Dirty warriors face moment of truth

The arrest of an apartheid hero shows the road to reconciliation will be perilous. Robert Block looks at the hard choices

TWO LITTLE girls throw breadcrumbs to the ducks and geese at the edge of Zoo Lake in northern Johannesburg. Every so often one of the ducks rushes the girls, who flee with squeals of laughter, dropping their crumbs before the triumphant fowl, which fight over the spoils.

The girls' father, "BB", a huge man with a smooth face and quiet manner, looks on and laughs in between kissing his third child, whom he cradles in one of his large brown arms. Watching this Saturday morning spectacle, it is hard to imagine that this man playing with his children is a convicted "terrorist" and murderer.

About 10 years ago, BB, fighting against apartheid, planted a bomb in central Johannesburg, meaning to cause disruption rather than casualties. But when it exploded, a man died. What was meant to be a violent protest turned into an act of political murder. It was not long before police, tipped off by one of BB's accomplices, captured him.

BB was convicted on 24 counts of terrorism, murder and related crimes, and sentenced to death. His colleague walked free under a law which indemnifies "full and satisfactory" testimony in a criminal trial.

For six years BB sat on Death Row awaiting his turn in the gallows. "Everyone on Death Row always protested their innocence, except for me. I was genuinely guilty," he said yesterday.

Time turned out to be on BB's side. The National Party under F W de Klerk, realising the futility of fighting to preserve apartheid, opened talks with its enemies in the African National Congress (ANC). To facilitate negotiations, Mr de Klerk granted indemnities to many ANC leaders who until then were considered fugitives, accused of various political crimes under apartheid-era law. Amnesties for other people accused of political crimes, including BB, followed. Change blew through South Africa and swept BB out of jail.

The war in which he had fought was over. The two sides declared a truce and dedicated themselves to healing and compromise. BB did the same.

"One of the first things I did when I got out,'' he said, "was to go see the man who informed on me and whose testimony sentenced me to death. We talked it out and reconciled our differences. I also said I was sorry for the suffering I had caused by my action.''

The experience of BB stands in stark contrast with that of two other South Africans who have been in the news this week: John Lloyd, the bomber- turned-state witness-turned-Labour candidate in Exeter, and General Magnus Malan, defence minister during the last bloody decade of apartheid and one of the regime's darkest heroes. The past came back to haunt both men last week.

In the case of Mr Lloyd, revelations about his membership of the African Resistance Movement and his role in sending a friend to the gallows has ruined his candidacy and tarnished the Labour Party. To the left he is a traitor. To the right he is a terrorist. For the Labour Party, Mr Lloyd's past has become an embarrassing problem. He has attempted to explain his actions, but failed to satisfy many critics.

General Malan, on the other hand, was arrested with 10 senior former military officers on Thursday and charged with murder. It was the first time high- ranking officers and a former cabinet minister had been charged with apartheid-era crimes.

The case against him focuses on his alleged role in setting up a paramilitary force for the Inkatha Freedom Party, the Zulu-based rival organisation of the ANC. The charges relate specifically to a hit-squad attack on the home of Willie Ntuli near Durban on 21 January, 1987, in which 13 people were killed. General Malan and his co-defendants were released on bail, and their trial is expected to start early next year.

The general has been protesting his innocence and rejecting offers of help from right-wing whites outraged by his arrest. They contend that the peace deal agreed by President Nelson Mandela and Mr De Klerk was based on the idea that neither side had won the war and that there would not be victor's justice by the winner of the peace. General Malan's arrest is seen by many whites as a negation of that agreement.

The furore surrounding both John Lloyd and Magnus Malan has thrown the issue of truth and reconciliation in South Africa back in the political spotlight. In the name of reconciliation, Mr Mandela's ANC-led government is about to establish a public Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine abuses during the apartheid years. But in South Africa, reconciliation is a word whose meaning depends on who is using it. The government has had to find a way of balancing the need for justice on one hand against society's need to heal its wounds and move ahead. Prosecuting hundreds, perhaps thousands, of apartheid-era crimes could overwhelm the already strained legal system and shatter the pact under which whites and blacks have agreed to live side by side. Under the compromise arrived at, the commission has no powers of subpoena and relies on those involved in human rights violations to come forward and confess. The carrot is the possibility of amnesty for "full disclosure". The stick is prosecution if hidden misdeeds are subsequently discovered.

The names of perpetrators and the crimes to which they confess will be published in the Government Gazette. Despite expectations of some victims of apartheid crimes, compensation has been ruled out because of the cost involved. Hearings will soon begin to determine the composition of the commission, which will be selected next month.

Already, the panel has been labeled, variously, a witch hunt, South Africa's Nuremberg trials, and a toothless, useless waste of time. Relatives of some people killed by state agents strongly object to the commission and to the amnesty. They feel their pain has been ignored and that the new state has abandoned them by agreeing to a commission without the power to prosecute.

Azhar Cachalia, the newly designated Secretary for Safety and Security, distinguishes between the work of the Truth Commission and police investigations of past political violence. He said the success of the commission would depend on the vigorous prosecution of members of the security forces - as well as of the ANC - who refuse to come clean. "The commission will only work if the government has the resolve to prosecute those who don't make disclosures, and this applies to members of the liberation movement and the state's forces. What is happening now is a precondition for the Truth Commission to work," he said.

In the end, General Malan may have no choice but to go to the commission if he wants to avoid a long, potentially embarrassing trial. But so far he has shown no inclination to do so.

According to BB, both John Lloyd and Magnus Malan need to face their past, and the truth of their actions must be told if South Africa is ever going to be able to move ahead.

"In the time of the armed struggle John Lloyd would have been killed,'' he said. "All informers, all agents of the state were considered legitimate targets. South Africans do not like snitches and informers. So many people were convicted and sentenced to death on the basis of state-accomplice witnesses that it has created an anti-informer culture here. But the John Lloyds of this world have to be seen as people who were trying to survive under bad circumstances.''

"Regarding General Malan,'' he said, "I do not want to see him hang or even go to jail. But I want to see him exposed for what he did. Hatred is a luxury we cannot afford in South Africa if our children are to have a future. We need reconciliation, but it must be reconciliation based on truth."