The Crowbar In the early months of 1980 rumours of a death squad began to circulate in Ovamboland. The SA’s, it was said, had trained a group of thugs to assassinate prominent Ovambos. Then in May 1980, Levi Kamangwa, an official of the Ovambo administration, was injured in a motor accident and died soon afterwards in the Oshakati State Hospital. At first the corpse was mistakenly thought to be that of a guerrilla leader. Then, in his pocket was found a list of names of prominent northern Namibian personalities, religious leaders, businessmen, teachers, Ovambo administration officials and tribal politicians. A nurse handed the list to the church authorities, so that soon afterwards the news, though not the names, appeared in Omukwetu, the Lutheran newspaper published in the Ndonga language. With the security police on his tracks, the editor, Ambrosius Amutenja fled to Angola. From there, Sam Nujoma publicized the allegations on a Radio Luanda broadcast beamed to Namibia, while the Windhoek Observer named some of the 50 targetted for assassination. Among them was Bishop Kleopas Durneni, head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the countrys largest denomination. The newspaper talked of an extermination squad of 40 whites and 50 blacks operating under various code names. Apart from Koevoet, pronounced coo-foot, Afrikaans for crowbar, there was Cold Feet, One Way, and Unit K, K for Kill. The aim of the squad, it suggested, was to eliminate support for SWAPO before the holding of internationally supervised elections under the aegis of the UN. With the appearance of the Observer report, Administrator-General Gerrit Viljoen issued a strenuous denial. A libellous lie was being spread by malicious rumour, said the one-time Broederbond leader: This type of journalism could not but play directly into the hands of SWAPO, which is the source of the lie, and which had spread the rumour to cover up its own plans to assassinate its adversaries. But it was no rumour. 2 of those on Karnangwas list had already been dealt with. One was David Sheeharna, a respected businessman, colleague of the founders of SWAPO when a contract labourer and no doubt suspected of funding it from the profits of his busy supermarkets across the north. In the early hours of 14 March 1980, 2 black men armed with AK-47s entered his flat above one of his shops, ostensibly looking for money. In those days AK-47 meant terrorist. A witness reported the intruders strange behaviour in not bothering to keep their voices down. They shot Sheeharna, then turned their guns on his wife. She survived, though wounded several times. The shopping complex was burnt to the ground, and Sheehamas tractor, trucks, his Mercedes Benz and Ford Granada, sprayed with bullets. Radio Ovambo blamed SWAPO. Those were the days before it became well known that the SA government was engaged in assassinating its opponents. Some SWAPO supporters had an uneasy feeling the radio report might be true. The attack took place under the noses of the normally ubiquitous SA security forces, but they seemed unwilling to track down the assailants. Mrs Sheehama had seen one of them, a policeman, in the supermarket the previous afternoon. When a white police officer arrived to investigate, he had no camera. Constable William Campbell of the security police called later with a camera, but by now it was too dark to take pictures. Still, he had no doubt, he told the inquest, that SWAPO terrorists were the killers. The Ondangwa magistrate, Mr. D Bennett, agreed, Sheehama was probably murdered by insurgents. The 2nd listed victim was an Oshakati baker, Mateus Elago, blown up by a mine planted under his car. In Ondangwa, a mine was found on the spot where another named target, furniture stores owner Eliakim Prince Shurni, normally parked his car. The mine was said to have been of SA manufacture. Shumi had made no secret of his sympathy for the struggle. Eliakim Namundjebo and Simon Nambili, both supermarket owners, were already in detention when their homes were bombed. Why, it was asked, would SWAPO blow up houses of people held by the police. Even before the death list was made public, several of those still to be dealt with had fled the country. They were wise. The dean of the western diocese of the Lutheran Church, Mika Iilonga, was on the list. That he was a marked man was evidenced by a brief period of detention in 1980. On 8 January 1982, the 50-year-old pastor drove in a small truck to Lutheran headquarters at Oniipa to pick up food and material for drought-stricken parishioners. He knew it was safe, for at daylight the army had mineswept the gravel road. Returning at 5 pm that afternoon, his van hit a mine, killing 2 passengers outright. With an army outpost close by it would have been impossible for the guerrillas to have planted mines during the day. Ignoring pleas to take Iilonga to a nearby hospital, the soldiers moved him to their outpost with assurances that a helicopter would fly