'Like in the 80s, nothing is as it seems'

Published Oct 27, 2003

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- Peter Dickson was among the white Port Elizabeth anti-apartheid activists targeted by security police in Operation Crocus. After a while, they tried to kill him - on hearsay from people like Vanessa Brereton, who fed her information to people who "made Vlakplaas look like a girl scout camp". Striking her from the roll of attorneys, he says, should be the symbolic first step in upholding the ethical dignity of the profession.

Every day I am grateful to be alive, to have actually made it a decade-and-a-half past 26.

Each morning I take a lungful of Atlantic air and then, like every day since August 1990 when the killer came for me on a Port Elizabeth street, it happens.

My breathing passages, ravaged by a nose smashed in three places by a Koevoet knuckleduster, give up half way.

So I suck instead and ignore the migraines.

In June this year, a letter came from Pretoria bearing the stamp of the department of justice.

"We are now able to inform you that the human rights violation committee of the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) has found a gross human rights (sic) has occurred and is of the opinion that you are a victim thereof," it read.

"Hope you find this in order." Oh, it was in order, all right.

And the codicil to the TRC report even said whodunnit.

There, deep within our little book of horrors, under my name, was the answer - "members of the South African Police".

After 14 years, I had found closure.

But it appears now that nothing, as in the paranoid 1980s, is ever what it seems.

We have fitted a number to a face and the biggest mystery of all - the why - now begins to take shape.

To those white Port Elizabeth anti-apartheid activists of the late 1980s, relentlessly and often viciously intimidated and harassed in their campaign for South Africa's first non-racial city council, the Vanessa Brereton admissions of naiveté as to the darker side of her security police braai buddies - until they turned on each other over guilt and stolen money in Motherwell in 1989 - beggar belief.

Perhaps she thought the Port Elizabeth security branch used vanishing cream on Steve Biko, Siphiwo Mtimkulu, Molly Blackburn, Brian Bishop, the Cradock Four and Pebco Three.

Either way, she was so full of loathing she took their money and lapped up their braais for another year and four months.

A liberal lawyer spying for a fascist regime, the defence acting for the prosecution, is treachery enough to swallow.

That alone should be enough to have her struck from the roll, never mind her limping home to sleep with the enemy as well.

But her handler and lover Karl Zachary Edwards did far worse than the betrayer.

To oversee such a cynical exercise against one's enemies, to subvert so contemptuously the very essence of justice by corrupting and manipulating an accused's very beacon of faith and pillar of trust, takes a rare arrogance.

For Edwards was not only a spy and a spy handler, he was also a psychology graduate who liked a little profile writing on the side, as Operation Vula operative Mac Maharaj revealed from stolen police files in 1993.

And profiler's reports, the TRC has shown us, got attached to those surveillance files that often prompted an executive order for the "permanent removal from society" of someone the security police did not have enough evidence to prosecute.

One of Edwards's profiles was that of African National Congress activist Marius Schoon, whose wife and daughter were later killed by a parcel bomb in Botswana.

Another was of Maharaj, from whose swept-back fringe Edwards deducted vanity and arrogance.

And this from a man who liked to dye his own hair.

Edwards's old partner Craig Williamson, with whom he had infiltrated student networks and diverted foreign donor funds in the 1970s while watching the ANC's back door to Botswana, sent the parcel bomb.

In the 1980s, the Port Elizabeth security branch became very adept at stealing cheques, along with other patriotic pastimes admitted to the TRC, such as burning, shooting, stabbing, petrol bombing, shack flattening, beating, poisoning, strangling, electrocuting, burglary, car theft, mail tampering, brake tampering, bugging, spying, cat killing, torture and menacing.

Edwards told The Herald after the Maharaj files were splashed that there was no sinister motive behind profiling and that he had long realised the need for change in South Africa.

But the good colonel protests too much.

In fact, Zack, as his fawning colleagues knew him, and whose brief was the white left and the media - especially the now-defunct Evening Post, founded by John Sutherland in 1950 to fight apartheid and the first newspaper in South Africa to bridge the racial divide - worked with men even Eugene de Kock described as having "made Vlakplaas look like a girl scout camp".

