Dulcie September. (Photo: Robben Island Mayibuye Archives) Controversial chief of special investigations for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the late Lawandhle Magadhla, at the mention of the French arms industry, abruptly terminated an interview probing the 1988 assassination of ANC chief representative Dulcie September, the Khampepe Commission of Inquiry into delayed post-TRC prosecutions has heard.
Former Swedish police investigator Jan-Åke Kjellberg, seconded to the TRC in 1996, told the inquiry on 12 August that Magadhla had unexpectedly joined him on 21 November 1997 during an interview with French Socialist party official Jean-Bernard Curial.
The investigation had moved to Paris to gather evidence from French police and officials as well as other witnesses after September’s assassination by unknown gunmen at the ANC offices in that city in 1988. She was shot five times with a .22 calibre rifle equipped with a silencer on 29 March. She was 53.
Reports published in France alleged French involvement in September’s assassination. At the time she was the ANC representative in that country and had been investigating how the international weapons embargo was being bypassed in Europe.
There were specific allegations that the French weapons industry was delivering arms to South Africa despite sanctions. French media had also accused Alain Guenon, who was tied to French arms companies, of being linked to the September murder conspiracy and the cover-up.
The gunman has never been identified and speculation is that September was murdered by apartheid government agents.
Full stop
The interview with Curial had taken place at the official residence of the then South African ambassador to France, Barbara Masekela, said Kjellberg.
“I do not know the reason for it, but I asked Mr Curial if he knew a man called Mr Alain Guenon,” he said. Guenon’s name had appeared in a number of reports and documents related to September’s murder, he added.
He told the inquiry that when he informed Curial that, according to Dutch anti-apartheid organisation, The Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa, Guenon had been “decorated” by President Nelson Mandela, Curial had balked.
“He stood up immediately and told us that if that was true, that he had been decorated, we should stop the investigation,” Kjellberg said.
It was then that Magadhla had left the room for about 20 minutes to make a phone call. He returned, said Kjellberg, and “ordered that the meeting end” and that the room be vacated.
The facts, however, are that Mandela had not decorated Guenon. This was a claim that had caused “considerable distress” to those close to September.
‘Total silence’
Magadhla’s appointment to the TRC investigating team was controversial at the time. He was the former regional KwaZulu-Natal director of the ANC’s Department of Intelligence and Security (Mbokodo).
Before that he had served as a policeman during the apartheid era, rising to the rank of warrant officer before retiring in 1991. In 1994 he joined the ANC, was appointed to the National Intelligence Agency and promoted to chief of special investigations for the TRC shortly after the Paris trip.
The September family have requested the inquiry to determine who instructed Magadhla to halt the interview and why. Also, his background as both a former apartheid policeman and an ANC intelligence agent has been highlighted as a point of interest for the commission and the family.
Buried in the archives
At the meeting in Paris in November 1997, the French ministry of justice had promised to provide the TRC with a copy of their investigative file on the murder, Kjellberg told the inquiry.
Upon his return to South Africa, Kjellberg said his investigative reports were “met with total silence” from the TRC head office. Furthermore, the French police file on the assassination, which had been promised to the TRC, had also been “lost” or ignored for a year.
When it finally arrived in late 1998, it had been misidentified as being written in Danish rather than French, was never translated or pursued and effectively lay buried in the archives.
Despite his seniority, Kjellberg told the commission, Magadhla asked no questions during any of the interviews in Paris and “showed very little interest in the details of the case”.
Magadhla reportedly never filed a report on the investigation afterwards.
The September file
The file, an investigative copy of the September murder case, arrived at the TRC’s Cape Town office in late 1998, but because the TRC Human Rights Violations Committee was shutting down and there was a perceived “lack of interest or investigative capacity”, it was never translated or pursued.
Advocate Geoff Budlender, representing the September family, noted that the family was “understandably concerned” and has specifically asked the commission to determine where the French police file is.
The file’s location is listed as one of the three critical questions the commission has been urged to investigate. The Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks) became involved in the September case only recently.
According to Kjellberg, his testimony was first approached by a representative of the Hawks “either earlier this year or late last year”. The Hawks were interested in questioning Kjellberg about his original 1997 investigation in Paris and were seeking both information and documentation that he had gathered at that time. DM
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