The Lost Boys of Bird Island

Tafelberg To the lost boys of Bird Island – and to all voiceless children who have suffered abuse by those with power over them Foreword by Marianne Thamm Secrets, lies and cover-ups In January 2015, an investigative team consisting of South African and Belgian police swooped on the home of a 37-year-old computer engineer, William Beale, located in the popular Garden Route seaside town of Plettenberg Bay. The raid on Beale came after months of meticulous planning that was part of an intercontinental investigation into an online child sex and pornography ring. The investigation was code-named Operation Cloud 9. Beale was the first South African to be arrested. He was snagged as a direct result of the October 2014 arrest by members of the Antwerp Child Sexual Exploitation Team of a Belgian paedophile implicated in the ring. South African police, under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Heila Niemand, cooperated with Belgian counterparts to expose the sinister network, which extended across South Africa and the globe. By July 2017, at least 40 suspects had been arrested, including a 64-year-old Johannesburg legal consultant and a twenty-year-old Johannesburg student. What police found on Beale’s computer was horrifying. There were thousands of images and videos of children, and even babies, being abused, tortured, raped and murdered. In November 2017, Beale pleaded guilty to around 19 000 counts of possession of child pornography and was sentenced to fifteen years in jail, the harshest punishment ever handed down in a South African court for the possession of child pornography. While Beale himself had not been arrested or convicted for physically harming the children, the court found that the possession of pornography is not a victimless crime. Somewhere in the world babies and children who featured in the hideous images had been abused, raped and murdered. In 2014, Peter McKelvie, a retired officer with the Hereford and Worcester Child Protection Team in the UK, disclosed that a list of child abusers, which included the names of at least twenty current and former UK politicians, existed and claimed that there had been a massive official cover-up of this in the 1980s. He was adamant that his findings warranted a formal investigation. McKelvie had compiled the list after interviewing a myriad survivors, as well as officials in the care system who had dealt with them in the aftermath. The site of the abuse was the Elm Guest House in Barnes, South London. Prompted by McKelvie’s dossier, Scotland Yard eventually launched Operation Fernbridge. In May 2015, the British police launched Operation Hydrant, an overarching investigation that included Operation Fernbridge and an astounding number of smaller investigations into child sex abuse by prominent individuals in the UK. The police released statistics indicating that more than 1 400 men, including 261 high-profile individuals, were being investigated in relation to allegations of historical child abuse. While many ordinary people can, at a push, imagine themselves in the mind of a criminal – be it a thief, a cheat, an embezzler or even a murderer – it is virtually impossible to fathom the mind of the child sex offender. Perhaps it is because this crime – when adults tasked with caring for and protecting children actually abuse, rape and harm them – goes so against nature that it requires an enormous effort to engage and not look away in utter horror and disgust or, worse, retreat into denial. One need only read or listen to the testimony of those who have survived serial sexual abuse and rape as children to understand the havoc and damage this causes, leaving victims with wounds and scars that linger for the rest of their lives. There have been several exposures of child sex and paedophile rings in South Africa in recent years, but back in the late 1980s these cases seldom made headlines. The secrecy of the transgressions, and the close proximity to the victims by predatory adults, often in trusted or powerful positions, made this a difficult crime to detect and expose. But in 1986–87 a high-profile investigation involving three prominent National Party cabinet ministers and one of their associates suspected of abusing young boys blipped briefly onto the radar before disappearing completely. South Africans who were alive at the time may have a vague recollection of rather sanitised reports involving these political leaders – but that’s about it. Until now. The 1980s marked the beginning of the end of Nationalist government rule in South Africa, with increased violence, state repression and an iron-fisted clampdown on those considered by authorities to be political opponents. Apart from mass arrests, there were also several political assassinations by state-sanctioned secret death squads. Media freedom and freedom of speech and movement