SOUTH AFRICA’S WAR CRIMES

‘Truth’ commission reveals Mandela’s bloody path to power
Published: 07/03/2000 at 1:00 AM

Editor’s note: WorldNetDaily international correspondent Anthony
C. LoBaido has lived and traveled extensively throughout southern Africa
over the past decade. His stories have covered the private apartheid
special forces army

Executive Outcomes, the

war in Angola, and

farm massacres of whites in Zimbabwe. In this first of a three-part series, LoBaido documents the crimes committed by the Marxist African National Congress, or ANC, during its war against the apartheid regime in South Africa. In Part II, tomorrow, LoBaido chronicles the misdeeds of the right wing.

By Anthony Lobaido
© 2000, WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.

South Africa’s

“Truth and Reconciliation Commission” — ostensibly set up to cleanse that nation’s psyche of its tortured past — is finding that the Marxist revolution fought there between 1948 and 1994 witnessed a departure from the normal rules of war by both the communist African National Congress and the Christian, pro-West Afrikaner government.

The TRC’s official goal is to investigate crimes committed by both the Marxist ANC and the right-wing government during the apartheid era. Crimes committed by other groups, including the Inkatha Freedom Party, or by AZAPO, the Azanian People’s Organization, are also being investigated. If those charged with crimes promise to tell all they know to the commission, they can be granted amnesty.

Under ongoing hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the sordid and often macabre blood sport that characterized this war has been leaking out in dribs and drabs to a global audience. Most of those appearing before the TRC can apply for amnesty and escape prosecution if they admit their guilt.

Many have chosen this route and testified against either the Afrikaner apartheid leadership or the African National Congress. Others, like Winnie Mandela, ex-wife of Nelson Mandela, and former South African President P.W. Botha, have maintained their innocence to the very end.

The African National Congress at first denounced a parliamentary bill granting amnesty for those who request it from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The feeling among the ANC was that it would provide a blanket amnesty for the torture and killings conducted by the right. However, as more and more of the ANC’s misdeeds are exposed, some have concluded that the Marxist organization is also in need of blanket amnesty.

The misdeeds of the Soviet-sponsored African National Congress have been well chronicled. It operated under and parallel to the South African Communist Party, established in the early 1920s as the first Communist Party outside the Soviet Union. In fact, the party was set up under the slogan, “Whites of South Africa unite to keep South Africa white.”

Throughout the Cold War, the Russians provided training and advisors to the ANC. Russia sent troops and billions of dollars in arms to fight a war in Angola against the Afrikaners. This was a part of the Brezhnev Doctrine to “seize the strategic mineral treasure chest of Southern Africa and deny these materials to the Western military industrial complex.” These minerals include titanium, used to build fighter jets, and zirconium oxide, a rare commodity used to sheathe nuclear reactor fuel.

The crimes committed by the ANC in the name of liberation are legion. First, there was the practice of “necklacing,” in which a gasoline-filled tire is placed around the neck of a victim and set ablaze — an action carried out by Winnie Mandela and her minions. Another horror was the “Church Street Massacre,” in which Nelson Mandela approved of a bomb set to explode at rush hour to maximize casualties of Afrikaner women, children and babies.

The same Mandela who told the black youth of South Africa to “burn down” their schools has produced a lawless, unemployable generation. Mandela recently traveled to Libya and presented Gadhafi with South Africa’s highest military medal.

More bizarre yet is the saga of

Executive Outcomes, a private army of Afrikaner special forces who fight on behalf of the ANC and Western multinational corporations around the world.

ANC death camps in Angola
Through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the gulags of northern Angola — where the ANC mutilated and tortured cadres who would not go along with the terrorist campaign — have also been brought to light. The ANC has admitted that torture and “staggering brutality” were committed at their Angolan re-education camps in the 1980s and “could have caused prisoner deaths.” In an internal report, the ANC documented 17 eyewitness accounts of detainees who survived the camps.

“The ANC routinely violated its own code of conduct with physical and psychological torture,” said the report. One detainee has written a book about the camps, which he referred to as “a scene from [the film] ‘Spartacus.’”