him to the hospital. The soldiers tried to make the dying man sign a statement blaming SWAPO for the mine. He refused. They were no more successful in persuading Mrs. Iilonga to sign. The helicopter arrived at 10 pm, by which time Iilonga was dead. The veteran correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, Jack Foisey, visited the area 2 days later, and reported that both Namibian and Finnish missionaries believe that some of the misfortunes that beset Lutheran activists like Iilonga are SA created. They suspect that some mines are detonated on command of the SA’s. On the death list were people who at first glance might have seemed hostile to the nationalist struggle. As a minister in the Ovambo cabinet, Frans Indongo was a natural guerrilla target. Even so, he was still a popular personality around Oshakati. With SAs resources it would have been an easy matter to stage-manage his demise to make it look as though SWAPO were the killers. Okavango ministers and Ovambo legislative members were similar cases. The death of popular churchmen could be couched in the context of rumours about SWAPOs anti-religious strain. As for the businessmen, they depended on government for provisions, licenses to sell liquor, and transport. The Koevoet list, then, was a clever device to discredit SWAPO, while at the same time eliminating its covert supporters. General Charles Lloyd, a former chief of the Namibian territorial force, and then secretary of the State Security Council, confirmed years later that it was part of the security forces strategy to remove the enemy leaders, to take them away from the masses, so that you can inform them, the masses and convey to them the real situation. Unexplained disappearances were nothing new in northern Namibia. Detainees were held incommunicado under security laws which placed the police under no obligation to inform families. They might eventually be freed. But there was always the chance of elimination on the spot, or, if they were thought to have useful information, of being disposed of during or after interrogation. 2 years before Koevoets appearance, a SWAPO supporter described the fate of a missing person. One woman told us that the soldiers went to her home and took her husband to their camp. The soldiers laughed and said to her: Didnt your husband go home? We sent him yesterday. As she was leaving the camp, a black worker told her of having seen the SA soldiers kill her husband the previous night, wind his body in socks soaked in petrol and burn it. By 1981 the secret of Koevoet was out. These were not Bobbies in the bush, but bogus policemen trained in the art of ambushing, tracking, bush survival and murder. The dirty task of causing enemies to disappear had been assigned to a specially groomed squad. Its formal title was the cumbersome Special Operations K Unit of the SA Security Police; alternatively COIN, for Counter-Insurgency Unit, but its founder, Brigadier Hans Dreyer, personally preferred the Koevoet pseudonym. Law and Order Minister Louis le Grange encouraged the name by describing it as the crowbar which prises terrorists out of the bush veld like nails from rotten wood. Off duty, members of Koevoet wore T-shirts proclaiming “Murder is our business, and business is good.” For once, SA propaganda had the ring of truth. Of all the armed units employed to retain Pretorias grip on Namibia, none has been more controversial than Koevoet. While 100 000 army regulars were in Namibia engaged in a seemingly endless war against SWAPO, it was Kcevoets white officers and black constables, numbering no more than 3000, who spearheaded a campaign of terror against the Ovambo and Okavango people, achieving a kill ratio of 25 to one by comparison with the army. Ordinary black policemen were terrified of them, while the army was said to be jealous of their success. Some Koevoet victims were indeed SWAPO freedom fighters, but they were also the elderly, young children, housewives, villagers going about their lawful business, shot in cold blood or victims of casual acts of brutality. Koevoets activities have been raised at the UN, decried by Amnesty International, tut-tutted over by the opposition in the Cape Town parliament. The SWA Bar Council, though dominated by Afrikaner lawyers not known for their radical behaviour, have seen fit to castigate some members of the unit for using the conditions of war as an excuse for murder, assault, rape and robbery. Despite growing controversy and public concern, the SA government continued for 5 years to deny the very existence of the unit. It was not until 1984 that Minister Le Grange admitted in parliament that it had been operative since January 1979, confirming the accuracy of Moses Garoebs, administrative secretary of SWAPO in Luanda, disclosure to the press in 1979 of the existence of a secret assassination squad.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 10:11:28 +0000
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