Evidence of Government Assassinations Resurrects Painful Memories : S. Africa: People like Mbulelo Goniwe are survivors of a war. They lived through years of death threats and sleepless waits for overdue spouses, relatives and friends.

PORT ELIZABETH, South Africa--Mbulelo Goniwe thought he had witnessed the worst the South African security police could do. He lived through years of police harassment as a political activist and saw the mutilated, burned bodies of his uncle and friends in 1985 after their apparent abduction and murder by government agents.

But he says he has never been so frightened as after what he calls the “revelations”--the publication this past spring of a document apparently containing the official order for military officers to have “removed from society” three local anti-apartheid leaders: his uncle Matthew Goniwe, his associate Fort Calata--and himself. The document was dated two weeks before Matthew Goniwe and Calata disappeared.

“When I saw Matthew’s and Fort’s mutilated bodies that day, I cried,” Goniwe recalled one day recently from his desk at the African National Congress’ Port Elizabeth headquarters. “But when I saw that what happened to Matthew was something that was also waiting for me, I got very frightened. Since then, I haven’t been able to sleep.”

People like Mbulelo Goniwe are survivors of a war. They lived through years of death threats and sleepless midnight waits for overdue spouses, relatives and friends. Many were left with fatherless children, no means of support and lonely quests to persuade skeptical and hostile South Africans that the survivors’ friends and family members had been assassinated.

There are dozens of unsolved deaths among anti-apartheid activists; journalist Jacques Pauw, author of a book detailing the activities of one notorious police hit squad, estimates that as many as 230 activists may have been assassinated by government security forces between 1974 and 1991.

Today documentation of the killings is beginning to emerge. But interviews with friends and relatives of Goniwe, Calata and other slain activists suggest that they are confronting the increasing evidence of a government assassination campaign with mixed feelings. Some are relieved at a second chance to prove government complicity in these deaths. Others are uneasy about reopening the old cases.

But all are in a unique position to assess the relevance of the disclosures to today’s South Africa. To many of them, the copies of assassination orders and confessions by hired state killers, which lately have filled the pages of the country’s liberal press, give an insight into the mentality that may be at work now, when the government has been accused of fanning black factional tensions for its own ends.

“They’ve moved from killing individuals to killing masses,” said Nyame Goniwe, the widow of Matthew Goniwe.

Not all the survivors of slain human rights figures are political activists themselves. But many agree with the aims of a resurgent campaign to unearth the extent of state killings before the imposition of a general amnesty for political violence, which government negotiators have proposed at constitutional talks.

“We must expose as much as possible so people understand what happened,” said Margaret Friedman, the girlfriend of David Webster, a sociologist and human rights worker gunned down in front of their Johannesburg home in May, 1989. His killing has been linked to the Civil Cooperation Bureau, a shadowy military unit unknown before the first investigation into his death.

“I don’t think there can be a general amnesty without a full investigation,” Friedman said. “There are too many things in the closet.”

Mbulelo Goniwe added: “We’re not looking for prosecution of individuals. You want proof--who did it, on whose instructions.”

The Webster and Goniwe killings are the most prominent among suspected assassination cases today, in part because new inquests have been announced for both.

They are also linked by the personalities of their victims. Webster and Goniwe were both engaged not in violent revolt, but in consciousness-raising--in Goniwe’s case, of the black tenants whose opposition to a rent increase he organized, and in Webster’s case, of students and academics he brought into human rights groups.

They would be especially valuable in South Africa today, when two years of progress toward a multiracial constitutional accord has stalled over mounting uneasiness about the government’s past and present behavior and its evaporating moral authority.

“Matthew was a man of many talents, educated, disciplined, morally upright,” recalled Nyame Goniwe. “He was very down to earth, very accessible.”

He was also staunchly nonviolent. When an angry mob once threatened to disturb a political trial taking place in Port Elizabeth, the local police summoned Goniwe from the courtroom, where he was a spectator, to calm the crowd.

“He had an extraordinary ability to get young people to follow him, to go down a road they would not have if he wasn’t around,” said Judith Chalmers, a Port Elizabeth activist who knew Goniwe well and who was nearly injured herself in a 1985 car crash that claimed the lives of two leading anti-apartheid activists--her sister Molly Blackburn and Brian Bishop--and seriously injured Bishop’s wife, Di. “They just wiped him out in the most brutal fashion.”

