Complete Dissertation

VU Research Portal Itineraries Rousseau, N. 2019 document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record <a href="/goto?url=https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/7dba2b00-adfd-4066-9e99-78c2857d1ae5" target="_blank">Link to publication in VU Research Portal </a>citation for published version (APA) Rousseau, N. (2019). Itineraries: A return to the archives of the South African truth commission and the limits of counter-revolutionary warfare. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. E-mail address: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" target="_blank">[email protected] </a>Download date: 09. Oct. 2021 VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT Itineraries A return to the archives of the South African truth commission and the limits of counter-revolutionary warfare ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad Doctor aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, op gezag van de rector magnificus prof.dr. V. Subramaniam, in het openbaar te verdedigen ten overstaan van de promotiecommissie van de Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen op woensdag 20 maart 2019 om 15.45 uur in de aula van de universiteit, De Boelelaan 1105 door Nicky Rousseau geboren te Dundee, Zuid-Afrika <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">promotoren: </li><li style="flex:1">prof.dr. S. Legêne </li></ul>prof.dr. P. Hayes Itineraries A return to the archives of the South African truth commission and the limits of counter-revolutionary warfare Nicky Rousseau Contents Acknowledgements Abstract ii iii <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Abbreviations </li><li style="flex:1">iv </li></ul><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Preface </li><li style="flex:1">1</li></ul>Introduction: Itineraries Chapter 1: Grids of Intelligibility 18 63 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">109 </li><li style="flex:1">Chapter 2: Truth Commissions and Interpretations of Violence: </li></ul>Debating the TRC’s Mandate <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Chapter 3: Uncertain Borders: </li><li style="flex:1">138 </li></ul>177 The TRC and the (Un)making of Public Myths Chapter 4: Counter-Revolutionary Warfare: The Soweto Intelligence Unit and Southern Itineraries <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Chapter 5: The Body and Counter-Revolutionary Warfare </li><li style="flex:1">212 </li></ul><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">238 </li><li style="flex:1">Chapter 6: The Farm, the River and the Picnic Spot: </li></ul>Topographies of Terror Chapter 7: Identification, Politics, Disciplines Conclusions and Future Itineraries References Cited 269 302 335 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">365 </li><li style="flex:1">Summary </li></ul>iAcknowledgements Intellectual debts are many, and too vast to name. I have been fortunate to have had the privilege of working in the History Department of the University of the Western Cape, both prior to and after the period spent at the TRC, and to have been closely associated with the Centre of Humanities Research since its inception. Colleagues, graduate students, travellers and passers-through in both of these spaces have provided challenging, sometimes skull-cracking, intellectual and political provocations and learning. My colleagues in the History Department generously supported my frequent straying back to post-TRC work in the Missing Persons Task Team and later the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Nonetheless, they never relented on their quest to persuade me to ‘do that Ph.D.’ I hope this portfolio, together with the way in which my itinerant straying has developed into wider graduate research in the department, goes someway to repaying a debt of generosity. The TRC is so discredited in the scholarly and public worlds, which I inhabit, that it may be surprising to insist that I regard the tumultuous time I spent inside the TRC as among the most valued of my working life. In those six years I was part of an extremely fractious, inexcusably hierarchical, but highly committed community that was, in equal parts, both maddening and extraordinary. The intensity of the environment and passion of colleagues at the TRC sparked many of the thoughts and arguments here, while my subsequent work with the Missing Persons Task Team took me into new realms of thinking, and ultimately research. My encounter with the practices of exhumation and the affective presence of the remains themselves provoked new questions and sent me along different paths of reading and writing. Traveling these paths has been immeasurably enriched through the work and contributions of graduate students, and colleagues, most especially over the past few years in the NRF Forensic History project, which serendipitously landed on my doorstep. To all my colleagues and friends in these very different spaces, my debt is huge. The NRF Forensic History project also enabled some of my research travels. Finally, my thanks to Susan Legêne and Patricia Hayes for generously acting as promotors, despite labouring far too long and hard in their own projects. The task was lightened by their warmth and humour. ii Abstract