the IFP had been told. My position with them was, well you can believe your political party and you can sit here. That's fine. Or you can have a go at trying to use this mechanism to get the truth and the requisite dangers that go with that process. So I think the IFP guys were caught in a very difficult situation and I think it's quite possible that in the case of the 17 that have applied for amnesty and have all said no, there was no involvement, I think it's quite possible that that is the game plan from their Attorneys and from one character in particular who is a very big fish or was a big fish in the KwaMadala Hostel, Mr. Vananu Zulu. Mr Zulu is heavily implicated.
POM. What was his name?
PP. Vananu Zulu. He was also one of the people arrested with Themba Khoza when they found with all those guns in the Sebokeng Hostel. Vananu Zulu is up to his neck in violence in the Vaal Triangle and there he sits at the Boipatong hearings right at the front. Who's going to talk against this induna? Think of the power structures and constructs inside these hostels. You don't break ranks.
POM. Is he still at the hostel?
PP. No, the hostel's closed down now.
POM. No, it was open the other evening.
PP. KwaMadala?
POM. Yes.
PP. Oh well maybe they've got control over it now and they've got employees now living there, or is it unemployed people still there?
POM. There were people wandering all over the place.
PP. He may be, I don't know. But think about the questions to ask none of these amnesty applicants miraculously were able to give the names of any other people who were involved in the massacre apart from a few people who were already dead. I'm sorry, their applications and they're not alone in it, the Security Police have done it, the ANC MK cadres have done it. I've written about it in the Mail & Guardian about these other parties' contrived amnesty applications because the line from their political party that is pushing them and supporting them on this line, no Police involvement. It's still a huge embarrassment for them this whole issue of Police collusion. It's a big bugbear between the ANC and the IFP leadership and I think it interferes with the national projects of reconciliation, the sort of top-down projects between these two parties and reconciliation. I think this is why we get talk now today of special amnesty in KZN for instance for IFP people. The political management of truth, and I think the Boipatong case is a classic example of that
POM. There was no real, again, KZN doesn't really figure even though most people who died by violence died in KZN, the Truth Commission really didn't deal with KZN.
PP. It dealt with some significant aspects of KZN and I think, again, largely on the basis of amnesty applications it was able to make some breakthroughs on the basis of the Security Branch hit squads operating in KZN during the eighties. They had these enormous hearings into the Caprivi hearings, so there was a fair amount of information. One of the difficulties was the IFP was boycotting right until the last moment until it realised, my God if we don't tell our people to come forward they're going to miss out on reparations. So the Durban office was swamped in the last eight weeks or so with 5000 people. A quarter of all TRC/HRC statements were collected during the last few weeks of the Durban office by hundreds of IFP people rushing to put in so-called statements which were sometimes a couple of months so they could qualify for reparation. It would have back-fired in the IFP's face if their members weren't getting reparation and the ANC was we told not to co-operate with the TRC. It was a disaster.
. This is why I argue beginning of understanding what happened in the past in terms of these processes. People must not see the TRC as the end of a process, it's the beginning of a process. Only lunatics like you and I think like that.
POM. That's a nice way to conclude this. Thanks ever so much.
PP. I'm sorry it's been a bit all over the place.
POM. That's OK. Do you have a card, e-mail?
PP. My e-mail addresses, I've got two at the moment. How long are you here for?
. A lot of people just said Mosenge is just a lying guy that was pulled out of a hat.
POM. This is Mosenge?
PP. Andries Mosenge, the guy that
POM. What do you think you have?
PP. I think I've got something which gives a little bit, well considerably more detail about what was happening to him around that period around the Boipatong massacre in terms of his relationship with the Police.
POM. The drive-by shooting. His relationship with
PP. Of course you've got the big Keshwa/Peens connection? Victor Keshwa and Peens, of course. Keshwa died in Peens' custody. I actually spoke to the Police Reporting Officer for what was interesting about that was that forsome reason Peens drove him across the jurisdiction into Free State, the Orange Free State. We think he did that so Jan Munnik, the Police Reporting Officer for this area who is a bit of a terrier, perhaps the only terrier in terms of trying to get to the truth of Police abuses, was operating in this province. Across the border in the Free State was a bit of a hapless, toothless wonder who wasn't very keen on pursuing these kinds of matters in terms of Police investigations. But he told us, again he wouldn't provide us with an affidavit, he said there was something seriously wrong with the way the Police handled Keshwa's death and he said, 'Oh I wrote my report and I submitted it to head office' and that was it. We quite convinced Keshwa, I'm quite convinced Keshwa was murdered by the Police. You just have to look at Peens' negative disciplinary record. How many people died in Peens' custody? Dozens. How many torture cases was he charged with? Dozens. The man boasted that he was brought up for the Eikenhof killings. You remember the Eikenhof killings?
POM. Yes.
PP. The three ANC guys that were charged with killing a white woman and two children in 1993, the Eikenhof killings. Eikenhof is just south of Jo'burg. It was a Brixton Murder & Robbery investigation but Peens is a notorious Vanderbijlpark Murder & Robbery cop who was brought in to do the interrogations because he gets the truth out of them. Of course he extracted confessions. This was his speciality. He's a very bitter man as Rian will tell you. Twentyyears in the service of loyally extracting confessions and then he was bumped. There's a whole lot of things we don't know about Peens I think. I have my conspiracy theories about Peens and Rian will discount it. It's interesting because Rian's sources of information are from within the Security Police largely, from the IFP side of it, and I come at it from the other side, so to speak, ANC community side and so forth. We'vehad some very interesting debates about Boipatong and we end up fighting most of the time but I think we've agreed to disagree and I think he would acknowledge, and I would be interested if you would ask him