The report — which was authored by two ANC officials and an independent advocate — did not single out any ANC members responsible directly for torture, although it is believed the late ANC activist Chris Hani was involved. Nelson Mandela has refused to apologize for what he said were “inexcusable” violations of human rights during the ANC’s terror campaign against the white-led regime. Mandela did, however, admit that torture occurred at ANC prisons and camps. But the report now documents that this abuse was widespread and far-reaching. Torture and murder occurred not only in Angola, but also in ANC re-education camps in Uganda and Tanzania.

This report was a major embarrassment to the ANC, which had been lionized in the West for its war to end apartheid and install a supposedly democratic government in South Africa. Detainees recounted in the report that they were tortured for disagreeing with Marxist orthodoxy, refusing to carry out bombings of civilians, being accused of spying, questioning ANC policy, or trying to leave the organization altogether.

Even the late Joe Slovo, a Lithuanian-born KGB colonel and the main leader of the South African Communist Party through the 1980s and early 1990s, said before his death that “it is possible that people died” in the re-education camps.

WorldNetDaily has now had the chance to examine the report, which reads in part:

“The worst conditions were at the Quatro camp in Angola, where guards and medical assistants were universally hostile. The inmates, whether convicted of any offense or not, were denigrated, humiliated and abused, often with staggering brutality. Prisoners were forced to crawl through piles of red ants, thrown down into trenches and then made to crawl out while guards poured dirt into the hole. Others were denied food, water and medical treatment. One prisoner had boiling water poured on his head. His head was then regularly struck against a tree to prevent healing. Prisoners were beaten to force confessions. Some prisoners were executed by firing squads for taking part in mutinies, beaten to death for infractions of military discipline or died of malaria and other illnesses in detention. From the late 1970s until 1991, suspected spies were imprisoned for up to eight years without any hearing, tortured to extract confessions, and beaten with sticks and wires.”

Ironically, the ANC accused the white-led South African police of conducting torture of black cadres in a similar manner.

The report continues: “We were left with an overall impression that for the better part of the ’80s, there existed a situation of extraordinary abuse of power and lack of accountability at the prisons. Order in the exile camps began to break down after the 1976 black student uprising in Soweto, which brought a flood of new and younger volunteers into the guerrilla training centers. Many of the new recruits were poorly educated, impatient to fight, given to drinking and drugs. Some were secret agents sent by the South African police. Thus the ANC gave its security department, called “Mbokodo” [the Xhosa word for “grinding stone”] unchecked power to investigate, judge and punish recruits.”

The panel that compiled the report also learned the names of accused torturers, some of whom still hold posts in the ANC’s security apparatus. The actual names were withheld from the published report, but are known to the ANC hierarchy. Two ANC leaders were directly named, however: Joe Modise, the former head of the ANC’s military wing, and Jacob Zuma, the former ANC secretary general. Neither was accused of torture.

However, Modise was cited as being part of a tribunal that in 1981 improperly arrested Dumisani Khosa, a producer for the ANC’s underground radio station. Khosa was arrested for “complaining about nepotism and sexual harassment” within the ANC. The report states that Khosa was “beaten until he urinated blood, then shipped to the Quatro camp in Angola where he was held for more than three years.”

Others implicated in the report are ANC representatives in Zambia and Uganda, as well as one of Mandela’s former bodyguards.

Rape capital of the world
Media coverage of the new South Africa has been muted at best, rarely focusing on ANC-sponsored anarchy. Indeed, South Africa, once a rich and prosperous pro-West, first-world nation, has decayed into anarchy over the past six years.

There is a rape every 26 seconds — only one in 35 of which is reported. In 1998, the official South African rate was 104.1 rapes per 100,000 people; in the U.S., it was 34.4 per 100,000. The “rape generation” of black males aged 20 to 29 have around a 40-percent HIV infection rate, according to some estimates. Many young blacks erroneously believe that if they rape a virgin, they will be cured of AIDS.

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno has now dispatched FBI officials to help 20 South African courts to train prosecutors and investigators to try sex crimes. Yet there is little evidence that this help from the U.S. Justice Department has made a positive impact. The Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa even banned a television ad against rape because the ad “was deemed to be anti-male.”

Miranda Friedman, a leader of Women Against Child Abuse, said, “We sent 250,000 signatures to the ANC government for stiffening rape sentences, but they still haven’t been implemented.”