This portfolio of articles draws on the work and archives of the TRC. Turning away from the dominant TRC literature which centres on questions of reconciliation and nation-building, I turn to what may be called the ‘truth seeking’ aspect of its mandate, an aspect that I argue dominated the actual day to day work of the TRC. In doing so, I turn to a particular strand of TRC research and investigation, namely that focused on the apartheid security force and intelligence service. I provide an account of how the TRC security force archive, or rather archives, were constituted and made sense of — processes in which I was deeply implicated. Using these archives, I then examine a very particular period, namely 1985-1989, in which security strategies and tactics adopted in the Southern African region as part of the apartheid state’s ‘proactive defence’ strategy were adopted through a policy of counter-revolutionary warfare to deal with internal political resistance. Through a re-reading of the TRC’s security force archives, filtered through the illegal practices of security branch operatives with a strong focus on that of ‘disappearing’ political opponents, I argue that the shift to counter-revolutionary warfare, rather than demonstrating the power of apartheid state makes visible its limits. This contests public and scholarly accounts of this period, as well as questions the forms of post-apartheid memorialisation. I conclude that the war did not ‘come home’ in the way it has been imagined; rather it was always the Southern African region that bore the brunt of this war. Finally, I suggest that a return to the archives of the TRC, in a mode less concerned with fixing it in its reconciliatory guise, may open other new and productive readings, not just of its truth-telling work but of the possibilities and limits of truth commissions themselves. iii Abbreviations AAAS AC ACDP ADM ANC American Association of Advanced Sciences Amnesty Committee African Christian Democratic Party African Democratic Movement African National Congress APDUSA APLA ARM AWB African Peoples Democratic Union of South Africa Azanian People’s Liberation Army African Resistance Movement Afrikaner Weerbestandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) AVF Afrikaner Volksfront (Afrikaner People’s Front) Azanian Liberation Army Azanian People’s Organisation Azanian Students Congress Azanian Students Movement Azanian Students Organisation Black Consciousness AZANLA AZAPO AZASCO AZASM AZASO BC BCMSA BNP BPP Black Consciousness Movement of South Africa Basotho National Party Botswana People’s Party CBW CCB Chemical Biological Warfare, Civil Cooperation Bureau CODESA COSAS CDF Convention for a Democratic South Africa Congress of South African Students Ciskei Defence Force CP CSV CSVR DIS GVHR EAAF Conservative Party Centre for the Study of Violence Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation Department of Internal Security Gross Violations of Human Rights Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense) HNP HRV HRVC IBIIR IDASA IFP Herstigte Nasionale Party (Reconstituted National Party) Human Rights Violation Human Rights Violation Committee Independent Board of Inquiry into Informal Repression Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa Inkatha Freedom Party International Centre for Transitional Justice International Monetary Fund ICTJ IMF IU JMC Investigation Unit Joint Management Committees <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">KIK </li><li style="flex:1">Koordineerde Inligtings Komitee (Coordinating Intelligence </li></ul>Committee) iv KZP LLA KwaZulu Police Lesotho Liberation Army <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">MDM </li><li style="flex:1">Mass Democratic Movement </li></ul><ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">MK </li><li style="flex:1">Umkhonto we Sizwe </li></ul>Missing Persons Task Team National Congress of Trade Unions National Intelligence Agency (post 1994) National Front MPTT NACTU NIA NF NIS NP National Intelligence Service National Party <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">NPA </li><li style="flex:1">National Prosecuting Authority </li></ul>National Security Management System Office for Serious Economic Offences Pan Africanist Congress NSMS OSEO PAC PAM PASO PCLU RENAMO SACP SADF SAHA SANDF SAP SAPS SAIRR SAYCO SAYRCO SDU Pan African Movement Pan African Students Organisation Priority Crimes Litigation Unit Mozambican National Resistance South African Communist Party South African Defence Force South African History Archive South African National Defence Force (post 1994) South African Police South African Police Service (post 1994) South African Institute of Race Relations South African Youth Congress South African Youth Revolutionary Council Self Defence Unit SIU SPU Soweto Intelligence Unit Self-Protection Unit <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">SSC </li><li style="flex:1">State Security Council </li></ul>Secretariat of the SSC South West African People's Organisation Treatment Action Committee SSSC SWAPO TAC TDF TNV TRC TREWITS Transkei Defence Force Nasionale Vertolkings Tak (National Interpretation Branch) Truth and Reconciliation Commission Teen-Rewolusionêre Inligtings Teiken Sentrum (CounterRevolutionary