ANC Discloses Past Evils

The ruling African National Congress admitted to South Africa's truth commission today that it tortured and executed renegade militants in its war on apartheid and that, in the 1980s, it drew up plans for a car-bomb killing of the entire white-minority cabinet.

Delivering an encyclopedic document with an unprecedented degree of disclosure about the movement's anti-government guerrilla campaign, Deputy President Thabo Mbeki told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the ANC is sorry for the human rights abuses it committed during the underground struggle. Citing the repression under which the ANC operated and the problem it faced from government infiltrators, Mbeki said the pressures of the times resulted in some abuses in an otherwise "just war" that enjoyed the moral support of the United Nations.

The ANC submitted the statement a day after Frederick W. de Klerk, the last apartheid president, formally apologized to the commission for the pain and suffering caused by his National Party's racial separation policies, which were the law of South Africa from 1948 to 1994. But unlike the ANC, de Klerk's party detailed none of the abuses it is believed to have committed and refused to take blame for the brutalities that were hallmarks of apartheid-era security forces, including assassinations and torture.

The ANC accused de Klerk's party today of continuing its violent covert operations during a period of democratic reform in the early 1990s and said de Klerk and his colleagues "have the responsibility to inform the nation" of such covert programs. The ANC also called for a new investigation into the death of ANC leader Chris Hani, who was assassinated in 1993. New information, Mbeki said, suggests that Hani may have been killed by government agents.

The ANC document was a dissertation on the history of apartheid and the ANC's campaign against it.

That campaign included sabotage and bombings, a code of conduct within the ranks, and underground organizing in exile camps as well as in black townships that had been rendered chaotic by poverty and state repression. But the torture of suspected spies in ANC camps, the "necklace" burnings of suspected informants in townships and civilian deaths in ANC bombings never were part of party policy, the ANC said.

To demonstrate the point, the party revealed that its leaders rejected a 1981 plan devised by party reconnaissance units that wanted to blow up the cabinet of then-President P.W. Botha. The party said it feared civilians also would be killed.

"The ANC highly regrets the excesses that occurred," Mbeki told the truth commission. "Further, we do acknowledge that the real threat we faced and the difficult condition[s] under which we had to operate led to a drift in accountability and control away from established norms, resulting in situations in which some individuals within the [ANC] security department started to behave as a law unto themselves."

Mbeki, who is a strong favorite to succeed President Nelson Mandela in 1999, delivered the ANC document to the truth commission, which is investigating human rights violations on both sides of the conflict in an effort to foster healing in a nation still fraught with deep racial and socioeconomic divisions. The commission, established by the ANC, has garnered little support from whites, while thousands of blacks have turned out to tell their stories of apartheid-era abuse or simply to listen and show moral support.

The panel, headed by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is to apportion reparation to victims and amnesties to perpetrators and to compile an official history of the nation's trek from racial repression to majority rule. The ANC won the nation's first all-races elections in 1994.

Although "transparency" is touted as a central tenant of the new government, Mbeki and others tried earlier this year to muzzle party leaders who planned to testify before the truth commission, saying they should clear their statements with the party first. Tutu has criticized the ANC for contradicting the spirit of openness and truth-telling that is supposed to define the commission.

The ANC apology today was not its first. In response to a 1993 commission of inquiry, which found that human rights violations had occurred in some ANC camps in Angola, the party took responsibility for the abuses and said they should not have occurred. Today, the ANC said it executed 34 people in the camps after military tribunals found them guilty of spying or mutiny. But the commission that investigated the camp abuses said only that security guards killed 16 suspected spies, most by beating. No commanders were disciplined.

Now that the ANC is South Africa's ruling party, some of its former military leaders are high-level officials in the government, such as Defense Minister Joe Modise, who headed the ANC's armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation). Modise said recently that he will ask the truth commission for amnesty. Others will as well, the ANC said today. Amnesty applications -- which require full disclosure -- thus far have been the preserve mostly of anxious apartheid-era security agents who fear prosecution.