S. Africa Frees Most-Notorious Racist, Rebels

The gunman had admitted he was smiling, “trying to suppress my laughter,” when he coolly killed seven passersby here in 1988. And the judge, finding no hope for rehabilitation, sentenced him to hang.

And yet on Monday, still smiling and unrepentant, Barend Strydom was turned loose by President Frederik W. de Klerk, in “the spirit of national reconciliation.”

The only thing that set Strydom apart from the hundreds of other political prisoners released by De Klerk since Friday was that Strydom is white, his victims all were black and his goal was white supremacy.

“It was a political act, a statement,” said Trudie Rautenbach, Strydom’s mother-in-law, who waited with other khaki-clad family members and admirers for Strydom to emerge from the tall beige walls of Pretoria Central Prison. “He wanted to show that the Boerevolk (white Afrikaners) are here to stay. Our enemy is the blacks. And Barend will never regret what he did.”

Prison doors opened all across South Africa on Monday, releasing some of the country’s most feared anti-apartheid guerrillas, who had planted bombs, killed police and slain township council members. But in an attempt to appease De Klerk’s right-wing opponents, the doors also were opened for the most notorious of the 20 or so pro-apartheid prisoners.

Shortly before Strydom walked free, Mththeleli Mncube emerged from the same prison in a suit with a designer’s tag still stitched to the sleeve. He had helped to plant land mines that killed eight members of two white farm families. He was arrested, but he escaped and shot to death two white policemen.

In Durban, Robert McBride, 26, a mixed-race African National Congress soldier, also walked free into the cheering arms of ANC supporters. McBride’s offense had made him one of the most controversial of the ANC prisoners; in 1986 he planted a bomb at a Durban bar that killed three women, one a single mother.

Like Strydom, McBride, Mncube and one of Mncube’s co-defendants, Mzondeleli Nondula, all were sentenced to death in the mid-1980s. But De Klerk had commuted their sentences to life imprisonment last year when he released almost 1,000 prisoners held for lesser political crimes.

De Klerk said the new batch of released prisoners, including Strydom, had committed offenses that were “totally, totally unacceptable.” But he decided to release them in a successful bid to lure the ANC back to the negotiating table.

“We’re not saying these deeds can be morally excused,” he said. “But we are trying to close the book on the past and bring reconciliation between opposing forces in the country. Unless we do it now, we will be continually tied to these disputes about the past.”

But the ANC saw a vast difference between its guerrillas and the right-wing whites who espouse racist views and have vowed to use force to topple a future black-controlled government in South Africa.

ANC Secretary General Cyril Ramaphosa said the difference between ANC prisoners and right-wing prisoners is the ANC commitment to peaceful change in the country. “Our prisoners will not go out and commit these acts again,” he said. “But there’s no guarantee that the prisoners who hate black people will not come out and shoot more black people.”

All of the ANC’s former soldiers released Monday said they had no regrets for their actions, which were part of the struggle against a government that embraced apartheid. But they also spoke of reconciliation and a new era of peace in South Africa.

“The new South Africa should not be established on the basis of anger, revenge and bitterness,” said Mncube, 32, of Soweto. “It should be on the basis of love, forgiveness and negotiations.”

But Strydom, 27, a self-described member of a shadowy right-wing group called the “White Wolves,” had no soothing words. The thin, dark-haired prisoner slipped out of Pretoria Central through a side exit, evading a phalanx of news photographers and reporters. He has signed an exclusive contract to tell his story to a weekly Afrikaans-language newspaper.

His family, friends and admirers spoke for him, though. They said Strydom, who has become a cult hero among right-wing whites, still deeply hates blacks and fears they will overwhelm Afrikaners. And they defended De Klerk’s decision to release Strydom along with ANC guerrillas.

“You can’t blame him (Strydom) for what he did,” said Robert von Tonder, leader of the right-wing Boer State Party. “It was definitely a political act. He wasn’t like a criminal. He was trying to demonstrate how white people feel about blacks.”

Strydom, a former police constable, said he had hoped to start a small war when he strolled through downtown Pretoria on Nov. 15, 1988, wearing a police camouflage uniform and firing on blacks at random. He hit 22 people, killing seven. And he admitted to killing a black woman a few days earlier to see if he could do it.

At his trial, he testified that he had done nothing wrong by killing blacks, whom he did not consider to be human. And he said he considered his attack an act of self-defense against blacks who were trying to drive whites out of South Africa. “It is a question of you or them,” he testified. “No reasonable person would sit still in such a situation. I decided to fight.”

Asked how an 88-year-old black woman, one of the victims, could have been a threat, Strydom replied, “She threatened my existence because she was black and because she was alive.”

Judge Louis Harms, when sentencing Strydom to the gallows, said the defendant was “worse than other terrorists. He is prepared to shoot people while he laughingly looks them in the eye.”