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'Drop the charges, or else...'
29/07/2007 19:37 - (SA)
Marthinus van Vuuren, Rapport
Johannesburg - A man who lost three family members in a landmine explosion in 1985, says he may lay a charge against the then ANC leaders who ordered the attack.
If he goes that route, various high-ranking ANC politicians will be in the same boat as former minister Adriaan Vlok and ex-police chief Johann van der Merwe, who are scheduled to appear in court on August 17 in connection with an attack they ordered during the apartheid years.
Dirk van Eck, 58, and his son Erick, 22, have sent a letter to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) asking for the case against Vlok and Van der Merwe to be withdrawn.
Families were ripped apart
If it is not withdrawn, they have requested that the ANC leaders who ordered Operation Kletswayo - the landmine explosion in which members of the Van Eck and De Nysschen families were ripped apart on a private game farm in Limpopo - should be similarly charged.
Three members of the Van Eck family and another three people were killed while on a game-viewing drive on the Chatsworth game farm 25km west of Musina on December 15 1985.
Van Eck's wife Kobie, 34, their daughter Nelmari, 8, and son Nasie, 2, died in the blast.
A day after the blast, the ANC claimed responsibility for the attack.
Mzondeli Euclid Nondula and Nthetheleli Zephania Mncube, who planted the landmines, were given amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
The ANC leaders who had ordered the attack, did not apply for or receive amnesty.
Van Eck told Rapport: "I don't have a problem with Mncube and Nondula. They were just puppets.
"I felt after the TRC that there had been closure on both sides. That was until the NPA started opening up old wounds."
He was astounded when he heard that Vlok and Van der Merwe were to be charged with attempted murder because they allegedly had given the order for the Reverend Frank Chikane to be poisoned, especially after Vlok had washed Chikane's feet.
"I decided enough is enough. This is not about my personal interests.
Abandoned in interests of reconciliation
"It's about the government starting to polarise the nation all over again by acting one-sidedly," Van Eck said.
Civil rights organisation AfriForum, which is assisting Van Eck, said it had already approached the NPA on behalf of the Van Eck family to ask that all political prosecutions for past acts should be abandoned in the interests of reconciliation.
A spokesperson said AfriForum's legal team had a 140-page dossier containing evidence that ANC leaders could be held "criminally, politically and morally responsible for the landmine attack on the Van Eck family and other terrorist acts in the 1980s".
AfriForum had also sent a letter to President Thabo Mbeki asking that the government create a better mechanism, in order to prevent prosecution taking place in a "one-sided and selective way" - as in the case of Vlok and Van der Merwe. Van Eck said on Saturday that the prosecution of Vlok and Van der Merwe "was creating a consuming cancer in South Africa".
He had indicated to the TRC eleven years ago that "the book of the past should be concluded and that no prosecutions should be sought on either side of the conflict".
"The future of our country is being undermined. How are we going to make this land a place to live in, if we scratch each other's eyes out in this way?"
- Rapport
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