Dr Death and Prime Evil

TWO decades into South Africa’s democracy, several of its most notorious apartheid-era killers are bidding for freedom. As The Economist went to press, Michael Masutha, the country’s justice and correctional services minister, was due to announce whether to grant parole to several notable white convicts.

One is Ferdi Barnard, who was sentenced in 1998 to two life terms and a further 63 years in jail for the murder of David Webster, an anti-apartheid campaigner whom he shot dead at close range.

Another is Clive Derby-Lewis, a right-wing politician whose lawyers say he suffers from terminal lung cancer. He was convicted of assisting in the 1993 murder of Chris Hani, a popular leader of the South African Communist Party and rising star of the liberation movement.

By far the biggest name on the list is Eugene de Kock, who is also known as “Prime Evil”. Mr de Kock was the commander of a notorious death squad in the 1980s known as C10. He and his team kidnapped, tortured and killed black anti-apartheid activists from a secret base on Vlakplaas, a farm near Pretoria. The bodies of his victims were burned in pyres of wood and car tyres while the assassins stood around drinking and cooking meat in a grim parody of South Africa’s famed braai, or barbecue. In 1996 Mr de Kock was sentenced to 212 years’ imprisonment and two life sentences for 87 crimes.

Many South Africans recoil at the thought of Mr de Kock and the others being released. Indeed it is a daunting prospect for a country much changed, but still deeply scarred, by the years of racist white rule.

Mr de Kock has, however, received support from unlikely corners. The widows of some of his black victims have backed his release, and previously requested he receive a presidential pardon. They argue that Mr de Kock is one of the very few apartheid figures to have served jail-time after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) ruled his crimes were not politically motivated. (Mr de Kock argues that he was merely a policeman following orders from his superiors.) From his cell he has tried to atone by volunteering information to families of victims, and has helped to find the bodies of missing anti-apartheid activists. Twice late last year he accompanied investigators to a river bank near Zeerust, north-west of Johannesburg, to locate the shallow grave of Phemelo Ntehelang, a young African National Congress (ANC) fighter who was captured and turned into a police informer. Mr de Kock had had him beaten with a snooker cue and smothered out of “pure rage”.

There are no apartheid politicians from the 1980s in jail. An underlying feeling persists among some South Africans that the architects of the apartheid system, those who gave orders to Mr de Kock and his ilk, simply got away with their crimes. Such a sentiment is evident in the ANC’s outcry over a recent decision by Cape Town to rename Table Bay Boulevard, one of the city’s arteries, after F. W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president. Although de Klerk shared a Nobel peace prize with Nelson Mandela after negotiating the white minority out of power, he is viewed by some as an “accident of history”—an apartheid stalwart who happened to be in power when the writing was on the wall.

In contrast to the conviction of Mr de Kock stands the bizarre case of Wouter Basson (pictured), a medical doctor who ran the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme. Nicknamed “Dr Death” by newspapers, he was granted immunity for many crimes because they allegedly took place outside South Africa. As Dr Death he allegedly provided cyanide capsules to soldiers, and tried to develop bacteria that would selectively kill black people, as well as vaccines to make black women infertile. He continued to practice as a cardiologist in Cape Town and only now faces being struck off the doctors’ register, having been found guilty in 2013 of unprofessional conduct by a practitioners’ council.

That some of apartheid’s killers are free yet vilified, while others are jailed yet now championed by their victims, points to the value of the TRC. Flawed as it was, it produced some reconciliation, if at the cost of rather less justice.