Three murders and a whitewash

By R.W. Johnson

Who killed Dulcie September? Or Anton Lubowski? Or Chris Hani? These are the questions asked by Evelyn Groenink, a Dutch communist and anti-apartheid activist, in her book Incorruptible. It is a curious work, apparently written over almost two decades and, particularly at the start, is full of period movement-speak. The Third Force makes many appearances in the text, although whether it really existed remains a moot point. Publications like the Mail & Guardian are treated with respect because they are “progressive”. The civil war between the ANC and Inkatha is referred to as if the ANC were angels and Inkatha were demons. And so on. But Ms. Groenink (who is also Mrs Ivan Pillay) is clearly a woman of integrity, and she really wants to get to the truth.

Dulcie September was gunned down at her workplace, the ANC office in Paris, in March 1988. The ANC, inevitably, immediately declared that this was the work of an apartheid death-squad. But, digging around in Paris, Groenink found no real trace of that – and indeed, hits on ANC activists in Europe were extremely rare. Some within the ANC believed, with the usual ANC paranoia, that they were always at great risk, but this seems unlikely, and none of the ANC activists I knew in Britain seemed particularly bothered by such rumours.

Dulcie September on the cover of Evelyn Groenink’s book.

Moreover, Groenink found that in the milieu of French mercenaries, right-wing activists and intelligence agents, there had actually been advance knowledge that a hit on an ANC target was about to take place. So while Groenink could not rule out the possibility of South African involvement, her enquiries soon mainly focused on French sources.

This led Groenink up many highways and byways. She gradually realised that French intelligence had carefully manoeuvred the ANC into renting the office they did, and that the next door tenant – a sports company – was keeping the ANC office under surveillance. It also appeared that the team of painters who had come to paint both these offices had acted, wittingly or not, as a cover for the assassin who had probably come in one of the windows from the scaffolding outside.

In common with most ANC activists, Dulcie was poorly educated, and had little knowledge of the French background, but she quickly ran into the fact that almost all French people take great pride in the national force de frappe – its nuclear deterrent.

The background is important here. Whereas the Americans collaborated with the British on the Manhattan Project and were then legally obliged to share nuclear secrets with them, Washington was firmly against the French developing a nuclear bomb, and refused to give any help with that project. So while the British developed first Polaris and then Trident nuclear submarines to carry their atomic weapons in conjunction with the US, this made the British deterrent cheaper though somewhat less independent than the French.

The French developed their own fully independent deterrent at great cost, and this in turn caused France to become a somewhat irresponsible arms trader, desperately trying to recoup its costs by selling arms to one and all. Until 1967 France was Israel’s main arms supplier, and France continued to sell arms to apartheid South Africa long after other nations had joined the arms boycott.

Groenink gradually unearthed the fact that not long before her death Dulcie had unearthed a piece of information about which she was extremely nervous. This followed a trip she had made to the Plateau d’Albion, the centre of French nuclear research. Groenink comes to the conclusion that long after France had joined the arms boycott of South Africa it had quietly maintained links with Pretoria in the defence field, and that these had included a strong interest in South Africa’s development of nuclear weapons.

In the course of that nuclear programme, South Africa had apparently made advances in the miniaturisation of atomic weapons which were of great interest to Paris. Indeed, Groenink believes that the latest version of the French nuclear deterrent actually incorporated some of those advances – though, of course, it would be highly embarrassing to France if such nuclear cooperation was to become publicly known. This, she thinks, was the deadly secret that Dulcie had learned, a secret which she was wary of sharing even with others in the anti-apartheid movement, and which in the end was the cause of her death.

This conclusion, though circumstantially supported by various suggestive pieces of evidence, is nonetheless no more than a hypothesis – and even then there is no indication of who exactly shot Dulcie several times full in the face. And we are left to wonder whether this was supposed to be someone acting for France, South Africa, or someone else.

What is important is that this happened in 1988 because after the Rubicon crisis of 1985 and the subsequent financial crisis when Chase Manhattan cancelled its South African loans, there was a widespread realisation that apartheid was a dead duck, and that a major regime change was about to happen. The various intelligence services of the major powers would all have been well aware that conversations were ongoing between Pretoria and the ANC, and that as soon as P.W. Botha quit the scene, the ANC was likely to come to power.

This created an environment of feverish speculation, since it was obvious that this would in turn create all sorts of major commercial opportunities. After the long years of sanctions and boycotts the new regime would be ripe for a major arms deal. It might also want to buy a number of new nuclear power stations, new rolling stock for the railways, and so on. And a new government might decide that Sol Kerzner shouldn’t have the sole right to set up casinos. …

Being an African government, the reasoning went, the ANC would be bound to be corrupt, so all manner of major interests, starting with the arms companies, had begun to cultivate contacts both within the ANC and more widely. One result, as both Dulcie and Groenink realised, was that they could no longer treat all ANC activists as if they were selfless heroes of struggle. Already some of them were becoming aware of the possible opportunities ahead and were less trustworthy than they might once have been.

Anton Lubowski, the Namibian political activist who was assassinated outside his home in Windhoek in 1989.

That context is important for both the other assassinations that Groenink examines. Groenink knew both Anton Lubowski, the white SWAPO activist, and Chris Hani. She was fond of Lubowski, whom she thought was incorruptible, but was an even greater admirer of Hani who, she says, arrived back in South Africa saying that the main danger now was not the Nats but the waBenzi – ANC people who wanted to get rich quick.

As it happens, I heard Lubowski speak in Durban only a few months before his murder. My impression was that he was a complete though naive Stalinist. A lawyer by trade, he was also quite a playboy – he loved expensive clothes, women (though he was married), fast cars and fine whisky. The good life, in all. Such contradictions were not unknown in “the movement”. Like not a few others, Lubowski gave the impression that he was loving the boyish thrill and high adrenalin of being in revolutionary politics.

