The eighty-nine charges included six counts of murder, as well as conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, assault, kidnapping, illegal possession of firearms, and fraud. De Kock made several pleas for forgiveness to the relatives of his victims.
In February, de Kock had a meeting in prison with Marcia Khoza, confessing that he had personally executed her mother, Portia Shabangu, in an ambush in Khoza publicly forgave de Kock. Sign-up Now. De Kock's primary duty as police colonel was to silence the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, particularly those from the African National Congress ANC. Ironically it is the ANC government that has released him from prison. His brother, Vossie de Kock, described him as a "quiet boy" who "wasn't violent at all".
From an early age De Kock wanted to be an officer in the police. Eugene de Kock at glance:. Like many young Afrikaner males he first tried the army but he was disqualified because of a stutter. He became a policeman although his attempt to join the elite Special Task Force unit was turned down because of poor eyesight. In he found his feet when co-founded the notorious Koevoet unit.
First he would kill his target. Then he would incinerate, burn, or even blow up the remains so that no scrap of evidence was left. He's an unlikely villain. With his carefully combed hair and thick glasses, he looks more like a librarian than a ruthless assassin.
And in the post-apartheid era of truth and reconciliation he has also become something of a hero, a man of integrity in a community of denial.
Truth and reconciliation has been hard to come by in South Africa. Only one former apartheid cabinet minister has sought amnesty for his role in the political crimes of the last white government. Every other minister has dodged the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and passed off the crimes of the apartheid era as the work of a few rotten apples.
De Kock is one of the foul fruits grown from the tree of apartheid. When he admitted to his crimes in front of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission he was applauded by a black audience.
They were commending him for his honesty, and his willingness to identify senior politicians on whose orders he carried out his dirty work.
De Kock disputes the label of psychopath, arguing that he never took pleasure in killing his victims. It was a job he said, and he was acting under orders from the very top. Eugene De Kock is on a crusade to finger his old bosses who let him fall for his crimes once he had outgrown his usefulness as an apartheid killing machine. He still gives them sleepless nights with his clarity and vision in recalling that dark era when a white government was prepared to cling to power by any means necessary.
The flaw within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be that such brutal honesty will not be put to good use. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu opened the first hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in April , he set out its charter - to expose the truth about South Africa's dark past, and lay to rest the ghosts of that eraso they could never return to haunt the nation. Justice was being exchanged for reconciliation, there was to be no Nuremberg trial in post-apartheid South Africa.
Truth when it comes is painful to everyone concerned - only the incredible moral leadership of Archbishop Tutu, and his comrade, President Nelson Mandela seems to have held the whole exercise together. As a human personification of the power of forgiveness, these two men alone have shown the lead in promoting reconciliation. Some South Africans have found it within themselves to follow the example of Tutu and Mandela - but human frailty and the desire for revenge has left many others frustrated that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission may have stolen their right to punish the perpetrators of the crimes of apartheid.
A colleague of mine commented that South Africa needs to invent a new word before it can come to terms with its past. That word is "concile". Stretching all the way back to the arrival of Dutch settlers in the 17th Century, through the Boer War, and on to the foundation of the new republic, South Africa has always been a country in which whites have been at loggerheads with blacks. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission chose only the last three decades of the apartheid era for its frame of reference.
It's a small period of South African history in which an awful lot of crimes were committed under the name of apartheid. But almost two and a half years on from the first investigative hearing, this Commission of Truth has been left with a huge lie: that it was not the apartheid leaders who were responsible for the heinous crimes of that era, but the foot soldiers like Eugene De Kock.
The ministers who guided and co-ordinated the evil strategy of apartheid have used the Truth Commission like a Catholic confession box. They have taken their pew and spoken softly only of the crimes they want to confess - and the Commission has absolved them of their sins, blessing them as they leave to forget about that awful past. As he smiled shyly, perhaps politely, rising to greet me, I saw a flicker of boyishness, of uncertainty.
He had become that evil. When South African psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela formally met Eugene de Kock for the first time in late , her thoughts above largely capture the sentiments of black South Africans who had suffered under decades of apartheid rule. Relying on a series of interviews she conducts with de Kock in C-Max, along with psychological and cultural analysis, Gobodo-Madikizela finds a basis for the possibility of forgiving an extraordinary criminal.
