Pretoria - The “truth” behind the killing of SACP leader Chris Hani did not go to the grave with Clive Derby-Lewis after all.
Hani was killed to make the country ungovernable so that the conservatives could take over.
This is according to Derby-Lewis, who revealed “the truth” two months before his death during his only interview since his release from jail in June last year.
In an exclusive interview with Forum Films, Derby-Lewis told interviewer and head of the film company Ernst Roets that Hani was a hardcore communist who could not be controlled by the ANC.
Two parts of the four-part interview were released this week on the company’s website. The complete package will be released by Thursday. Roets said it was Derby-Lewis’s wish that the interview be released after his death.
Derby-Lewis, 80, who died on November 3 of cancer, spent 22 years in jail for his part in the 1993 assassination of Hani. The man who pulled the trigger, Polish immigrant Janus Walusz, is still behind bars and embroiled in legal proceedings to secure parole.
Many believed Derby-Lewis never told the truth behind Hani’s assassination. But in the interview, Derby-Lewis maintained that it was a simple discussion between him and Walusz that Hani should be killed.
However, Derby-Lewis was adamant that he did not tell Walusz to kill Hani, but that the Pole offered to do it. “I suggested we should take out a well-known profile figure and he said he would be prepared to do the shooting. I could not instruct him to commit murder; he volunteered.
“As far as I was concerned it was a political objective and it was justified. I accepted his offer. I said ok, if you want to do it, but keep me out’.” Derby-Lewis said at that stage he was not even sure whether it was the right thing to do.
No dates or places were planned, but Derby-Lewis said he instructed that it may not be done over the Easter weekend, as families were then together. The assassination was also to be abandoned if anybody else apart from Hani was around. Derby-Lewis said he made it clear he wanted no other casualties.
He gave Walusz an unlicensed firearm, and the plan was to give him the bullets to use, but Hani was killed before this could be done.
WATCH THE INTERVIEW BELOW
Derby-Lewis said he was visiting a friend in Krugersdorp on April 10, 1993.
“We were having tea when the phone rang. My friend’s wife answered and she came back saying Hani had just been killed. I had such a tremendous feeling of relief, because I knew it could not have been Walusz as he had not yet had the ammunition. When I found out it was him, it was quite a shock.”
He said no preparations had yet been made at that stage. “He was supposed to change the car registration and I was going to organise a big purple wig for him, so people would not look at his face. The only instructions I really gave him was that no one else but Hani should be harmed.”
But as it turned out, Walusz saw his “golden opportunity” when he spotted Hani alone in front of his home in Boksburg.
The staunch Conservative Party member said in the interview that Hani was a hardcore communist who was determined at all costs to lay the country to waste to achieve his political goals.
“He was a radical. He was uncontrollable by the ANC’s higher authorities. As far as we were concerned, he was enemy number one.”
Asked why Hani was the target and not President Nelson Mandela, Derby-Lewis told Roets it was because of Hani’s hardline approach and the support he had of the “radical yes in the country”.
He said “we” wanted South Africa to become ungovernable, which would lead to the security forces declaring martial law.
“Once order was restored, elections would have been arranged. According to all the fundis we (Conservatives) would have won; we would have become the new government.”
Derby-Lewis said the country was in a state of war at the time, but unfortunately the security forces controlled it so well that the ordinary man on the street was not aware of this.
“One of the big problems was that Hani was a hardened communist. He did not believe in God anyway. I saw him as part of the anti-Christ,” Derby-Lewis added.
Pretoria News