Sterk Hans Dreyer The man chosen to set up Koevoet was one of SAs most experienced counter-insurgents. Sterk, Afrikaans for strong, Hans Dreyer, Chief of the Security Police in Natal. From Natal, Dreyer had been able to study the modus operandi of the Flechas, Portuguese for arrows, in neighbouring Mozambique. This was a black unit run by PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, to hunt and eliminate guerrillas. Files discovered at PIDE headquarters in Lisbon after the April 1974 coup contained reports of regular meetings between the heads of the SA, Rhodesian and Portuguese security police. The exchange of information on anti-guerrilla combat techniques was of special interest to SA. With the collapse of Portuguese rule in Mozambique, the Flecha commanding officer, Oscar Cardozo, with many of his white and black troops, fled into Rhodesia. There they were taken under the wing of Ron Reid Daly, founder of Rhodesias equivalent to the Flechas, the Selous Scouts. As with the Flechas, the Scouts had a dual role, the elimination of freedom fighters and the gathering of intelligence. In reality, they could do exactly as they liked. For them, the law was of minimal concern. Dreyers other strand of crucial experience was to have served with the SA Police (SAP) contingent in Rhodesia. When, in 1967, Joshua Nkornos ZAPU guerrillas invaded north-western Rhodesia from Zambia, they were accompanied by Umkhonto we Sizwe units, the ANCs military wing, heading for SA. In response to a call for help from the Rhodesian leader, Ian Smith, Vorster sent a contingent of police which ultimately numbered 4000 men. In his book Selous Scouts, Top Secret War, 1982, Reid Daly provides numerous insights into the operation of irregular units. Both Koevoet and the Scouts were police, not army, units. Reid Daly writes that: Military Intelligence could never have tackled the task, they did not have the means of being in contact with the countrys grass roots, they were geared towards conventional rather than unconventional war tasks. Here was a terrorist insurgency, a civil war where no battle lines were drawn. The only people who could have their finger on the information pulse of a civilian population, where every next man could be an enemy or an enemy sympathiser, was the civil police force spearheaded by the Special Branch. The conventional a army chiefs distrusted 2 key Selous activities which were to become staples of Koevoet. The first was what Reid Daly calls pseudo operations. Selous Scouts would go into villages impersonating freedom fighters and, if the welcome was warm, inflicts vicious punishment on their hosts. The Rhodesian generals were also suspicious of turning terrs that is, incorporating captured freedom fighters into the scouts ranks and using them for counter-insurgency. Of the armys generals, Reid Daly wrote: Their logic demanded that all captured enemies should be knocked on the head and killed. By the end of the war, the scouts had turned the best part of a thousand men from the liberation armies. It was only the newly captured terrorists who could keep the teams up to date with the constantly changing picture of what was happening in the enemys camp to enable us to get, and then to stay, ahead. In the same way, turned SWAPO guerrillas were a key component in the Koevoet operation. Koevoet was born in the greatest secrecy. More than likely the idea for a force of this kind came from Vorster himself, given his many years as minister of police and his close association with the contingent in Rhodesia. It was 1978, PW Botha was defence minister, and Ian Smith still ran Rhodesia, albeit through a black surrogate, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, General Magnus Malan, SADF chief, instructed the police to set up a Selous Scouts type operation, its role, in the words of a later law and order minister, Louis le Grange, to act as the eyes and ears of, and to collect information for, the military. It is important to establish the declared official aims and pattern of Koevoet policing which the government did not mind being made public. In the debate in parliament in May 1984, Le Grange took the opportunity to place full particulars about the unit on record: so that there need be no further misunderstanding about Koevoet and its involvement. SWAPO had succeeded by means of intimidation, propaganda and family ties existing between them and the local population, in maintaining a permanent presence in Owambo, SA spelling for the Ovambo Bantustan. The population was intimidated and influenced to such an extent that the rendering of assistance to SWAPO occurred on a large scale. Le Grange talked of sabotage, murder, abduction, land-mine attacks and ambushing forming part of the daily intimidation. Spies came and went, he said, and the guerrillas were even getting down to the white south, there to commit acts of sabotage. As, the ordinary conventional methods of warfare appeared to be ineffective in combating terrorism in Owambo and the rest of SWA, it was decided after consultation between the SA Defence Force, which at that stage was engaging in the struggle on its own, and the SA Police, to form a special unit to gather information and make it possible for the security forces to track down and wipe out terrorist gangs. We did not simply send a unit of the SA Police to the operational area arbitrarily. It was a calculated operation at the request of the SA Defence Force as a result of the problems which I have sketched. With the passage of time it became apparent that the initial basis on which the unit had come into existence, and according to which it would transmit all information it obtained about terrorist movements to the combat units of the security forces while the latter would carry out the pursuit operations, gave rise to problems in practice. In many cases the unit had to follow the tracks of terrorists across a vast expanse of territory, and when the unit ultimately succeeded in tracking down the terrorists, the long distances, impassable routes and dense undergrowth made it impossible for the combat units of the security forces to mount their attacks in time, with the result that the terrorists got away. So the unit in due course began to operate as a combat unit, together with the rest of the security forces. That was