Intelligence Target Centre) Tak Stratkom (Stratcom Branch) Totale Strategie Tak (Total Strategy Branch) United Democratic Front TSK TTS UDF UNITA UWC UWUSA VTP WISER ZANU ZAPU National Union for the Total Independence of Angola University of the Western Cape United Workers Union of South Africa Violence and Transition Project Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research Zimbabwe African National Union Zimbabwe African Peoples Union vPreface Preface 1Preface I had wanted to write from within instead of standing outside pointing. This is not so much autobiography or what is sometimes called selfreflexiveness, though there is plenty of that and necessarily so because the anthropologist is inevitably part of the reality analyzed. It is more like having the reality depicted turn back on the writing, rather than on the writer, and ask for a fair shake. “What have you learned?” the reality asks of the writing. “What remains as an excess that cannot be assimilated and what are you going to do with the gift I bestow, I who am such strange stuff?”’ Michael Taussig1 Locations The body of work presented here spans a decade of writing from different intellectual locations. The first two chapters, which focus on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), were very much situated as an insider of the TRC; the remaining four, on counter-revolutionary warfare and the politics of dead bodies, were written as a scholar in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). If the institutional location of the TRC marked, perhaps even over-determined the former, my work with the Missing Person’s Task Team (MPTT), between 2004 and 2008/9, strongly influenced the latter. Nonetheless, the TRC threads through all of the chapters in one way or another. 1 Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. vii-viii. 2Preface The TRC, one of the early initiatives of South Africa’s first post-democracy government, was constituted in late 1995, after a long and fractious parliamentary debate, and finally closed its doors in early 2002,2 close to three and a half years later than originally envisaged. Its creation arose from what many South Africans regard as a ‘devil’s pact’: South Africa’s transition to democracy came at the cost of holding off fundamental socio-economic transformation, as well as an agreement that, in the interests of ‘reconciliation and reconstruction…. amnesty [would] be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past.’ 3 Like Taussig’s ‘devil’s contract,’ where wealth was granted, but only for luxury goods, while the land dried up and the pigs ‘[wasted] away to skin and bone,’ 4 many South Africans today regard ‘freedom’ — the right to vote — as something of a useless luxury good in the face of unremitting inequality. And many will say that not only do the ‘devils’ continue to accumulate wealth and live off the fat of the land, but their soldiers and police also received amnesty for torture and killing. In an attempt to ameliorate this latter injustice, and in an international context of ‘transitioning states’ associated with a growing appetite for forms of accounting and accountability, the African National Congress (ANC) proposed a process in which amnesty would be combined with a truth commission. Thus while perpetrators could receive amnesty, this would happen in a context in which ‘the human and civil dignity’ of victims would be restored ‘by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of the violations of which they are the victims’5 and those declared victims would receive some form of reparation. While reconciliation, national unity and reconstruction had framed the amnesty section in South Africa’s Interim Constitution, only reconciliation and national 2 The TRC was dissolved on 31 March 2002. 3 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, Act 200 of 1993, <a href="/goto?url=http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/legal/sacon93.htm" target="_blank">http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/legal/sacon93.htm </a>accessed 14 December 2017. 4 Michael Taussig, 'The Sun Gives Without Receiving' in Walter Benjamin’s Grave, p. 70. 5 Section 3 (1) (c) Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, 34 of 1995, <a href="/goto?url=http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/1995-034.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/1995-034.pdf </a>accessed 14 December 2017. Hereafter referred to as TRC Act. 3Preface unity survived in the final act, named the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act.6 This genealogy of a truth commission springing not from a demand for truth, but from a ‘devil’s pact’ of amnesty, had a doubled effect. Crucially the leadership of the security forces, not apartheid functionaries, had driven the demand for indemnity/amnesty,7 accordingly rather than the crime of apartheid being placed at the centre of the truth commission, it was violence associated with the struggle to defend or to end apartheid that assumed centre stage. Thus, rather than 1948 when the National Party (NP) came to power, marking the official implementation of apartheid, the TRC’s mandate begins in March 1960, following the banning of key political movements8 and it ends on 10 May 1994, the