Cape Town - Eugene de Kock put a name to prison’s parole grapevine: Radio Bandiet. In the past, he said,”I just totally ignore it. It’s just trash. The day you are handed your warrant of release, that’s the day you believe it.”
Yet it looks like Radio Bandiet was right on Friday. The man notoriously known as Prime Evil was given parole by Justice and Correctional Services Minister Michael Masutha, “in the interest of… nation-building”. His previous application was denied in July.
The time and date of his release will not be made public, but De Kock is expected to be out of jail soon.
Masutha remarked particularly on his rehabilitation behind bars and the assistance he has provided to the Missing Persons Unit. Yet he’s likely to enter the free world with much on his mind.
Out here are men whom he believes allowed him to take the full blame for crimes that may have also been theirs. He has even claimed former apartheid president FW de Klerk’s hands were “soaked in blood”.
Out here are also the families of men whose deaths he believes were wrongly blamed on him.
Prominent among the dead are ANC leader Job Tabane and Umkhonto weSizwe operative Sello Motau, who were assassinated, with De Kock held responsible. Throughout his years in prison, he has remained resolute that he was not.
He has always said he knows who was responsible and has alleged those men are still in the police force. At the very least, he believes they remain free in a democratic South Africa, while he has had to sweat it out in jail.
Tabane (known as Cassius Maake) and Motau (known as Paul Dikeledi) were slain in a car travelling between the town of Matsapa and the capital city Mbabane in July 1987, while on a mission in Swaziland for MK.
Their deaths were bloody and brutal – and, says De Kock, not “his style of doing things” when he was in charge of the C1 unit, better known as Vlakplaas, the notorious home of apartheid’s death squads in the 1980s.
A meticulous man, De Kock would aim to leave no evidence of his crimes. Even in prison, he kept himself very neat. His pitch-black hair would be combed slick to one side. He wore the bright orange prison uniform, but spoke as if he was not in it. He spoke without his hands. He knew exactly what he wanted to say, like a man who had become accustomed to being listened to. De Kock was adamant about everything concerning his life, including his existence inside Kgosi Mampuru II Correctional Centre, outside Pretoria.
“One thing that jail does… it sorts out who is your friend. If you’re looking for true friends, this is not the place to find it.”
The mass killer was originally sentenced in 1996 to 212 years in jail after 89 charges were laid against him. He was to serve two life sentences.
Justice Willem van der Merwe ruled in the Pretoria Supreme Court that the sentences would run concurrently after convicting De Kock on six charges of murder, two of conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, culpable homicide, being an accessory to culpable homicide, defeating the ends of justice, assault, kidnapping, fraud and the illegal possession of weapons and explosives.
The court singled out two incidents as deserving of life sentences. The first was the murder of ANC cadre Tiso Leballo, the second the 1985 death of Krugersdorp security guard Japie Maponya, whose only crime, said Judge Van der Merwe, was that he had a brother who was an ANC member sought by the police.
At the time of his sentencing, it was thought De Kock would be likely to die in jail unless he was granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was not.
This has troubled De Kock for 20 years. He put in his bid for amnesty at the 11th hour and, soon after that, so did a number of apartheid generals and politicians who might have believed they had much to hide.
Celebrated advocate George Bizos said in his book, No One to Blame, that De Kock’s amnesty submission ran to “more than a thousand pages”.
Bizos described how those very generals and politicians decided they could “not take a chance” and their applications “flooded in”.
The case of Tabane has haunted De Kock. In 2008, when the MK cadre’s remains were repatriated from Zambia, where he had originally been buried, the claim De Kock had supervised the assassinations was made again. He again denied it. “The commander of the South African police anti-terrorist unit under the rule of the National Party, Colonel Eugene de Kock, had nothing at all to do with the murder of Job Tabane, nor had any of De Kock’s men or agents anything to do with the murder,” he wrote in a statement.
De Kock has named the two men he says are responsible for the murders, and these are known to Independent Newspapers. One was a warrant officer at the time, the other a lieutenant in the then-SA Police. De Kock claims they operated out of Mpumalanga, and that the driver of the car in which Tabane and Motau were killed was a registered source within the Security Branch.
He further claims that a woman who survived the shooting, despite being in the car with the two men, was also a source.
“The woman just got out of the car and ran. They just fired shots over her head.”
Tabane and Motau were shot at point-blank range.
When Tabane was killed, he was the deputy secretary of MK’s revolutionary council and based in Zambia. He was also a senior member of the central committee of the SACP.
“It’s a matter of general betrayal,” De Kock said about the allegation that he and his men killed Tabane and Motau, “although the possibility that I would have okayed it does exist.
“Vlakplaas was used for cross-border raids. If there was immediate information, we had the right to immediately attack. Therefore, we always had arms on us. But sometimes other police units would make their own hit squads, and for that, they had to use arms from Vlakplaas … subs, 9mm and silencers. In this case, they operated on their own with no orders from head office, so much so that after the killing, a complaint reached then-General Johan van der Merwe over the fact that these men had crossed the border, because his own people did not tell him.”
In 1997, when De Kock sought amnesty from the TRC for his role in political crimes, many applauded him.
He has always said he is not a psychopath, that he has been tested by independent psychiatrists and found not to be a psychopath, and that he never took pleasure in killing his victims. It was “a job” which compelled him to act under orders.
He is bitter about ex-policemen and top-ranking National Party appointees who never admitted to their pasts.
Weekend Argus