De Klerk to Force Through Amnesty Bill : South Africa: When Parliament rejects legislation allowing secret pardons, president vows to circumvent lawmakers.

The Parliament rejected a bill Wednesday that would give President Frederik W. de Klerk broad power to secretly pardon political crimes, including those committed by government agents against anti-apartheid activists.

But before his opponents had time to celebrate, De Klerk shocked the country by announcing that he would refer the legislation to the President’s Council--a move that virtually guarantees the bill’s passage.

“I’m flabbergasted,” said Colin Eglin, national chairman of the Democratic Party, De Klerk’s liberal opposition in Parliament. “They are forcing this bill through despite overwhelming opposition, not only inside Parliament but throughout the country.”

De Klerk is under pressure to enact the law from within his security forces, many of whom fear that a future black-controlled government will try to prosecute them for past crimes. And the law would allow the government to pardon its own crimes--without publicly disclosing the nature of those crimes.

“This bill is nothing more than a means of reassuring the restive past members of (government) hit squads . . . and their bosses that they will be allowed to escape punishment,” said Dave Dalling, an independent member of Parliament and member of the African National Congress.

Michael Hendrickse, a Colored (mixed race) member of Parliament, added: “It is as if Hitler were to absolve himself from the crimes of Nazism. An undemocratic regime always tries to absolve itself before the end of its reign.”

De Klerk maintains that the legislation is not aimed specifically at granting amnesty to state officials. Instead, he says, it is designed to give legal force to an agreement reached last month with Nelson Mandela’s ANC to release political prisoners and pardon all South Africans who committed crimes with a “political objective.”

“I will ask (the President’s Council) for validation for something I believe is necessary for reconciliation” in the country, De Klerk said Wednesday.

Critics contend, though, that De Klerk already has the executive power to release political prisoners. And they say the amnesty bill will give him much broader powers by allowing him to pardon government officials without revealing what they did wrong.

The bill would set up a De Klerk-appointed board to secretly hear amnesty applications from South Africans across the political spectrum. That board would make non-binding recommendations to De Klerk.

The government contends that only a small number of the amnesty hearings would be secret, but all those would involve state officials who have yet to be charged. Government officials also say they would not oppose an amendment to give the country’s chief justice authority to decide whether to disclose the nature of those crimes.

As Parliament adjourned in Cape Town on Wednesday, a witness at a Johannesburg inquiry into the 1989 assassination of anti-apartheid activist David Webster fingered three members of a former army hit squad in the killing.

Johan Gagiano, a writer for right-wing publications, testified that the commander of a shadowy government-funded dirty tricks unit, known as the Civil Cooperation Bureau, had identified three of his operatives as the killers of Webster. Gagiano said he was told the assassination order had come from within the South African Defense Force.

Webster, a white sociologist, was one of more than 70 anti-apartheid activists killed during the 1970s and 1980s. No one has been charged in any of those deaths.

The Civil Cooperation Bureau has since been disbanded.