formal inauguration of the new democratic government.9 I joined the TRC as a full-time national researcher in September 1996, and together with the late John Daniel, my brief until November 1998 was to focus exclusively on security policy and state repression. Specifically this meant that between us, we were responsible for researching security policy and structures as well as gross violations of human rights committed by security force operatives during the TRC mandate period. While Daniel, a professor of political studies seconded from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and a former exile, was 6TRC Act. 7 As Andre du Toit points out these terms tended to be used interchangeably. See Andre du Toit, 'ANC Amnesty Narratives: The Myth of Mandela’s (Secret) Amnesty Deal with ‘the Generals’ in Exchange for Protecting the Founding Democratic Election,' seminar paper, South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar, University of the Western Cape, October 2015. See also Adam Sitze, The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 8 The apartheid government banned the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan African Congress (PAC) and the Congress of Democrats (COD) on 8 April 1960. The bannings followed anti-pass protests and the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, in which the police shot dead 69 people, injuring many more. These events are widely understood to have led to the later decision by the ANC and PAC to turn to forms of armed struggle. The choice of March 1960 as the beginning of the TRC’s mandate period thus serves to signal that it was to the violations arising from the struggle to overthrow or defend apartheid, rather than apartheid itself, that its work should be directed. For the TRC’s discussion on its choice between a wider focus on apartheid and a narrower definition focused on political violence see TRC, Truth and Reconciliation of South Africa Report, Volume One (Cape Town: Juta, 1998), pp.60-65, hereafter referred to as TRC, Report. 9 The legislation initially specified the mandate period to end on 5 December 1993, the date on which the Interim Constitution formally came into effect, but later revised this to 10 May 1994, the inauguration of the first democratic government. 4Preface responsible for security force violations outside South Africa, my recruitment to the TRC filled a slot that curiously no researcher had volunteered for — namely, the apartheid state’s security forces with particular reference to its violations of human rights inside South Africa. This, of course, was something of an absurd division, as the two were hopelessly entangled.10 Our work also overlapped considerably with regional researchers, whose responsibilities included mapping gross human rights abuse in the different provinces of apartheid South Africa,11 as well as investigators, particularly in the Investigation Unit’s (IU) Analysis Unit. Research included the archives generated through the Amnesty and Human Rights Violations (HRV) committees, the IU, as well as extant archival holdings.12 Daniel and I were involved in research for, and participation in, several key hearings concerning security policies and practice, as well as follow up questions to formal submissions, including those of the National Party (NP), former state president, P.W. Botha, and the former South African Defence Force (SADF), as the TRC sought to determine issues of accountability for human rights violations. We were also part of a smaller team of researchers responsible exclusively for Volumes Two and Three, and individual chapters in Volumes One and Five, as well as formulating many of the findings included in the five-volume report handed to the president in October 1998. Following the October 1998 report handover,13 Madeleine Fullard and I were the 10 Nonetheless, this division ensured a steady and consistent research focus on the ‘external theatre’: while the TRC’s mandate specifically included violations outside South Africa, neighbouring countries showed little enthusiasm for such an inquiry, thus foreclosing the possibilities of investigations and hearings taking place outside South Africa’s borders. 11 The TRC had four regional offices: Cape Town, East London, Durban and Johannesburg. Regional researchers in Cape Town were responsible for the former Cape Province; East London for the Eastern Province and the former Ciskei and Transkei bantustans; Durban for Natal, the KwaZulu and QwaQwa bantustans, and the Orange Free State; Johannesburg for the former Transvaal, and Bophutatswana, KwaNdebele, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, Lebowa and Venda bantustans. 12 The structure of the TRC was bifurcated: the main body, headed by Archbishop Tutu and comprising 17 commissioners, consisted of two committees, the Human Rights Violations Committee and the Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee; the Amnesty Committee, independent from the main body, was headed by Judge Mall, and consisted of judges and lawyers.

Complete Dissertation

Details

Download

Copyright

We respect the copyrights and intellectual property rights of all users. All uploaded documents are either original works of the uploader or authorized works of the rightful owners.

Support