TRC Roulette : Mbeki’s Radio Freedom broadcast on eve of Cradock Four funeral played at Khampepe inquiry

One of the attachments to the bundle of papers former president Thabo Mbeki submitted to the Khampepe Commission of inquiry into delayed post-TRC prosecutions was a sound clip of a speech broadcast on the ANC’s Radio Freedom on the eve of the burial of the murdered ‘Cradock Four’, Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlauli.

The four UDF activists, we now know, were abducted by members of the security police on 27 June 1985, assaulted, stabbed, strangled with telephone wire and shot before their bodies were burned an mutilated.

In 1993, at the reopened inquest, Judge Neville Zietsman found that security forces were responsible for the deaths of the Cradock Four, although no individual was named. All of the security police members have since died.

The longest thread, however, tracks back to a high-level meeting of the State Security Council (SCC) that took place in March 1984 and was attended by 12 Cabinet ministers, including FW de Klerk, then minister of internal affairs, and Barend du Plessis, then head of education and training.

This meeting was allegedly to discuss strategies to deal with “terrorists” in what was then South West Africa. Also on the agenda was the matter of how to “remove” activists who were becoming a growing threat in Cradock to the apartheid regime. Fifteen months later, the four men were dead.

In March this year Du Plessis testified at the reopened inquest into the Cradock Four and agreed that the order sent to the State Security Council requesting the “permanent removal from society” of the Cradock Four activists implied their murder. However, he claimed the operational order was “misunderstood” or misinterpreted outside his authorisation.

Six security policemen applied for and were denied amnesty for the murders – Nick Janse van Rensburg, Johan van Zyl, Eric Alexander Taylor, Hermanus Barend du Plessis, Harold Snyman and Gerhardus Lotz.

At the reopened 2026 inquest into the murder of the Cradock Four, a haggard former Vlakplaas commander, Eugene De Kock, told the hearing that the murder had been planned independently by the then Port Elizabeth Security Branch and that the activists had not been considered a threat.

De Kock, who served 20 years behind bars for multiple murders, has denied any involvement in the planning and execution of the murder the Cradock Four, and claimed he became “an accessory after the fact” when members of the police Security Branch tried had tried to conceal the gruesome killings.

It is no secret that Lukhanyo Calata, son of Fort, and the face of the families of victims of apartheid abuses, has accused Mbeki of and former president Jacob Zuma of political interference in post-TRC matters.

In voluminous court papers it is alleged that Mbeki’s government created a “back door” amnesty for human rights abuse perpetrators who had not applied for amnesty.