De Kock writes that it was Zack who told him in 1985 that the Pebco Three had been murdered by his colleagues.

Zack also asked him to "take over the vehicles they had stolen from left-wing organisations and, if my memory serves me correctly, also from trade unions".

These were then used by Vlakplaas "in covert operations, especially in the neighbouring states".

One of these cars was stolen from Professor Peter Vale, who had poured a beer over Edwards' brother and fellow security policeman Lloyd, for detaining Vale's wife in Grahamstown.

In this same year, as Brereton well knew, Dr Wendy Orr won an urgent Supreme Court appeal stopping Zack's colleagues from torturing 150 Port Elizabeth detainees under her care by means of beatings, electric shocks, being forced to drink petrol, and suffocation.

But then they were just communists.

Edwards just wanted to go fishing when he spoke to the Watson brothers' Australian biographer Kristin Williamson in May 1995, saying the past was "water under the bridge".

He was "very proud" of his 24/7 commitment ("we worked like demons, late nights, early mornings, you should talk to my wife") to the regime's total strategy against dissent.

"We regarded it as a revolutionary war," he said.

"Anybody who got involved was a terrorist. Our job was to go in search of them." Naming those who "did a lot of naughty things" was pointless, he said.

Indeed, despite mention by more than a dozen Port Elizabeth activists in statements to the TRC in May 1996, Edwards, unlike many of his branch colleagues who clamoured for amnesty, kept the code of silence.

He added: "We got everyone we were after. Shot them. Anyway, it's not prudent to dig up the past. We've got to bury the hatchet. It was war."

When it was suggested that he must have known about the murders and torture, even if he was not personally involved, he said simply: "Our function was to keep the wolf from the door, to stop innocent people being blown up. It was war."

People like me, the Watsons, Dominic Souchon, Darelle van Greunen, Glenn Goosen, Therese Boulle, Howard Varney, Gavin Hartford, Judy Chalmers, James Brennan, Rick Eyman, Roi Simpson, Kobus Pienaar and the banned Janet Cherry, who Brereton spied on, "went against the run of play" and were "regarded as outcasts by the whites".

"South Africa wasn't ready for it," Edwards said. "You believe according to the way you've been brought up. You make choices. Everyone has to decide which way to jump.

"I believed change would come to South Africa eventually. I continued as I was. In the struggle to change too quickly, a lot of people fell by the wayside. It's a dirty game."

But it was the media, in which I was often a lone white voice of resistance since the city's activists trusted me, that really pressed Edwards' buttons.

Despite the suffocating emergency regulations, censorship provisions and scores of restrictive laws and banned words and phrases, the Evening Post still got the story out.

News editor Cliff Foster also diligently forwarded any copy on police actions to Associated Press and the national dailies. As I was the paper's crime, labour and metro reporter between 1987 and 1992, most of these reports carried my byline.

"They portrayed us as narrow-minded, ignorant and stupid," Edwards fumed.

"We were never stupid! We were following the laws."

Personal grudges have often triggered crimes of passion.

Journalist Gavin Evans, who also crossed swords with Edwards in 1984 while a cadet reporter and living with fellow ANC underground operative Cherry, almost died at the hands of the CCB because another security policeman simply disliked him.

He and Cherry almost died in Port Elizabeth, too, in a high-speed attack on their car by the security branch.

I guess my finger to his effective bosses in the South African Defence Force in September 1989, a month after the restricted anti-conscription movement unbanned itself and won an interdict stopping an SADF smear campaign, really enraged Edwards.

Evans was a leading ECC figure by then, Cherry its banned Port Elizabeth chair, and the city's leading white United Democratic Front activist Dominic Souchon, who lived with her, had personally signed up the 19 objectors.

They included the Watson brothers - Valence and Ronnie were ANC intelligence operatives - of non-racial rugby fame, who were hated as much as they were feared by the security police and survived attempts on their lives and trumped-up arson and attempted murder charges; and ex-National Union of South African Students leaders Goosen and Varney, who had come seemingly from nowhere to rid the city of petty apartheid.

