MANY of our most toxic secrets from the apartheid past are still buried in files. Yet ironically – and tragically – our new “liberation” rulers seem almost as dedicated as South Africa’s depraved ancien regime to keeping these secret police files as far from the public gaze as possible.
“The major reason, I think, has to do with cultures of secrecy,” says Verne Harris, director of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory. “There is a deadly mix of old apartheid personnel – there are still many strong pockets of them – mixing with the culture of secrecy associated with the liberation underground and exile. There’s a meeting of minds between those old and new spooks.”
Intelligence agencies of the democratic era have played a cat and mouse game for years now with researchers over the whereabouts, even the existence, of apartheid-era security documents. In many instances, they have simply lied. “The recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee was for an archival audit, but that never happened, so we simply don’t know what documents are out there”, says Piers Pigou, director of the South African History Archive. “But we have been able to establish that the military withheld 90 per cent of their documents from the TRC, and we found that out entirely by mistake. We asked for three file series that we knew about and a clerk unwittingly replied: “No, we have 42 file series’.”
Vast quantities of incriminating state records were shredded or incinerated in the dying days of apartheid. In his book Unfinished Business – South Africa, Apartheid and Truth, Terry Bell states: “In little more than six months in 1993, while political parties of the apartheid state negotiated with the representatives of the liberation movements, some 44 metric tons of records from the National Intelligence Service alone were destroyed. There was so much material that state incinerators could not cope; the furnaces of private companies, such as steel maker, Iscor, had also to be used. Into these flames disappeared the last vestiges of the voices of thousands of victims.”
Grotesquely, the old regime was not the only authority prepared to obliterate precious documentary records from our recent past. “In 1996, I was part of a team that walked into a room where both old and new spooks were systematically destroying records of the old Bophuthatswana Intelligence Service”, recalls Verne Harris. “That was a year after Nelson Mandela had ordered a moratorium on destroying documents.”
The sad truth is that both old and new bosses have a vested interest in keeping the past hidden. There will be extremely compromising information in those files – not just about the nefarious activities of apartheid officials, but revelations about the ambiguous role of some liberation “heroes” as well.
So today when South African politicians pontificate about the need to learn from our tortuous past, their dedication to this admirable proposition is often highly selective. The paranoia within the ANC, especially in exile, is well documented. Partly as a result of this failure to open up that past, the ANC still seethes with suspicion and paranoia.
Other countries, mostly former Soviet Union satellites in eastern Europe, faced similar dilemmas. Some, concerned not to destabilise national reconciliation, kept their secret police files closed for years. Yet this frequently led to a proliferation of rumour and smears. Eventually, most former Soviet satellites opened up secret records under a process known as “lustration”, from the Latin word for ritual purification.
The problem, clearly, is how far can any secret police document be trusted?
Personal files that have come to light in South Africa reveal some of the crudity and ignorance of security police judgments. One friend, the late journalist Barry Streek, accessed his own record (File 3016), to discover a 1971 recommendation, signed by the Minister of Justice, urging that he be restricted without delay. This was on the basis that: “Streek is clearly a supporter of communism. His whole ideology is one of opposition to and the undermining of the current authority.”
In addition to suspect, unnamed sources, however, there are also the dubious motives of the security handlers themselves. There is always a temptation to build up a case (and their own reputation), not to mention the possibility of personal animus. In former Soviet satellites, it has been shown that, as Communist regimes crumbled, secret police deliberately and maliciously placed “poison pills” in dissidents’ file, knowing that later this could ruin their reputations.
The first, most complete, revelations were from East German Stasi files. A major reason for this is that the collapse of the East German regime was rapid and total. West Germany took over; it was like a successful invasion. In most other countries, South Africa included, there’s been a more fraught transition: many sensitivities – and therefore secrets – had to be balanced and placated.
Yet how can we continue, 15 years after our first democratically elected government, to accept this protracted silence about so many apartheid-era documents?
