Durban — In an extraordinary sequel to South Africa's truth and reconciliation process, an apartheid-era cabinet minister and a former national police chief have been sentenced to suspended jail terms for trying to murder a church leader who has since become President Thabo Mbeki's top civil servant.
Adriaan Vlok, a police minister appointed by P W Botha - the former president found by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to have led the South African state into unprecedented levels of criminality - and Johann van der Merwe, chief of police under Botha's successor, F W de Klerk, were each sentenced in the Pretoria High Court on Friday to 10 years' imprisonment, wholly suspended, for their role in the poisoning of the Rev. Frank Chikane in 1989.
In 1988, after church leaders responded to the outlawing of a group of political organisations by stepping into the front lines of public protest against apartheid, P W Botha ordered Vlok to arrange to blow up the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) in central Johannesburg. The building was destroyed by explosives in August, but it did not deter Chikane, the council's general secretary, and other church leaders from their anti-apartheid campaigning.
Early in 1989, Chikane repeatedly fell desperately ill while traveling, then made rapid recoveries upon returning home. The mystery was solved, and his life probably saved, by medical specialists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after Chikane – on a visit to his wife, Kagiso, who was studying there – collapsed and was hospitalized. Medical tests revealed evidence of organosphospate poisoning. As a result of his illness, Chikane missed a White House meeting with President George H. W. Bush, which he had been scheduled to attend with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other church leaders.
In hearings before the TRC nearly 10 years later, Vlok became the only apartheid cabinet minister to apply for amnesty. He, Van der Merwe and a large group of policemen confessed to, and were granted immunity for, blowing up the SACC building. They did not confess, however, to trying to poison Chikane, and the TRC failed conclusively to identify the culprits.
Chikane, meanwhile, had gone on to serve on South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission during the country's first democratic elections in 1994, and then to study at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. After his return to South Africa, he became director-general of Mbeki's office while Mbeki served as deputy president to Nelson Mandela. He took over as director-general of the presidency when Mbeki succeeded Mandela.
Last year, Vlok asked for an appointment with Chikane at his offices at Union Buildings, Pretoria, the seat of the executive. When Vlok arrived he presented Chikane with a Bible inscribed with the words, "I have sinned against the Lord and you. Please forgive me." Then he pulled out of his briefcase a plastic bowl and two towels and asked a startled Chikane whether he could wash his (Chikane's) feet. Chikane consented.
The incident became a cause célèbre, with opinion divided between those who accepted Vlok's good faith, those who ridiculed him and those who asked how serious his remorse could be if he had not come clean before the TRC. Soon afterwards, Vlok met a group of mothers whose teenage sons had been murdered by police and washed their feet too.
The episode culminated in a plea bargain which was heard and ratified by a judge in Pretoria on Friday. According to an agreement entered into by prosecutors and defence lawyers, three policemen acting on Vlok and Van der Merwe's authority broke into Chikane's checked-in luggage at Johannesburg's airport and laced his underwear with poison. (Under the plea bargain, the court on Friday imposed five-year sentences, also wholly suspended, on the three operatives.)
After the court hearing, Chikane greeted and shook hands with Vlok and Van der Merwe. He told journalists he wanted to put the incident behind him, but appealed to others who had failed to apply for amnesty to come forward and tell members of victims' families what had happened to their loved ones.
However, the poisoning of Chikane appears unlikely to slip quietly into the past for one of apartheid's most recalcitrant police generals.
Sebastiaan ("Basie") Smit was an officer who first made his name as a drug squad officer in Durban. After transferring to the security branch of the police, he rose through the ranks of the unit, in time becoming its national chief. The security branch was notorious for its use of torture and for running death squads.
Smit showed early signs of resisting any accommodation with apartheid's opponents. In a meeting Vlok had with church leaders over a hunger strike that political detainees embarked on in 1989, Smit was clearly uncomfortable at Vlok's apparent willingness to find a compromise. After the release of Mandela in 1990, a number of high-level police and army generals resisted the ensuing transition to democracy, secretly arming black vigilantes and mercenaries to foment intra-communal violence in black communities. Some 14,000 South Africans died, more than twice the number killed in the rebellion which preceded the transition.
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Less than six weeks before the 1994 election, an investigating judge, Richard Goldstone - later chief war crimes prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia - told F W de Klerk of evidence that some top officers were still orchestrating violence to destabilize the country ahead of the election. Goldstone's revelation of what he called "a horrible network of criminal activity" forced De Klerk to order the immediate suspension of the officers. One of them was Basie Smit, by then the second-in-command of the national police force.
During hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed liberation, hundreds of security policemen applied for amnesty. Smit was not among them, despite being named repeatedly as having ordered killings.
Implicit in the political deal which produced the commission was an agreement that if perpetrators of human rights abuses did not apply for amnesty, they would face prosecution. On Friday, the prosecution disclosed that Smit had been the officer who gave the direct order to the three operatives to poison Chikane. And one of the terms of the plea bargain read into the court record was an undertaking by Vlok and Van der Merwe "to act as state witnesses in the event of a prosecution being instituted against General Sebastiaan Smit."
