The Truth about the Truth Commission, by Anthea Jeffery
approximately 200 shotguns. According to Verster, Snyman later told him that General Le Roux was present when the prototype was tested and was very happy with the results. Both Rausch and Venter were told that the guns were intended for Inkatha. In his amnesty application, Douw Willemse stated that he assisted Snor Vermeulen and Lionel Snyman to test home-made weapons, on the instruction of de Kock. These allegations are untested, it would seem. They also abound in hearsay. The extent to which they have been corroborated-except by similar testimony from other amnesty applicants who might also have had reason to falsify their evidenceremains unclear. The commission implicitly acknowledges the difficulties of relying on this testimony when it states: 'The amnesty applications relating to the supply of weapons by the SAP to the IFP have at this stage not been heard and the commission is thus unable to make a finding on this issue.' In its very next sentence, however, the TRC appears to abandon this caution. It continues: 'However, sufficient evidence is available for the commission to make a finding that former SAP operatives provided substantial amounts of unlicensed heavy weaponry, explosives, and ammunition to senior members of the IFP in the post1990 period.' This finding appears to be based on the amnesty statement of Col de Kock, who (at the time he supplied weapons to the IFP) was no longer a member of the police. The commission fails to explain why Col de Kock's untested evidencehearsay against all individuals other than himself-should have sufficed to prove a conspiracy among former policemen to provide the IFP with weapons. (Col de Kock had himself been found to have supplied weapons to the IFP, but this did not necessarily prove the wider culpability the TRC asserted.) To recap, thus, of the 7 127 amnesty applications received by the commission, only 102 had been heard and upheld (through the granting of amnesty) by the time the TRC compiled its report. These 102 statements were only a tiny fraction of the amnesty applications received. They, at least, should have constituted a safe source of tested, substantiated, and reliable evidence on which the commission could properly draw in making findings of accountability. Whether this was always so is difficult to gauge. A careful scrutiny of one key amnesty application suggests, however, that it might not have been. Unexplained oddities in a key amnesty statement An application for amnesty was put forward to the TRC by Captain Brian Mitchell, a former police officer. Capt Mitchell had been convicted in 1992 on 11 counts of murder arising out of a massacre at Trust Feed near New Hanover (in the KwaZuluNatal Midlands) in December 1988, and had been sentenced to death-a punishment commuted in April 1994 to 30 years' imprisonment. The TRC report describes the Trust Feed massacre as follows. In the early hours of 3rd December 1988, gunmen opened fire on a house in the Trust Feed community, killing 11 and wounding two. The attack was perpetrated by four special constables, acting on the orders of Capt Mitchell.
Source: Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Dialogue: www.nelsonmandela.org