Mass graves: SA pledges help

2005-11-15 18:00

Cape Town - The defence department will co-operate with the Namibian government in uncovering the truth about two mass graves recently discovered there, said defence deputy minister Mluleki George on Tuesday.

"The only weakness... is that some of the people mentioned (in connection with this) are no longer with the department of defence. "But, we will assist in whatever way required."

George was responding in the national assembly to a call by an African National Congress MP for anyone with information about the graves near the apartheid-era South African military base, Eenhana, about 850km northeast of Windhoek, to "reveal the truth".

"I want also to assure this house and the people of South Africa that the present department of defence will never engage itself in such acts of barbarity," said George.

The base was home to the SA Army's 54 battalion during the latter part of the 1966-1989 border war.

Number of bodies unknown

The bones are thought to be those of fighters from the South-West African People's Organisation's military wing, Plan, who may have been killed in the so-called nine-day war in April 1989.

Construction workers discovered a first mass grave containing human bones and ammunition 400m from the base on Thursday.

With the exhumation of the grave still in progress, it is not known how many bodies the grave contained.

Several hundred Plan cadres were killed in the nine days after April 1 1989, just before United Nations peacekeepers formally took over from the old SA Defence Force.

The Namibian government has asked the SA National Defence Force to shed light on the graves to speed up identification.

The then-defence minister Magnus Malan joined former SADF chief Constand Viljoen in denying any knowledge of the mass graves on Monday.

- SAPA