Inevitably, both SWAPO and the ANC immediately declared that Lubowski had been killed by an apartheid death squad. Magnus Malan, the South African Defence minister, immediately brandished a copy of Lubowski’s bank account showing payments into it from South African intelligence. “We wouldn’t kill one of our own agents,” Malan said.

Groenink did a good deal of sleuthing which effectively puts paid to Malan’s claim. Interestingly, her enquiries about Lubowski also turned up the name of Alain Guenon, a French intelligence agent whose name had also come up frequently in her enquiries about Dulcie September. It turned out that Guenon had been tasked by his employers to make contact with SWAPO and the ANC, and that his calling card was a letter from Winnie Mandela vouching for him. But by that stage Groenink had become streetwise enough to know that Winnie’s word wasn’t good for anything. One is left feeling Guenon was clearly up to no good.

It also emerged that Lubowski had been in contact with the mafia boss Vito Palazzolo. Indeed, Palazzolo had attempted to hire Lubowski, asking him to help him get Namibian citizenship, and Lubowski had flown to Switzerland to see the mafioso who was then still in jail on mafia-related charges. In fact it turned out that what Palazzolo really wanted was permission to set up a casino in Windhoek once Namibia was independent – casinos being the preferred mafia medium for laundering cash derived from illegal trade in drugs, blood diamonds, etc.

In the end, Lubowski declined to help, and Groenink surmises that he was killed by the mafia as a result. This too is far from being a watertight case, and questions remain about Lubowski’s apparent willingness to act for someone known to be a mafioso. Groenink’s explanation that Lubowski was always far too willing to believe the best of everyone doesn’t really cover the bases.

Groenink’s investigation of Hani’s murder is interesting in that she carefully interviewed Hani’s neighbours and establishes beyond doubt that in addition to Janusz Walus Hani was followed by another man driving another car, and that this car was seen and heard accelerating away as soon as Hani was shot. The police seemed keen to close the case once they were sure Walus had fired the fatal shot, and simply ignored this extra evidence.

By now, however, Groenink had realised that the ANC explanations of both the September and Lubowski murders were insufficient and wrong, so she is not disposed to join in the wild goose chase for “a wider right-wing conspiracy” which many on the Left wanted to find. (The TRC also looked for this and came up with nothing.) Instead she was struck by the persistent reports that leading ANC figures had been among those conspiring to kill Hani, and by the fact that Eugene Riley, an NIS agent, had actually told journalists several days before the assassination that Hani would be killed. Some months later Riley himself was killed – it was pretty clear that those behind the Hani killing were determined to shut up someone who had so inconveniently talked.

 

The radical ANC politician Chris Hani, who was assassinated outside his home in Boksburg in April 1993.

Groenink was unable to talk to Riley and, for obvious reasons, his girl friend, Julie Wilken, quickly vanished into a witness protection programme for more than eight years – so she was unavailable too. I was luckier and interviewed Wilken when she was, at length, released from that programme. She told me that she had typed out Riley’s reports for him, that Riley had known for over a week beforehand that a leading ANC figure would be killed, and had known that it would be Hani three days before. He had also known that Walus and Derby-Lewis would be involved in the murder, and said that they had been promised that they would be spirited away to Poland and Australia respectively, in order to encourage them to go through with their plan.

Groenink is certain that the key to the assassination is that Hani would have been vehemently opposed to the arms deal and all its attendant corruption. Hani had already openly accused Joe Modise, the MK boss, of wholesale corruption and as a result Modise had attempted to have Hani executed. Only Oliver Tambo’s intervention had saved Hani. So there was already much bad blood between Modise and Hani.

Groenink believes that in a sense Hani had to be killed so that the arms deal could go ahead, for he was second only to Mandela in popularity within the ANC and he would have strongly and publicly opposed the deal. Groenink argues that the two prime movers behind the arms deal were Modise (the minister of defence) and Thabo Mbeki and that they were responsible for pushing most of the deal towards British Aerospace.

Not surprisingly, Groenink, like many others, comes to the view that Joe Modise is by far the most likely suspect – he had, after all, already tried once to have Hani killed. (When I talked to journalists who had investigated the case at the time I found they almost universally suspected Modise.) Perhaps because of that widespread suspicion, Ronnie Kasrils and Fidelis Hove have recently produced a biography of Modise who, in their version, appears as a knight in shining armour, not even guilty of having been the notorious township gang boss that most others say he was.

The reaction in MK veteran circles was “Why is Ronnie white-washing Joe Modise?” For few, if any, of the veterans were willing to accept the Kasrils-Hove version. (Groenink asks of Modise, “Had he been not only a selfish, uncaring, luxury-loving excuse for a guerrilla commander, but an apartheid agent too?”) The only answer would seem to be that Kasrils was Modise’s deputy minister from 1994 to 1999 – all the way through the arms deal – and the continually swirling speculation about Modise might have discomforted him. Certainly, the attempt to rescue Modise’s reputation at this late date seems quixotic and, indeed, hopeless.

Groenink doesn’t really solve any of the three assassinations she examines, long and painstaking though her enquiries were. But the story of her lengthy investigations and the considerable amount of new information she picked up on the way makes her book required reading. Groenink came under enormous pressure while writing her book – and her intended publishers, Jacana, were frightened off altogether. Ironically, the Kasrils-Hove whitewash is published by Jacana – though that is another story.

FEATURED IMAGE: Place Dulcie September in Paris, named after Dulcie September after her assassination in 1998. Wikimedia Commons.