There was also Evans's father Bishop Bruce, keeper of the objectors' register, giving us the apparent support of the sanctions-supporting Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Anglican Church - Edwards hated Tutu - and that of fiery George Irvine's Methodist Church, which hosted the protest. The Black Sash expressed support as well as General Bob Rogers MP and former head of the South African Air Force.

Souchon, a Catholic Justice and Peace Commission worker who along with Cherry had beaten a trumped-up drugs charge, had neatly collectivised the white enemy's face.

We had also taken those pesky little Breretons by surprise for once.

Edwards was "disappointed" the next day with my "stupid" decision and warned me that I had crossed the line.

I was one of "them" now, the communists he and Brereton so hated and feared.

A year earlier he had personally withheld my press card for three months while I was placed under surveillance, like several reporters, to be "checked out".

But this was the spring of 1989 when a mass defiance campaign, the last great push against apartheid, filled the streets with peaceful marches and protests for "justice, peace and hope".

White Port Elizabeth activists were in the forefront of this rolling mass action, organising the city's mass march - the country's biggest - and anti-segregation protests, all of which I took part in and helped publicise, in October 1989.

As the underground ANC became emboldened by the marches and the release of Rivonia trialists, I accompanied ANC leaders Mike Xego and Mike Ndzotoyi on brokerage and fact-finding missions to hospitals, factories and Uitenhage townships - winning a peace treaty there after attacks on ANC supporters by security branch surrogates in January 1990 claimed 20 lives.

I introduced them to other white democrats and the courageous PK Botha, the town clerk, with whom they and Goosen would finally sit down for a fitful two years of One City talks in April 1991 - the month Brereton was paid off and spat out.

Goosen would chair the executive of the city's first non-racial council, the first in South Africa, in 1993, while I would be the founding secretary of the country's first civic forum the following year.

By August 1990, though, I was reporting on the ANC-aligned northern areas co-ordinating committee in the city's coloured areas, whose housing and education concerns eventually spilled on to the streets after a police shooting at a school.

Five bloody days of clashes between police and ANC supporters in Labour Party country claimed 49 lives, with damage estimated at R100-million.

I saw, survived and reported every tragic day of it with my colleague Charles Pullen - ANC poster on the bonnet and Danny Jordaan's ANC beanie on my head to curry crowd favour - and got drunk every night to forget.

We were the talk of the town, with both sides

accusing us of bias... for also quoting the other side.

But the police, for this was the second month of the covert destabilisation campaign against the now unbanned ANC, had made a plan.

Their man came for me from behind on August 26.

He smashed my face in and dragged me to my flat. My flatmate was home. Their man ran.

Funny how comprehensive and objective reporting of events, activities and community concerns - the essence of journalism - is twisted into instigating, leading or supporting them.

And that's precisely the problem with the largely second-hand hearsay and untested assumptions that the reward-driven Breretons of this world get to work with.

The kind of talk that can very easily get people killed.

Perhaps the order to kill me came from higher up.

There was that other business in April 1990 about what had happened to the white "terrorist" arrested in the city a year earlier - the inquiries passed right up to law and order minister Adriaan Vlok's office, his spokesperson Brigadier Leon Mellett advising that these matters were best left alone by the likes of me.

Ronald Desmond Bezuidenhout, it turned out, found a new home at Vlakplaas.

Or perhaps it was simply because, as Mkhuseli Jack said on the closure of the Post in November 2000, that the paper had "helped to popularise the armed struggle" in the region?

Or as Jacob Zuma put it at the Post's 50th anniversary ball in May 2000, that "at the height of the struggle in this region, during the '80s, this newspaper kept many of us informed of the events that were taking place here... despite the harsh restrictions placed on the media at the time.

"That was a time when the people needed brave and courageous journalists and editors to keep them informed and to expose the injustices... The stories and the editorials expressed in the Evening Post proved to be remarkably prescient."

I could torture my mind forever to find the sense in it all - but there isn't any.

There is no point to what Karl Edwards and Vanessa Brereton did. But there is a point to what we did.

We brought the run of play around again - so that everyone could play ball - and took the referee's gun away. And the world wanted us to.

Contained in a pot, the crocus lasts only for as long as the flowers bloom, says my gardening handbook.

The trouble with these blasted bulbs, though, especially in autumn, is that they just keep shooting up where least expected.

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