“The rape issue is three-fold,” said Narina Van der Merve, an Afrikaner police spokeswoman, in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily. “First, Mandela telling the youth to burn down their schools and not learn Afrikaans. Second, Mandela emptying all the jails of rapists and murderers — this is a classic tool of terror on the populace by communists the world over. Third, the ANC-mandated affirmative action programs.” “Most of the affirmative action-appointed police can’t read or write,” said Van der Merve. “So they can’t even write up a rape report. It’s a bloody joke. We have concluded that one in three women in South Africa will be raped in their lifetime. But I promise you, there is going to be a war in this country. The whites and decent blacks — Zulus, Coloreds and Indians — they are all fed up with the ANC and their Marxist lies. We are already in a war, only it’s the black communists who are killing and raping. But they have woken up the tiger inside the Afrikaner, and there is going to be a big payback for them.”

The case of Amy Biehl
While the crimes of the right wing under apartheid have been for the most part state-orchestrated or carried out by the extreme right wing, the crimes and murders of the left can appear haphazard and disorganized. Unless, of course, they are “framed together in a pattern of Leninist ‘anarcho-tyranny’ to cow the populace into submission,” adds Van der Merve.

There is no greater example of this phenomenon than the murder of a white American college student named Amy Biehl of Newport Beach, Calif. She came to South Africa in the early 1990s to work with blacks and help them prepare for the 1994 elections. She was a Fulbright scholar who lived in a black township and generally interacted with the ANC Marxist cadres in a peaceful manner.

In August of 1993, Biehl was attacked by a group of black youths chanting communist slogans like, “One settler [Afrikaner or Boer farmer], one bullet!” Biehl was stabbed innumerable times and had her head bashed open with bricks.

At the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings, Biehl’s attackers testified about the event. Three of the four youths who testified finally admitted that they were part of the mob that set upon her. A fourth youth, Vusumzi Ntamo, admitted hurling stones at Biehl’s head as she lay dying in a township outside Cape Town.

The youths tried to evade their 18-year jail terms by claiming that the killing was political and not criminal. Ntamo acknowledged that he was too ignorant to understand any political theory.

Biehl’s father, Peter, and mother, Linda, appeared at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission trial and actually shook hands with the murderers of their daughter. Mr. Biehl read a poem to the youths before embracing them. Mongezi Manqina — who admitted he applied the fatal stab wound to Biehl’s chest — wiped away a single tear from his eyes as Mr. Biehl read the poem.

Says Van der Merve, who attended the TRC Hearings on Amy Biehl, “I don’t want to be rude or insensitive, as I would have done anything to prevent this killing. But the Biehl family just doesn’t get it. They are what Lenin would call the ‘useful idiots’ of a Marxist revolution. Their own daughter, the girl they raised from a baby to adulthood, was horribly murdered by these animals, and they just shake the hands of the killers. This is the mentality of the liberals.”

Pauline Naidu, a South African of Indian descent, told WorldNetDaily, “I was attacked by some blacks in Durban at the cash machine. They beat me up horribly. It used to be ‘your money or your life.’ Now it’s ‘your money and your life.’ It’s just madness. Still, I wasn’t raped or shot — so I am thankful.”

The master plan
Many whites have fled South Africa during the last six years of ANC rule — almost one-third, according to some statistics. Nelson Mandela has pleaded with whites to stay in the country, and even begged for those who left to live in Canada, Israel and New Zealand to return to help rebuild the nation.

In recent weeks, current South African President Thabo Mbeki (who admits he grew up memorizing the works of Karl Marx) has announced that South Africa has formed an alliance with communist China. For decades, South Africa had helped Taiwan, but last year, Mandela switched official recognition from Taiwan to China. Mbeki has applauded the seizures of white-owned farms in neighboring Zimbabwe, even as ANC black revolutionary cadres step up their terror campaign against white farmers in South Africa. His communist flank secure, Mbeki recently announced in a speech to parliament that he is effectively handing over control of South Africa’s economy to international financier George Soros and a group of 12 Western transnational corporations.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2000/07/5704/#haD2eL1DSebK5QAW.99