Goniwe was also a believer in the importance of negotiating with the prevailing powers, a sentiment that was not overly popular then in the anti-apartheid movement and is ebbing now. “He carried on speaking to people who really were the enemies,” said Paul Verryn, a Methodist minister in Soweto who was a friend of Goniwe and Fort Calata.

Friedman described Webster in almost the same terms used by Nyame Goniwe. “He could relate to people from almost any angle,” Friedman said. “He was an incredibly modest, humble person. Very involved in music, sports, academia, politics. After his death, I found out he had done a lot of personal things for (political) detainees and their families, taking presents to the children, things like that.”

Unlike Webster, Goniwe left behind his own children, a daughter, now 16, and a son, now 9.

Both Goniwe and Webster had been under police surveillance at the time of their deaths. But it was much more intrusive in Goniwe’s case. After he became well known in the small agricultural town of Cradock, where as a school principal he helped organize Cradora, the Cradock residents’ association, in 1983, local police stepped up their harassment of the black township, Nyame recalled.

“It was total harassment, and our family had to bear the brunt,” Nyame Goniwe said. “They’d follow Matthew everywhere, sometimes bumper to bumper.” There were telephoned death threats; once they received an effigy in a bottle with a noose around its head.

By contrast Friedman recalled few if any overt incidents of harassment, although evidence at the first inquest showed Webster was under surveillance by the security department of the Johannesburg City Council. But Webster was never arrested, their home never invaded by police.

“There were a few funny phone calls, but no real death threats,” she said. “I know he was quite careful--when we moved into this house in ‘85-’86 he was aware of every car passing on the street. But 1985 was different from 1989,” when the level of police-state paranoia was much reduced.

The reopened inquest is certain to focus on what happened after the car carrying Goniwe, Calata and two other anti-apartheid workers disappeared on the way home from Port Elizabeth to Cradock, about three hours away, on the night of June 27, 1985.

Goniwe was normally cautious about driving late at night and assured friends that he would stop for no one but a policeman. His car was found days later, burned and with a false license plate attached. Over the next few days, his body and those of his three colleagues were found at separate sites around the Eastern Cape, all badly mutilated as if to hamper identification.

The inquest is also sure to scrutinize the “signal”--the State Security Council message ordering that the Goniwes and Calata be “permanently removed from society.” The document was published May 8 by the New Nation, an alternative weekly in Johannesburg.

“That document takes some explaining,” said Clive Plasketts, a lawyer representing the Goniwe family at the inquest. “If there’s an innocent meaning to it, I’d like to hear it.”

He added that the authenticity of the document has not been officially challenged and that its author, South African Defense Force Lt. Lourens du Plessis, has confirmed he wrote it.

The inquest into Webster’s death is likely to refocus attention on the Civil Cooperation Bureau, three agents of which were held for questioning by police investigating the drive-by shooting in 1989.

The motive, investigators suggested, may have been that Webster had stumbled on evidence linking the South African military to continued funding of Renamo, Mozambican guerrillas whose South African support had supposedly been cut off. But a commission of inquiry ruled the connection to the bureau was “inconclusive.”

Survivors of the slain activists had few doubts themselves that the state was behind the killings. “In my mind, there wasn’t any question of links to the government,” agreed Friedman, who witnessed the shooting. “If not an actual branch of the government, then a government front.”

But they point out that the receptivity to such arguments on the part of the public and political system now is much different from the 1980s.

Even Arthur Chaskalson, a respected lawyer associated with anti-apartheid causes, stopped short of explicitly naming the police when he summed up the Goniwe family’s case at the inquest.

“We know (the killers) to be a group sufficiently strong and well-organized to stop the car,” he said. “It was a group of people who knew Port Elizabeth region well enough to find beach tracks and leave bodies at isolated places, (and) sufficiently skilled to formulate a plan and to leave a false trail.”

How the assassination disclosures are affecting the traditional support for President Frederik W. de Klerk’s Nationalist Party among middle-class whites is hard to tell.

“I think the old Nationalist Party supporters wouldn’t support that kind of thing and didn’t believe it was happening,” Friedman said. “But I think now they believe David was killed by the government. At least one hopes they’re coming around.”

But survivors and friends of the victims are burdened with too much knowledge of what the South African state was once capable of doing, and might still be.

“It’s quite scary because they’re still around, a lot of these people,” Chalmers said. “And they probably haven’t changed their spots.”