Johannesburg - Chris Hani’s daughter Cleopatra was thrilled when she heard that Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Michael Masutha had declined to release her father’s killer, Clive Derby-Lewis, on parole.
“That is good. He must talk. He must tell the country what really happened. He must grateful that I’m a woman. If I was a boy we would be together in prison. I would make sure that I go to jail and kill him, but I can’t do it because I’m a woman and a mother. That man is evil, he must remain in prison,” she said.
Masutha announced his decisions on parole applications for three apartheid-era killers on Friday morning.
Eugene de Kock gets out but Derby-Lewis and Ferdi Barnard stay in jail.
Derby-Lewis has lung cancer and his parole was recommended by the medical parole board. However Masutha questioned their interpretation of the law so refused the parole.
He said the law allowed for the medical parole of an offender with stage 4 malignant cancer which had metastasised and was inoperable and for which both radiation therapy and chemotherapy had failed. However he said Derby-Lewis had stage 3b cancer.
He said the parole board’s recommendation on Derby-Lewis was thus “difficult for me to comprehend” and refused the parole.
He also queried the paperwork in Derby-Lewis’s case, saying a medical report was in another name – also used by another patient at the same hospital with a similar medical problem – and there wasn’t sufficient paperwork to back up Derby-Lewis’s explanation that this name change was for security reasons.
Masutha said there was no decision yet on Barnard (who murdered Wits academic Dr David Webster), as the parole board had asked for further time on this which had now been agreed to by the lawyers.
Masutha said he was guided by the law in the decisions.
“Our country is a constitutional democracy which is governed by the rule of law,” he said.
There was no decision announced on Derby-Lewis’s co-conspirator Janusz Walus, who recently filed a court application to demand that the minister make a decision on his application for parole.
All the men are serving life sentences.
On Friday Masutha said: “In the interests of nation building and reconciliation I have decided to place Mr De Kock on parole.”
“He has requested that the actual date and conditions of his release should not be made public. I have acceded to this request.”
Masutha said he had noted the positive reports from the Department of Correctional Services authorities on De Kock and his ongoing assistance to the National Prosecuting Authority’s Missing Persons Task Team.
In July last year Masutha refused De Kock parole. This followed a court order which required the minister to consider De Kock’s application and make a decision.
At the time, Masutha said that De Kock’s victims had not been consulted, which he said was a requirement.
However the family of one of De Kock’s victims said their family had still not been consulted.
“Not at all. This particular case of my brother – no one ever contacted us, except the media,” said Charles Mlangeni, the brother of Bheki Mlangeni, who was killed by a bomb in a Walkman which De Kock had sent through the post to another target.
“Every time that name crops up, it opens wounds again. It’s very, very difficult. There’s nothing we can do. We just carry on. We don’t have any right to say yes or no.”
Although Bheki Mlangeni was one of De Kock’s victims, he is not one of the convictions for which De Kock is still serving time.
However the Mlangeni family still feels they should have been consulted, and accused De Kock of trying to reconcile with the family only to get parole.
“Where’s the genuine concern, the remorse? There’s nothing. He wants to go to his family. We are minus one brother,” said Charles Mlangeni.
De Kock, Barnard, Derby-Lewis and Walus were sentenced under pre-2004 laws which means that, as lifers, they are entitled to apply for parole after having served 13 years and four months. This does not mean they are entitled to parole, only to apply for it.
Once the parole boards have made a decision, their recommendations are sent to the minister of Justice and Constitutional Development for the final yes or no.
There have been repeated attempts by these prisoners to get parole, including bringing court applications to demand that the minister make a decision.
Derby-Lewis and Walus were convicted of the 1993 killing of SACP leader Chris Hani; Walus shot him on right-winger Derby-Lewis’s orders. They are both serving life sentences, after their original death sentences were commuted when the death penalty was outlawed.
De Kock was “Prime Evil”, the commander of the police hit squad based at Vlakplaas, and was sentenced in October 1996 to a total of two life sentences plus 212 years for a range of offences including murder.
Barnard was sentenced in June 1998 to two life sentences plus 63 years for crimes including the murder of Dr Webster. Barnard was a member of the military’s cover Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) which was involved in state-sanctioned violence. He has served 16 years of his sentence.
The Star