As the cold war ended, South Africa made peace with its neighbors. Two years ago President F. W. de Klerk legalized the ANC and declared apartheid dead. But the warriors lingered. And de Klerk’s opponents keep piling up evidence that some, a “Third Force” in the security establishment, kept right on fighting-at home.
The revelations of secret-police dirty tricks have been trickling out ever since de Klerk took office in 1989. First a police captain told of having belonged to an assassination squad that targeted suspected ANC sympathizers. Johannesburg newspapers published a top-secret memorandum implicating the current head of military intelligence in the 1985 murders of four pro-ANC activists and disclosed secret government funding of the ANC’s main political rival, Inkatha. More recent revelations indicate some cops never cleaned up their act. In June, eyewitnesses to the massacre of 42 blacks in Boipatong claimed that the police had collaborated attack by pro-Inkatha Zulus. In July, the country’s most prominent pathologist charged that police routinely torture and kill suspects. Now a former army lieutenant colonel, the most senior source to come forward yet, has confirmed the suspicion that some members of the security services are pursuing a divide-and-conquer strategy aimed at debilitating the ANC. The Third Force," says Gert Hugo, is out of control, and de Klerk and his ministers don’t know even half of what is going on today."
Hugo served with military intelligence, first in Namibia, later in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, a bastion of ANC support. In 1990 he became head of military intelligence in the black “homeland” of Ciskei-and says he watched his colleagues turn its leader, Oupa Gqoxo, into a bitter opponent of the ANC, in order to provoke black-on-black violence. This, he says, was part of a plan to sow division within the Xhosa ethnic community that predominates within Ciskei–and provides the ANC’s bedrock support.
Both the South African military and the Ciskei government have attacked Hugo’s credibility: he pleaded guilty last year to stealing $7,000 in Ciskei government funds. But it is more difficult to dismiss one of the documents he showed NEWSWEEK. In a confidential memo from January 1991-nearly a year after de Klerk legalized the ANC and freed Nelson Mandela-the commanding officer of the region around the Indian Ocean port of East London referred to the ANC as an “enemy” threatening the “good order and welfare” of the country. The memo outlined a plan to counter the ANC by using the security forces and surrogate black groups called “force multipliers.”
De Klerk says such scheming has no place in his “NewSouthAfrica.” In l990 the told police: " We will not use you any longer as instruments to attain political goals." He finally appears to be cracking down. After the Boipatong massacre, he disbanded several of the most notorious security units, including Koevoet. He also asked a British criminologist to investigate the massacre-a sharp departure from the government’s usual resistance to scrutiny from outsiders. And last month he retired 13 white police generals, opening the way for top-level black appointees.
The army could be next. De Klerk has agreed to a proposal by United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for an independent judicial commission to investigate both the police and the armed forces. The government also proposes a blanket amnesty for those accused of political crimes-including members of the security services-as a way of jump-starting constitutional talks broken off in June. But the ANC demands joint control of the security services, and that may well be too steep a price. “De Klerk can’t act because he needs a firm power base to support him in case negotiations fail,” said Hugo. If that’s true, the full story about a “Third Force” may never be known.