the last time the government allowed Koevoet to be debated in parliament. Those early days were described in the semi-official SA magazine, Armed Forces. Once the final arrangements had been made between the SAP and the SADF, Dreyer was allowed to pick 5 of his men to accompany him and was sent to Owambo, arriving on 11 January 1979 in a small convoy of 2 police cars, 2 bakkies, vans, and some private vehicles. Arriving in the area more or less cold, the new team was greatly assisted by the local security police chief who had earlier been Dreyers 2nd in command in Natal. The first 3 months were spent with the local security police and with the Recces, absorbing background information and studying the situation. The next step saw them drive around much of the region, building a mental picture to go with the maps and files. Already operating in the territory was a group of Ovambos trained by the white police intelligence unit. This group of comparatively well educated men had done a number of jobs for the SA’s at a time when they were losing their grip. They distributed a newspaper called Eume, Friend, and showed propaganda films at schools and cuca shops. They also trained bodyguards for pro-SA chiefs and headmen who might be targets for the guerrillas. The guards were nicknamed makakunya, literally bone-pickers and bloodsuckers, a universal term for anyone fighting for the SA’s. This group and the men they trained were the earliest Koevoet recruits. Dreyer claims to have captured the first insurgent in May 1979, and that he proved a highly valuable source, allowing Koevoet to greatly flush out the existing information on SWAPO organization and activities. In the beginning it seems that Operation K, as it was at first known, was genuinely concerned with looking for clues and apprehending wrongdoers. The police were put on to political murders and sabotage cases, and behaved more or less as criminal investigation officers. This training programme for special constables took Dreyer away from a purely Scouts type of pseudo operation as originally foreseen, towards the Flecha concept of utilizing local personnel and former insurgents. Very soon 64 Ovambos had been chosen from the special constables and by June 1979 the first Koevoet fighting group, called Zulu Foxtrot, was set up, headed by 10 white SA’s. According to American journalist Jim Hooper, its first major success came in 1979 when 12 guerrillas, said to have killed 4 people on white farms south of the Etosha game park, were killed. Koevoets 300 white officers were almost all SA policemen. They numbered members of the special branch which, for 2 decades, had bludgeoned a bloody path through SAs own resistance movements. Koevoet fell directly under the jurisdiction of the Security Branch. Dreyers early deputies included white Rhodesian Selous officers as well as members of the now disbanded SA police unit which had served in Rhodesia. One of them, Frans Conradie, described as a legend in his obituary in the police magazine Servamus (November 1983) had been a counter-insurgent in the late 1960s when SA set up an observation post in the Caprivi Strip. Namibian whites did join Koevoet, but in insignificant numbers. With barely 60 000 in Namibia, the countrys white manpower resources were heavily stretched. In 1981, as part of the show of turning over responsibility to South Westers, an own government police service for SWA was instituted, called SWAPOL. The first annual report noted in a show of defiant complacency that in the field of crime there were generally no unusual trends and the situation is well under control. It did mention that, with the need to maintain the internal security of the territory of prime importance to the Force, an anti-insurgent unit was established immediately. This unit, it explained, was functioning so efficiently that it was considered to be justifiable. In SA, white Koevoet officers were recruited informally, often by word of mouth. An officer serving in Namibia might well recommend to a colleague back home a 6 month or years stint in the far north-west of the empire. Indeed, those with a historical perspective might have seen themselves as something of a praetorian guard defending a prized African possession from communism. Nurtured on the theory and practice of baasskap, literally, masterliness, fed a diet of commie onslaught propaganda, what better way to serve the motherland? Eugene Terre Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), has estimated that 80% of all white police, the lower ranks of the armed services are AWB sympathizers. The police are often drawn from the economically poorer ranks of white SA society and feel threatened by the rise of Black Nationalism. Among them are those who feel hemmed in by even the modest restraints of SA custom relating to the treatment of political prisoners. These days a growing number of SAP, civil and security, black and white, have counter-insurgency experience, as they attempt to plug the ANC guerrilla tide inside the white cities and across several thousand miles of permeable border. But northern Namibia, criss-crossed by SWAPO soldiers and inhabited by a population offering them safe passage, posed a special dilemma for the security forces. Koevoet recruits attended the police counter-insurgency training course at Maleoskop, near Groblersdal, Eastern Transvaal. The syllabus was indistinguishable from army infantry units, with instruction in patrolling, battle-craft, ambushes, counter-ambushing, road movement, attacks on enemy bases, follow-up and mopping-up operations, forward air control, anti-riot procedures, urban terrorism and terrorist tactics, is unlikely that the course referred to the 1984 UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which has still to be signed by SA. Article 10 of the Convention calls for signatories to: ensure that education and information regarding the prohibition against torture are fully included in the training of law enforcement personnel, civil or military, medical personnel, public officials and other persons who may be involved in the custody, interrogation or treatment of any individual subjected to any form of arrest, detention or imprisonment.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 10:04:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015