were severely curtailed, and the restriction and intimidation of newspaper editors and journalists was routine. The tumultuous era saw the declaration of two states of emergency, one in 1985 and another in 1988, which suspended the country’s then constitution, providing wide powers to the police and the South African Defence Force (SADF), then under the control of the hugely powerful Magnus Malan, minister of defence in President PW Botha’s cabinet. Magnus André de Merindol Malan was a blue-blooded Afrikaner Nationalist who rose through the military ranks and had always been destined for high office. A military man all his life, who also trained in the US, Malan was appointed chief of staff of the South African Army (SAA) in 1973. Three years later, he was appointed head of the SADF. The minister of defence at this time was future South African president PW Botha, who later appointed the trusted Malan as his defence minister. It would be safe to say that Malan was the second-most powerful man in apartheid South Africa, which towards the late 1980s was slowly imploding. The country was gripped by a permanent sense of impending crisis. Crime and violence were rampant as a low-grade civil war raged, mostly in the townships where South Africa’s black majority had been forcibly removed and ‘contained’. It is against this disruptive and turbulent backdrop that the shocking story you are about to read took place. The writers of the two narratives contained in this work, Mark Anthony Dawid Minnie and Chris Steyn, had never compared notes until Minnie, haunted by his past as an undercover narcotics agent with the South African Police in Port Elizabeth in the 1980s, delivered his account of the story to the publisher. Both Mark and Chris had spent a considerable amount of time investigating the same case, but somehow, until the publisher brought them together in 2017 to write this book, their paths had crossed only briefly. In 1987 Chris Steyn began working at the English-language morning newspaper the Cape Times. She was a rara avis in a newsroom then populated by young, mostly white, ‘leftie’ journalists, including myself. Chris stood out immediately. She didn’t dress like the rest of us. She was always impeccably groomed, wearing tailored jackets and high heels and carrying a briefcase. She was also Afrikaans-speaking, or so we thought, which in those claustrophobic times led to immediate stereotyping and a modicum of suspicion. Which is odd, because some of the country’s most vociferous anti- apartheid journalists were Afrikaners – such as Max du Preez, Pearlie Joubert and Jacques Pauw, to name only a few. Chris came to the Cape Times trailed by a frisson of political intrigue. As she recounted in her 2006 memoir, Publish and Be Damned: Two Decades of Scandals, some news stories are neither forgotten nor forgiven. In Chris’s case, the ‘Boesak Affair’ was one such story. ‘I had no way of knowing it would transform me from an accidental journalist into an enemy of the State,’ she wrote. The Boesak story requires a short retelling as it encapsulates so many of the currents that flowed through and beneath South African life back then. In January 1985, Chris had been drawn into the story about the hugely popular anti-apartheid activist cleric Allan Boesak, a member of the South African Council of Churches (SACC), when Michael Shafto, who was then Chris’s news editor at the Johannesburg daily The Star, handed her a pamphlet that had mysteriously turned up in the newsroom in-tray. Shafto tasked Chris with investigating the pamphlet, which featured a photograph of Boesak alongside one of Dianne Melanie Scott, an SACC official. The pamphlet alleged that Boesak, a father of four, was having an affair with Scott. It detailed a series of hotel and chalet bookings allegedly proving that Boesak and Scott had had several romantic trysts. Chris, a meticulous, dogged and hugely professional journalist, set about verifying the information in the pamphlet through telephone calls and visits to each establishment. During her investigation Chris learned that the security police had visited the Johannesburger Hotel the night before Boesak had checked in and had asked staff to let them know when the cleric arrived. The feared security police were known for their ‘black ops’ and dirty tricks aimed at prominent anti-apartheid activists. Later, a mysterious recording of Boesak and Scott talking inside another hotel room, this time at the President Holiday Inn, also found its way to Shafto’s in-tray. Chris, along with then crime reporter Mike Cohen, confronted the security police with the evidence and soon learned that it was indeed they who had sent the evidence to The Star as well as several other newspapers, including the Sunday Times, which, after Boesak had denied the allegations, took it no further.

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