Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 19:42:48 +0100
To: revs@csf.colorado.edu
From: slein@e1m147.mpibpc.gwdg.de (Stephan Leineweber)
Subject: Former South African officers brought to trial 
 
 Hello to all:

On Sat, March 23 1996 an article appeared in a German local daily newspaper,
which might be interesting information to REVS members.
Here I try to translate the essential content:

Magnus Malan, former South African Minister of Defence and ten of the most
esteemed military leaders in the days of white minority government have been
brought to trial. They are accused of being involved in massacres during the
apartheid era. The suspicion is, that leading officers in the eighties had
founded or at least tolerated those armed gangs which were later known as the
notorious para-military 'Third Force'. The public prosecution refers directly
to a raid on a cottage in KwaMakhuta (KwaZulu-Natal) in January 87, during
which 13 Blacks were murdered (11 of them women and children) by a 'Third
Force' squadron. Later it turned out that the assassination ostensibly was
intended against an ANC-activist. He had lived in that house months before.
The massacre set off a terrible wave of violence, which splashed over to the
townships around Johannesburg in 1990. The fighting accelerated before the
first free elections in April 1994. 

Magnus Malan protests his innocense. His strategy, he says, was necessary to
combat the appetite of international communism. He had to act due to a state
of war existing at that time.

The spotlights are directed on Malan and his co-accused. But revelations might
not spare their political tutors and colleagues of the apartheid era. "The
accusation of the former Minister of Defence may have serious consequences
for the current Government of National Unity. It's survival depends on nothing
turning up at the trial which would criminalize the vice president Frederik
Willem de Klerk and his National Party (NP)", says Paul van Zyl of the
Johannesburg Violence Research Center. 

No event since the first free elections two years ago has roused more emotional
turbulence in South African society.

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