Stratcom insider lifts the lid on apartheid atrocities

• Published date: 06 November 2021
• Publication title: Saturday Star

Excerpt

PERHAPS it shouldn’t have been so, but the story that made the headlines in the 1970s was not the one of the sexual abuse and violence towards conscripts. It was the elephants. The media at the time alleged that senior politicians, MI and police were involved in the wholesale killing of elephants. Horrified by these deaths, Beyers had faithfully committed that to paper too.

One day, a vehicle pulled up outside the SAP post and a very drunk General Lothar Neethling, Chief Deputy Commissioner of the SAP, stormed into Beyers’s house and demanded fresh meat, biltong, alcohol – and the dockets relating to both the rapes and the elephants. Beyers did not co-operate.

Neethling, who was later to head the SAP forensic science department and earn notoriety as the go-to man for poisons to be used against activists and enemies of the state, stood up to Beyers’s defiance. A furious exchange took place, during which Beyers told Neethling to get out of his house or he would open fire.

Beyers’s next visitor, a few days later, was Colonel Ogies Viljoen, who had been sent from the Security Branch (SB) Head Office to sort out this upstart sergeant. Once again, Beyers refused to comply with the order to close the cases, even when Viljoen told Beyers he was “destroying SAP-SADF relations” and could, in fact, pose a serious threat to the good name of the SADF. He said Beyers had no right to “interfere” in what were internal matters – matters that should be dealt with by the Military Police.

Beyers stayed on for a while, determined to stick to his guns, contending that he had taken an oath that superseded any other considerations. He refused to be bullied by anyone to close the dockets, to get rid of evidence or “forget about what happened”. The threats, however, became impossible, relentless and more ruthless. Eventually, Beyers was compelled to accept a transfer to John Vorster Square, where he was overlooked time and again for promotion.

Nannie disobeyed direct orders from an SAP general to throw hand grenades at Uniformed SAP Radio Branch members – another example of the many false flag orders we were given. In another incident, Nannie and I were ordered to kill an SAP station commander. It was Nannie who took the initiative and refused this order, as the officer issuing the instruction was drunk and we ignored the obvious lunacy of the command.

Beyers is dead now, lost to the post-traumatic stress disorder and depression that took him to his early grave. Like me and...