Durban — South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is preparing to reveal new evidence that the former white-led government gave high-level authorization and broad support for covert and illegal operations in the mid-1980s, fueling a decade of politically motivated violence that claimed 20,000 lives in the still-troubled province of KwaZulu-Natal.
At hearings scheduled for this week but delayed by legal wrangling, the commission plans to present witnesses who were directly involved in training and equipping a state-sanctioned paramilitary force -- commonly known here as a hit squad -- to wage war against supporters of the African National Congress, once South Africa's principal anti-apartheid group and now its governing party.
Details of the paramilitary force's operations emerged during a trial last year in which former defense minister Magnus Malan was acquitted of murder and conspiracy charges. But the truth commission, operating under different rules from a court of law, appears poised to present evidence that is more far-reaching than what was presented in the Malan case. Testimony, council minutes and military planning documents will describe a broad conspiracy, emanating from high within South Africa's apartheid government, that resulted in warfare between the ANC and a rival group, Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Movement, and nearly derailed the elections that brought nonracial rule in 1994.
Code-named Operation Marion, the covert project was sanctioned by the State Security Council, a cabinet-level body chaired by then-President Pieter W. Botha to coordinate defense and counterinsurgency actions. The action was considered so sensitive that Botha ordered oral briefings for the council rather than the usual written reports, according to the evidence obtained by the commission.
The commission's disclosures will implicate Buthelezi, who currently is a member of President Nelson Mandela's cabinet, as well as several former officials of the apartheid era. They also could threaten the fragile racial, ethnic and political relationships among the three major parties of post-apartheid South Africa: the ANC, led by Mandela; Buthelezi's Inkatha; and the National Party, led by Frederik W. de Klerk, the last president under apartheid.
Slated as lead witnesses are a former military intelligence officer who assisted with the training and an ex-ANC supporter who became the chief operative in the anti-ANC force.
The identity of the intelligence officer, who has applied for amnesty for his role in the project, is being kept secret. The other principal witness, Daluxolo Luthuli, grandson of the late ANC president and Nobel Peace laureate Albert Luthuli and a former ANC guerrilla, will provide a firsthand account of his role as "political commissar" of the anti-ANC trainees.
With the testimony and the large assortment of classified materials gathered by investigators, the commission wants to determine the degree of high-level responsibility for the political violence that flared just over 10 years ago.
Secret documents, which have not been made public but have been examined by Africa News Service, outline a strategy adopted in 1985 to provide an offensive force for the Inkatha Movement, a predominantly Zulu organization now called the Inkatha Freedom Party. At the time, Buthelezi, Inkatha's leader, was chief minister of the black "homeland" of KwaZulu and was seen by Pretoria as a credible black ally against the ANC.
Although Pretoria subsidized Buthelezi's homeland administration and the other black enclaves established under apartheid, covert paramilitary support for a political movement such as Inkatha was not legal, even under the state of emergency declared in June 1985.
Buthelezi, who as home affairs minister is now one of only two opposition politicians in Mandela's cabinet, has been notified by the commission that testimony at the hearings will tie him to illegal acts.
Through its activities, the truth commission is exposing the fault lines that still divide the country. The panel embodies the delicate political deal that replaced the apartheid system of racial separation with majority rule. In negotiations over how past crimes would be dealt with once a nonracial government was installed, de Klerk pressed for a general amnesty, while some in the ANC favored prosecution and harsh punishment for enforcers of apartheid and others preferred a formula for conditional amnesties. The compromise was a commission to uncover atrocities and to grant amnesty to those who fully disclosed political crimes.
Some 8,000 South Africans requested amnesty before a May 10 deadline, including hundreds of ex-police officers, a former head of the South African military, several current cabinet ministers and the top echelon of the ANC. However only two ministers from the old government and only a few former military leaders submitted applications.
De Klerk, who legalized the ANC and freed Mandela from 27 years in prison, contends that he never authorized or condoned the gruesome tactics against apartheid opponents that the commission has exposed. De Klerk did not apply for amnesty and has accused the commission of being pro-ANC.
Buthelezi also has distanced himself from commission inquiries, and neither he nor other top Inkatha officials sought amnesty.
The most dramatic revelations have involved systematic brutality by the white-led police and military that extended into the smallest towns and rural areas. The commission has established, for example, that each of the 11 area branches of the security police had its own hit squad to deal with troublesome local activists.
"You thought you knew the horrors of apartheid," said Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the commission's chairman, in an interview, "and then you are bowled over completely by the depth of depravity that has been surfacing."
Partisans and victims in the fighting mostly have been local residents. The bitter clashes, which divided villages, schools, churches and families, eventually spread to areas around Johannesburg, abating only with Buthelezi's last-minute agreement to participate in the 1994 poll. Although killing has sharply declined, tensions between the ANC and Inkatha still run high.
Operation Marion predates previously publicized activities in which undercover police and military officers, in what came to be referred to as a "third force," provided logistical backing when Inkatha's battle with the ANC escalated after Mandela's release in 1990.
The start of Operation Marion followed the formation in 1983 of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a coalition of anti-apartheid groups that provided the open opposition to white rule that the outlawed ANC could not.
Because of Buthelezi's relative favor within the government, many in the front and in the ANC were hostile to him. Testifying last month before the truth commission, South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki revealed that an ANC unit had proposed a plan to assassinate the Inkatha leader but said ANC leadership had vetoed the idea. Mbeki speculated that Buthelezi felt vulnerable because the country's military intelligence agency "did all manner of things" to convince him that the ANC intended to kill him.
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According to the Operation Marion documents, the project originated with a request from Buthelezi for "a small, full-time offensive element which could be covertly deployed against the ANC/UDF." A State Security Council meeting on Dec. 20, 1985, gave the plan its blessing, and a February memorandum said implementation had been approved at the "highest level."
The records show that 206 Inkatha recruits received six months' instruction in sabotage and counter-terrorism from South Africa's Special Forces division at a military base in the Caprivi Strip in northern Namibia. On their return home, the trainees were armed, given false identity documents and put under the command of M.Z. Khumalo, a Buthelezi aide. Their arrival in KwaZulu-Natal Province, then called Natal, coincided with a surge in attacks on United Democratic Front activists, and the region quickly became a killing field, as the two sides battled for control.
However, the government's strategy proved largely a failure. Two years after the operation began, military planners wrote that Inkatha was "retreating" in the face of growing ANC popularity. After responding initially with increased support, Pretoria ended the funding in mid-1990, prompted by concerns that the project was about to be exposed by the press.
Nevertheless, the carnage worsened. With elections on the horizon, Caprivi trainees in late 1993 took part in training some 5,000 recruits for "Self Protection Units" Inkatha was creating throughout the province. As the voting neared, violence rose to new levels.
