The Farcical Harms Commission Report

The Farcical Harms Commission Report

On Saturday, 24 November 1990, apartheid National Party politicians and senior officials in the security forces celebrated the release of the Harms Commission Report, as they reacted jubilantly to the report’s findings. Adriaan Vlok said: “We’ve got the Harms report … death squads never existed in the South African Police. The police don’t kill people, they arrest them.”

On 13 November 1990, after more than 70 days of hearings, apartheid President FW de Klerk released the findings of the Harms Commission. As it was expected, it became an exercise in futility, especially for the people of South Africa, whose lives had been touched by the death squads. All they got was a deafening silence. The Harms Commission was De Klerk’s response to Captain Dirk Coetzee’s allegations, including those of Almond Nofomela and David Tshikalanga, in late 1989. He appointed a judicial commission of inquiry into the existence of police death squads and his chosen instrument to dissect and expose death squads was Justice Louis Harms.

The one-man Harms commission, headed by Supreme Court Judge, Justice Louis Harms, ironically enough, with a wave of assassinations sweeping the country, targeting opponents of the government, found no evidence to back up the allegations of army and police involvement in hit squad activities. Harms exonerated the police and found that no death squads had existed at Vlakplaas.

In the end, what the Commission investigated was not police death squads, but the mental state of Dirk Coetzee and Almond Nofomela. Without a single shred of psychological evidence to support his findings, Harms declared Coetzee to have psychopathic tendencies. On the other hand, Harms seems to have been impressed by the blunt denials of Eugene de Kock and his men and even said that the Vlakplaas commander was an “impressive witness”.

Harms found that it was not necessary to disband Vlakplaas and his recommendation on the unit was that: “the men should in future keep diaries and records of all their actions and operations”, commenting on the criticism levelled at the composition of the commission and its investigators. According to Harms, the dedication and conduct of the officials had been exemplary and they had acted fearlessly regardless of who the “opponent” was.

Although the report exonerated the hit squad units, it was critical of the suspicious activities of the defunct Military Intelligence’s Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB). The CCB was a government-sponsored death squad which, operated under the authority of Defence Minister General Magnus Malan. When its existence was first revealed in the late 1980s, the CCB appeared to be a unique and unorthodox security operation: its members wore civilian clothing; it operated within the borders of the country; it used private companies as fronts; and it mostly targeted civilians.

As a reformulation of “Project Barnacle” – a top-secret project by the CCB to eliminate SWAPO detainees and other perceived threats during the 1980s, which ran between 1981 and 1990 – the nature of the CCB’s operations were disguised, and it disassociated itself from all other Special Forces and DMI (Directorate of Military Intelligence) structures. The CCB formed the third arm of the Third Force, alongside Vlakplaas C1 and the Special Tasks projects. All CCB records were either destroyed or illegally removed. Moreover, records of Koevoet, the notorious police counter-insurgency unit that operated out of Namibia, were reported as having disappeared in transit from Namibia to Pretoria

During the Harms Commission hearings, three former police officers, Dirk Coetzee, Almond Nofomela and David Tshikalanga, came forth to testify on the activities of the hit squad. Their evidence was dismissed as untrustworthy. Therefore, no evidence was brought forward to shed light on who was responsible for the death of anti-apartheid activists Griffiths Mxenge, Stanza Bopape, Mhlabunzima Maphumulo, Nokuthula Simelane, Fort Calata, Mathew Goniwe, Sparrow Mkhonto, Sicelo Mhlauli, as well as David Webster and Anton Lubowski in May and September 1989, amongst many others.

Although this report found the Minister of Defence, General Magnus Malan, politically responsible for the operations of the CCB, apartheid State President F.W. De Klerk exonerated him. And yet De Klerk made apologies before his death without disclosing this critical piece of information: What about the families of those who were brutally murdered and assassinated by the hit squads, and some whose graves are not known to this day? Malan’s loyalties to the Broederbond’s philosophic perspective remained steadfast until his death, and accordingly his apologies were undoubtedly in vain. Pity those who insist that his atrocities should be forgiven and forgotten.

Justice Louis Harms failed to break through the conspiracy of silence that the police presented to him. Actually, he should in the first place never had accepted the terms of reference as laid down by De Klerk, which prevented him from investigating operations conducted and atrocities committed outside South Africa’s borders. Time and time again, as accounts were given to the commission of the death squads poised at South Africa’s borders, the stories of their raids were cut short by Louis Harms.

Tim McNally, who was the Orange Free State Attorney General, was appointed to lead the State’s evidence. Just before his appointment, McNally had led a commission of inquiry into the death squad allegations of Almond Nofomela and Dirk Coetzee. In his report, handed to De Klerk at the end of November 1989 but released only a year later, McNally found that there was no evidence to suggest that either Coetzee or Nofomela had been telling the truth. He made the finding about Coetzee without interviewing him, but simply by making enquiries about his background. Yet the same Tim McNally accepted an assignment to lead evidence to the Harms Commission.

