People will skirt around the issue of apartheid as a crime against humanity. We are the disciples of Bantu Biko and Strini Moodley. We are the students of Lybon Mabasa and Debbs Matshoba. We will speak with No Fears Expressed. We are the soldiers of Muntu ka Myeza and Imrann Moosa. We have no holy cows.
1. The Congress Movement (ANC, SACP, COSATU, SANC0) and all political, social and civil society organisations and institutions that either participated in or endorsed the Conference for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and endorsed the Constitution of South Africa are guilty of denying Apartheid as a Crime Against Humanity (as declared by the United Nations) and as a heresy (as declared by the World Council of Churches).
2. One of the reasons cited by the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO) for its refusal to participate in the talks with the National Party (NP) was that the declaration of apartheid as a crime against humanity implies that De Klerk and all NP leaders and leaders of political parties that participated in the apartheid governments and its structures are war criminals who should face a Nuremberg type of trial like the leaders of Nazi Germany instead of being made part of the negotiation for a new society.
3. AZAPO called for the National Party government to be dissolved and the South African Defense Force (SADF) and South African Police (SAP) to be quarantined to the barracks for a peaceful transitionary process to take place in a safe and unprejudiced environment policed and overseen by a neutral administrator agreed to by the international community.
4. AZAPO called for the Patriotic Front constituted by all segments of the liberation movement - broadly defined to develop consensus on the generic principles of the kind of new society they envisage and the generic principles that should be entailed in the social and economic policies of a new society. It called for a democratic constituent assembly that would allow for a constitution that expresses the will of the people of South Africa (Azania).
5. These sensible demands stood in the way of those who could not wait to the new rulers and eaters and all the liberals, conservatives and quasi-revolutionaries who preferred a surface modification of the old society to a revolutionary transformation of society.
6. The rest is history and AZAPO’s concerns were vindicated.
7. De Klerk and the National Party through the SAP, SADF, the soldiers and police of different Bantustans and so-called independent states, vigilante groups and paramilitary outfits like Witdoeke etc. unleashed wanton violence that resulted in the lynching of multitudes of Black people in the transition period. Bisho Massacre, Boipatong massacre and other incidents of mass killings of Black people took place in this period under the watchful eye and commanding voice of Frederick Willem De Klerk. The tortures and executions at Vlakplaas and other torture houses continued and escalated in this period rather than subside.
8. We know that Project Coast, the biological and chemical warfare program mastered by Wouter Basson and Pieter Willem Botha continued under the De Klerk administration because in April 1989, the Civil Corporation Bureau (CCP) attempted to kill the Reverend Frank Chikane with poison while he was on a trip in Namibia.
9. We know of a subsequent failed attempt by the same CCB to poison Reverend Chikane when he was on a trip in the US where a doctor diagnosed his malady as organophosphate poisoning.
10. We know of the testimony of Petrus Jacobus Botes, a CCB operative, that a South African army doctor provided him with the cholera and yellow fever organisms to contaminate the water supply at Dobra, a refugee camp located in Namibia in May 1989. In August 1989, another attempt to contaminate the water the water supply, led by the same Botes, failed because of high chlorine content in the treated water camp.
11. Remember that De Klerk became President of South Africa on 2 February 1989 and effectively became Commander in Chief of SADF and that Wouter and others have confessed that De Klerk was informed of each of their operations.
12. Remember that Daan Goosen, the managing director of Roodeplat Research Laboratories (1983-1986) told BBC reporter, Tom Mangold that Project Coast supported a project to develop a contraceptive that will be secretly applied to Black and was able to develop a vaccine for Black males and females to make them sterile and were looking at ways to administer this to Blacks without them knowing.
13. We all heard at the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that plans were hatched to put contraceptives in water supply.
14. All these took place when De Klerk was the leader of a verkraampte section of the National Party that resisted PW Botha’s reform efforts.
15. As late as 1983 De Klerk declared: “Race in the lock and key of NP policy and shall remain lock and key”.
16. De Klerk indicated that his position of race as the lock and key of National Policy did not change with the reformist project to the South African government a non-racial face without tinkering with racial-capitalism. This is vindicated by the fact that he explicitly pronounced that the NP enters the negotiations with three non-negotiables which should govern the transition government and future governments and be embedded in the SA constitution:
1. Guarantee of minority rights
2. Guarantee of private property
3. Power-sharing
17. With all this knowledge, Former President Nelson Mandela declared De Klerk “a man of integrity” and went on to accept sharing a Nobel prize with him. Knowing all this, the ANC and the PAC worked with liberal and conservative parties to kick Azapo out of the Patriotic Front after Strini Moodley had written a letter to the Democratic Party (today’s DA) and all the Bantustan parties telling them that they can’t be part of the Patriotic Front.
18. We can go on. We can speak about the current ANC government; the murder of Andries Tatane. The Marikana Massacre. The Life Esidimeni Massacre.
19. We can go on and on about the schizophrenic selective morality of the radicals who are - correctly so, finding it uncomfortable to be in the same room with FW De Klerk
