For 20 years in C-Max, Eugene de Kock says he waited for someone to ask him who gave the orders. At the Khampepe Commission this week, he finally started naming how those orders were carried out – by black men turned against their own liberation movements.
The 77-year-old former commander of C10 at Vlakplaas, the farm outside Pretoria that became synonymous with state murder, gave the most detailed account yet of the Askari system – apartheid’s secret weapon that used turned MK and APLA fighters to hunt, identify and kill their former comrades.
Testifying before retired Justice Sisi Khampepe, De Kock traced Vlakplaas from its Rhodesian roots to a full-blown counter-insurgency unit.
He told the commission the farm was initially formed by Colonel Schoeman, who brought in black members of the Selous Scouts and the Rhodesian African Rifles.
“I know we received about five Rhodesian black Rhodesians,” De Kock said in his halting testimony.
But it was his predecessor, Dirk Coetzee, he said, who “converted it into a counter-terrorist organization.”
That organization ran on Askaris.
When Advocate for the commission asked him who the Askaris were, De Kock was unequivocal: “Askaris were former members of MK and APLA.”
He then revealed he had tried, repeatedly, to stop the use of the word.
“I, on many occasions, wrote orders and asked that the name Askari must be changed because it was more a derogatory term to these people,” he testified.
The word itself, he explained, came from the German colonial era in East Africa, where it referred to black troops led by white officers – a loaded history for men who had once sworn to free South Africa.
According to his written statement, which he was taken through paragraph by paragraph, the official justification for Vlakplaas was “rehabilitation” of Askaris. The reality, he admitted, was entirely different.
They were death squad trackers.
“In the first place, they were used to identify former or present members of MK or APLA,” De Kock said.
He described how divisional security branch commanders across the country would request Askari teams to be deployed to taxi ranks, train stations and bus stations – anywhere MK operatives moved.
Their brief was to spot, arrest, and if necessary, shoot.
“If they could, if they couldn’t, to use their firearms, and then they must be handed over to the nearest security branch,” he said.
Pressed on whether these Askaris had any legal authority to detain anyone, the implication was clear: none. They operated outside any law, answering only to Vlakplaas.
The testimony was part of a broader narrative De Kock is weaving before the commission – that while he became the face of apartheid evil, the system that created Vlakplaas was never dismantled.
He told the commission he had been at war since 1968, serving first in the special guard unit protecting the state president and prime minister, then being posted to Oshakati in then South-West Africa in May 1978, and later becoming one of the first members of Koevoet, the brutal counter-insurgency unit in Namibia.
By 1983, he said, he was finished.
“The strain of all the training I received, and then the strain of training others, and then all the operations and the combat operations, and some more clandestine operations took a toll on me,” he said. “I was basically out on the canvas. I was finished.”
He asked to be transferred to the uniform branch in the Western Cape to escape. Instead, he was sent to Vlakplaas.
De Kock joined the South African Police in 1968, moved into counter-insurgency in 1983, and was convicted in 1996 to two life terms plus 212 years for murder, torture and fraud. He was paroled in 2015 after 19 years.
His testimony on Askaris matters for the Khampepe Commission’s central question: why did prosecutions of TRC cases collapse?
De Kock argues the answer lies partly in the Askari dilemma. To prosecute apartheid’s commanders, the NPA would have to rely on Askari testimony – testimony that would immediately reveal that those witnesses had been tortured and turned, exposing the state to liability and collapsing cases.
It is why, he claims, prosecutors like Gerrie Nel and Anton Ackerman – and Advocate D’Oliveira in the Motherwell Four trial – allegedly shut the door when he volunteered to testify.
“I volunteered to give evidence. I was not coerced by anybody,” De Kock said, recounting how he called his lawyer from prison to contact Eastern Cape Attorney-General Les Roberts to offer to testify in the Motherwell case. “There is a secrecy that the country will never know.”