What was most astonishing of all was that the police team appointed to investigate the Vlakplaas death squads was headed by General Ronnie van der Westhuizen, who was colloquially known as “General Fix-It”. Van der Westhuizen had tried two years earlier to abort a murder investigation against a security police officer and was assisted by the nimble Krappies Engelbrecht and coroner Hermanus du Plessis. According to Dirk Coetzee, Du Plessis was involved in the murder of an anti-apartheid activist in 1981 and the disappearance of a student leader in 1982. Now, oddly, the death squads had to investigate themselves.

Louis Harms was faced with blank and bare denials, as a veil of secrecy was drawn across the activities of the Vlakplaas squad. De Kock und his men were whitewashed and presented as knights in shining armour. Nonetheless, one important fact did emerge at the commission, and that was that Vlakplaas had achieved very little of what it was set up to do – to identify and arrest ANC and PAC insurgents. As commander of Section C for eight years, Brigadier Willem Schoon said he had only arrested about 20 persons during his time. The question therefore, was if they were not arresting anti-government operatives, what were they doing all along?

Interestingly, Justice Harms was warned that he was the victim of a massive cover-up and De Klerk was accused of appointing an ineffective commission. According to Constitutional Court Judge Laurie Ackermann, “Louis Harms wielded a blunted scalpel. He could not cut through the tissue of lies.”

As one of the main witnesses to appear before the Harms commission, Joe Mamasela was implicated by Coetzee in virtually all his death squad operations. Mamasela denied any complicity in any illegal activity, like all the other security policemen. Later on, he admitted: “We were told to lie. There was no way that we could compromise the police. We were told, in all certainty, that we should lie. We must just tell the truth about our own backgrounds, because they could find that out easily. We were told to say no, we did not know anything. That was the bottom line.”

During his testimony before the Harms Commission, De Kock maintained that he “ was never involved in any assassination outside the borders of South Africa. My duty was restricted to collecting information on the activities of terrorists. The accusations of Almond Nofomela and Dirk Coetzee are untrue. There was never a death squad at Vlakplaas.” For De Kock, “FW de Klerk abdicated when he unbanned the ANC. He wasn’t in control of the country any more. De Klerk is one of the biggest traitors in the history of this country. … There were only two factions that kept the National Parry in power all those years: the police and the Defence Force. The people who helped him to stay in power, the people who helped him to start this peace process, were the people he threw to the wolves.”

De Klerk had obviously hoped that the Harms Commission would be the final words spoken on the actions of his security forces. He said in his reaction: “The events dealt with in the report took place in an era of serious conflict, now belonging to the past, we should act with a view to our future and take conciliatory steps which are necessary to again create a peaceful South Africa.”

Following the Harms Commission report, the only action De Klerk took was to promote Louis Harms to judge of appeal and Tim McNally to Attorney General for Natal. Harms remained unrepentant about the failure of his commission and in typical FW de Klerk-fashion, he said he was a victim of a police cover-up and could under those circumstances not come to any other conclusion, but that Coetzee had lied and that there were no death squads at Vlakplaas.

When De Klerk was asked by the TRC about the failure of the Harms Commission, he said: “The Harms Commission, it later came out, was up against a wall. It couldn’t get to the truth, it was misled. So that effort did not succeed as I had hoped it would succeed … once again with hindsight, with everything which is coming out, maybe I should have done more. I’m not saying that I was perfect.”

From the perspective of the apartheid Security Branch, it was a commendable performance by the men of Vlakplaas who testified before the Harms Commission, since the investigators found no traces of the unit’s crimes and the men were well briefed and coached before appearing before Justice Louis Harms. The performance made it clear that Vlakplaas was going to emerge from the inquiry unscathed. According to Craig Williamson, “They believed totally the nonsense that was fed to them. The whole Harms Commission was a farce.”

Sources:
Wikipedia.
South African History Online (SAHO).
African National Congress, “Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, August 1996.
Jacques Pauw, “Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins”, Jonathan Ball, 1997.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol. 2”, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 29 October 1998.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol. 3”, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 29 October 1998.
Noel Stott, “From the SADF to the SANDF: Safeguarding South Africa for a Better Life for All?”, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Violence and Transition Series, Vol. 7, 2002.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol. 6”, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 21 March 2003.
Hennie van Vuuren, “Apartheid Grand Corruption: Assessing the Scale of Crimes of Profit from 1976 to 1994”, Institute for Security Studies, 2006.
Robin Binckes, “Vlakplaas: Apartheid Death Squads 1979 – 1994”, Pen and Sword Military, 2018.

Castro Khwela
Good evening fellow Compatriots!