washingtonpost.com: Key Witness Backs Madikizela-Mandela

Key Witness Backs Madikizela-Mandela

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 2, 1997; Page A22

Albertina Sisulu, a respected veteran of South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, gave surprise testimony to the nation's truth commission today that supported Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as she faces allegations of criminal activity during the late 1980s.

At the same time, Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of President Nelson Mandela, came under fire from truth panelists for threats that she or her supporters allegedly made to witnesses testifying against her. One witness successfully demanded protection for his family before he would give testimony, in which he claimed that Madikizela-Mandela hired him to kill a prominent doctor who allegedly had damaging information about her involvement in the beating of a teenage boy.

These unexpected events marked the sixth day of politically divisive and emotionally charged hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1995 to probe human rights abuses committed during the apartheid era by the white-minority government and its opponents. Over the past week, the commission has turned its attention to Madikizela-Mandela's alleged involvement in murders and other abuses committed by her bodyguards in the latter years of the fight to bring down apartheid. These events have haunted her political career for a decade, despite her continued denials of a role in any atrocities.

While her famous husband was serving 27 years of political imprisonment, Madikizela-Mandela was a defining figure of the anti-apartheid struggle. But she was surrounded by a brutal entourage, known euphemistically as the Mandela United Football Club, comprising loyal but wayward youths, members of the military wing of the anti-apartheid movement and spies injected into the club by the white government.

After a week of testimony that the truth panel's deputy chairman, Alex Boraine, characterized as "lots of lies, half-lies, half-truths and truth," today's hearing centered on a figure who was expected to lend her untarnished stature to the search for the truth about Madikizela-Mandela.

Truth commissioners anticipated that Sisulu, a staunch anti-apartheid campaigner, would shed credible light on Madikizela-Mandela's whereabouts at the time of two of the most infamous crimes committed in the black township of Soweto in the late 1980s. Madikizela-Mandela has been implicated in both crimes: her bodyguards' December 1988 abduction and beating of four youthful activists, including 14-year-old Moeketsi "Stompie" Seipei, who was stabbed to death; and the shooting death that month of a prominent Soweto physician, Abu Baker Asvat. Sisulu was the nursing assistant in Asvat's Soweto office.

But instead of refuting Madikizela-Mandela's alibi at the time of the Seipei beating -- as she had in a television interview this year -- Sisulu shocked the truth commission by contradicting herself and supporting Madikizela-Mandela.

Katiza Cebekhulu, a member of Madikizela-Mandela's so-called football club and now one of her chief accusers, claims she took him to Asvat's office on Dec. 30, 1988, one of two days on which Seipei was beaten. Her presence in Asvat's office that day would prove that she was in Soweto at the time of the Seipei beating and not in a small town several hours' drive away, as she claimed during her 1991 trial for the boy's kidnapping, for which she was convicted.

In a BBC interview broadcast in September, Sisulu appeared to strike a blow at Madikizela-Mandela's alibi when she identified a doctor's appointment card on which she had recorded a Dec. 30, 1988, visit by Cebekhulu to Asvat's office.

But today, Sisulu said the handwriting on the appointment card was not hers. "I usually don't print when I write," she insisted.

She could not explain why she had given a different story to the BBC. She also said she had never seen Cebekhulu at the doctor's office and that, while it was possible that Madikizela-Mandela was in the doctor's office on the day in question, she did not see her.

Sisulu also contradicted Cebekhulu's testimony placing Madikizela-Mandela in Asvat's office having a loud argument with the doctor on Jan. 27, 1989, the day Asvat was shot to death. Sisulu said she did not see Madikizela-Mandela on that day and did not hear any such argument.

But Dumisa Ntsebeza, a truth panelist, suggested to Sisulu that she was following a code of ethics from the anti-apartheid struggle by which a comrade must be protected. Sisulu and Madikizela-Mandela had much in common: Like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, husband to Albertina, had been a political prisoner for decades.

Ntsebeza asked: "Can it be, if I am right, that you are trying your very, very best to say as little as possible about your comrade that might implicate her?"

Sisulu took offense. "I am not here to tell lies," she said. "Dr. Asvat was my child." She earlier had described her relationship with him as that of a mother.

That exchange set the tone of a day filled with confusion. At one stage, six young men dressed in battle fatigues and red berets paraded into the hall where the hearings are being held. One said in a brief interview -- before being silenced by his fellows -- that the six were actually former members of the armed wing of the now-ruling African National Congress. He said they had come to support Madikizela-Mandela.

Their presence electrified the atmosphere inside the hearing room. Witnesses claimed, through their lawyers, that these men and perhaps others in the audience were former members of Madikizela-Mandela's now-defunct bodyguard troop. Their presence, these witnesses said, was in itself a threat.

Cyril Mbatha, serving a life sentence for Asvat's murder, said through his lawyer that his family was in the hall to hear his testimony, but that he could not give it without a pledge by the truth commission that his family would be protected after he had spoken. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of the truth body, promised protection would be provided.

Mbatha's lawyer claimed he had received telephoned death threats at home, and a truth commission investigator said that a witness told him he had been contacted by Madikizela-Mandela. Her lawyer denied the allegation.

When he took the stand, Mbatha said Madikizela-Mandela had offered him the equivalent of $8,000 to kill Asvat and that she provided a weapon for the deed. However, Mbatha has told different versions of events in previous statements.

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