As she writes:. And the grace-filled gestures of forgiveness I had witnessed from people who lived with psychological scars as daily reminders of their trauma gave me even greater hope.
In wrestling with my empathy, somehow I found solace in these gestures of forgiveness by victims. When Ntehelang returned to Vlakplaas, De Kock and his team were away on a three-day mission. Ntehelang waited for them, drinking at a nearby shebeen. When De Kock and his men finished their operation, they pub-crawled their way back to Vlakplaas, where they continued boozing.
They were playing pool at the canteen when Ntehelang appeared, drunk and bearing bad news: he had lost his gun. When we first speak, Flores claims not to remember the incident clearly; but when I attempt to run through the events of the day, he balks. On hearing about the missing gun, De Kock smacked Ntehelang over the head with a pool cue until the cue broke in half, and then retired to his office. With De Kock in his office, the group set upon Ntehelang. At the TRC, the men said they suspected that Ntehelang had sold his weapon to an ANC cadre and were concerned that their location had been compromised.
Ntehelang took the blows; the cops took turns. Everyone stepped back and stared at the dead askari on the canteen floor. While some of the men were wrapping Ntehelang in a blanket and cinching each side with string, De Kock was given the news. He was furious: the idiots had needlessly killed an asset — and worse, someone on the government payroll, which meant there was a paper trail. Ras, then a hulking young blond with dead blue eyes, came from a town on the Botswana border. De Kock figured he might know a good place to dispose of a body.
In the years after his Vlakplaas days, Ras ended up addicted to alcohol and struggling to make a living. He has sought compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder, but the new government has denied him for years. Recently, they have asked him to prove his case, and so he has been compiling a file. He brings a copy to our meeting in a cafe and hands it to me: a few hundred bound pages detailing his most heinous acts.
He orders a chicken and mayonnaise sandwich. He has no teeth, he says; they are all ground down from stress. Since he never smiles, it is impossible to tell, so I crane my neck.
Obligingly, he opens his mouth: only gums. Once he killed a year-old boy. Another time, he forced a captured guerrilla to write a letter to his mother, dated several weeks later, then killed the man, strapped a bomb to his body, and blew it to pieces. Later, he mailed the letter as a cover-up. How could I let the work that I did blind me?
His prison social worker detailed this in her report: he wakes at night with sweat all over his body, hearing bomb blasts, smelling blood — experiencing the brutality of war. W hen De Kock asked him to come up with a burial spot, Ras knew just the one.
He has never found out the name of that victim; he had been directed to kill him and he had obliged, offering the man a cigarette and a prayer before shooting him in the back of the head. Ras led them to a game farm owned by an elderly friend, who, seeing a car full of police at his gate late at night, asked no questions and lent them a shovel. The men dug. A few of them, on their knees after a day of drinking and murder, vomited.
They then drove back to Pretoria, weaving through the streets during morning rush hour, while white workers headed to their offices. Stones, sand, fire, diesel, the flames and whatever. Those people were not right in their mind.
They fear that he might rise up, so they have to make sure they put everything on top of him. To them it seems he was a monster. They were fearing him even when he was dead. In , Fullard asked De Kock if he could help. He called Ras from her office phone.
The men embraced. Ras was tasked with asking the new farm owner if they could dig on his property. They met for dinner and drinks. They worked together in the searing sun, meticulously extending their search until they found Ntehelang. Later, back in Pretoria, the group celebrated over a barbecue. Six weeks later, to the shock of many South Africans, De Kock was released from prison. After all, De Kock was in prison precisely because he had been denied amnesty, on the grounds that certain crimes were not politically motivated; he should be treated like a criminal, not an apartheid monster.
Opinion on the parole decision was divided. Some felt that De Kock was the only member of the old regime upon whom justice had been served, and that he should be joined behind bars by his old cronies. Others felt he was a scapegoat who should be freed. Few people believed there was adequate political will to go after other perpetrators: former president FW de Klerk heads a charitable foundation and boasts a Nobel peace prize ; a doctor who once cooked up chemical weapons for the apartheid government runs a thriving Cape Town cardiology practice.
Why was De Kock in prison?
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