Cape Town - Sharp light is cast on the notorious assassination of Durban academic activist Rick Turner in a series of recently released Section 29 hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The hearings also highlight the plight of a good cop, trying to do his job in the worst of times.
Barely 18 months after the student rebellion of Soweto in 1976, Turner was killed by a bullet to the chest, fired through the window as he went to answer the doorbell in his home in the Durban suburb of Bellair, dying some minutes later in the arms of his 13-year-old daughter, Jann.
Sorbonne-educated, Turner cut a romantic figure at Durban’s university campus, preaching inclusive democracy to a generation that produced a remarkable band of white dissident intellectuals and activists.
A close associate of Steve Biko, Turner was also the author of the banned Eye of the Needle – Towards a Participatory Democracy in South Africa, and a genuine threat to the apartheid state – to the extent that he was slapped with banning orders restricting his movements and keeping him off campus.
No amnesty applications were received by the TRC in respect of Turner’s murder, but TRC investigators engaged in a series of hearings in 1997 aimed at uncovering what happened on that night of January 8 in 1978 .
Witnesses called to testify by the TRC included then-murder and robbery captain Chris Earle, his commanding officer Major (later Colonel) Christoffel Gert Groenewald, as well as Bureau of State Security (BOSS) operative Martin Dolinschek, later a senior manager in the National Intelligence Agency.
And though the best efforts of all witnesses involved would appear to be directed at obfuscation and exculpation rather than clarifying matters, patient cross-referencing and back-tracking on usually unsatisfactory answers already given finally led the TRC’s interviewing panel, chaired by attorney Richard Lyster, out of the fog.
At stake was the status of Earle’s investigation of the assassination. Earle spoke of having experienced disquiet from the start of assessing the evidence, and said he came to suspect early on, in the absence of any apparent motive, that agents of the apartheid state – whether police, military or from
BOSS – could have had a hand in the killing for political reasons.
Rejecting suggestions that it was a random shooting and aborted robbery and taking with a large pinch of sceptical salt an anonymous phone tip-off to the effect that the ANC had had the outspoken Black Consciousness intellectual eliminated, Earle focused on the apparatus of state for answers.
Information, apparently sourced to security policeman Vic McPherson (though Earle does not name him) reached him to the effect that Dolinschek “and possibly other members of BOSS were involved. I also had inform-ation available that the fire-arm used to shoot the deceased was of Angolan origin.”
Following up on the tipoff, Earle – in what proved a fruitless exercise – formally requested that firearms in Dolinschek’s possession be handed over for ballistic testing and received only the BOSS operative’s service pistol for examination.
This gun revealed no secrets.
It did, however, raise the investigation temperature and Earle’s supervising officer, Groenewald, along with the area commanding officer, a Brigadier Hansen, were summoned to Pretoria.
Though for almost interminable passages of the transcript Groenewald affects amnesia and confusion, in the end the interviewers were able to confirm that no less a figure than national police commissioner General GL Prinsloo, on hearing that the finger of suspicion appeared to be pointing to Dolinschek, decreed evidence was lacking and the investigation should be shut down.
And it was, much to Earle’s chagrin. “It just did not carry my agreement,” he noted.
“I wanted to solve the case, particularly because of the claims made by the family and other persons that the police were involved.”
This was not the end of it.
Procedure required that the case be reviewed and the docket reopened six months after its termination, and, according to Earle, the routine was duly observed. And then the dust was allowed to settle.
Dolinschek would later feature in the abortive Seychelles coup attempt led by mercenary adventurer Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare in 1983, where Turner’s former wife tracked him down and interviewed him – to no avail.
Jann Turner recently made a movie about her father’s murder, but could not definitively unmask his killer, and continues to believe that Dolinschek was involved.
The investigation clampdown that has now come to light in the until-now secret Section 29 hearings would suggest she might not be very far off the mark.
Weekend Argus