The People of Apartheid Must Come to Repentance : South Africa: Confessions have laid bare the atrocities of police terror units. Now the government must come clean.

“We burned their bodies and then either tossed the ashes into the river or raked them over the ground to hide any trace of them.” With descriptions like this, retired South African Police Capt. Dirk Johannes Coetzee revealed what was never supposed to be known, never even whispered into the ears of posterity. His recent confession about officially sanctioned death-squad killings has stripped the white mask of “Western civilization” from the face of the South African government and laid bare the brutal features of the apartheid state.

There was supposed to be “no trace” of the ashes. Those killed were to remain forever faceless and nameless. Now we are beginning to learn the names of apartheid resisters who were shot, stabbed, poisoned or blown-up by police terror units--Griffiths Mxenge, Ruth First, Dulcie September, Joe Gcabi, Jeannette Schoon (and young daughter), Patrick Makau (and young son), Victoria Mxenge (widow of Mxenge), among others.

But we do not (and perhaps will not) know the names of scores, maybe hundreds, of African National Congress guerrillas who were captured, tortured and, failing to “turn” and become police agents themselves, were drugged, shot and burnt to ash. Will they stay forever nameless? Will there be an accounting, as there was in Argentina, where the military invented “disappearing,” or as there was at Nuremberg, after the Nazi defeat?

The death-squad revelations have probably presented Pretoria with its worst crisis since the imposition of sanctions in 1986. Because apartheid is founded on land greed and brute force, government policy has always been one of conquest, control and containment.

The police have used terror tactics for decades--enforcing “pass laws,” evicting whole communities, destroying homes, making hundreds of thousands homeless refugees. These tactics--arbitrary force and violent assault on person and property--have become an ingrained form of police behavior.

Police torture and murder of political prisoners began in 1963 after restraints on habeas corpus were imposed. The death-squad killings began in the mid-1970s as part of the government’s “total onslaught” against opponents. This form of brutality was just a perverse extension of the violence at the heart of apartheid. Now it seems to have become the norm.

What is President Frederick W. de Klerk going to do? He is already trying to control the “securocrats”--security police and military intelligence personnel--who took over as a shadow government during the presidency of P. W. Botha. Will a mass firing of implicated police officers contain the death-squad damage? How can mere dismissal of employees exorcise such evil? And doesn’t De Klerk himself have reason to fear these killer policemen and their superiors?

Thousands of right-wing policemen support the Conservative Party and the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement. Those within his own camp could become his mortal enemy.

And what will De Klerk do about investigating the death squads? Will he continue to censor the press, especially the Vrye Weekblad, which originally broke the Coetzee story? Can he allow all the truth to come out and still remain in power? We can be sure that these revelations have helped the defiance campaign rising up in South Africa. It’s likely that De Klerk will try to contain the threat from the left and the right.

So we are left with the original question. Who is accountable for all these killings? Will we have to wait until some kind of revolutionary change brings the ANC and its allies to power before South Africa has its own Nuremberg trials? Those victims who are faceless and nameless today must not be forgotten tomorrow.

Ahmed Kathrada, one of the ANC leaders imprisoned for life with Nelson Mandela, and released in September with Walter Sisulu and others, has always had his own way of remembering. In a speech after his release, he said:

“In 1962, in my last public speech before . . . being sentenced in the Rivonia trial, I showed a gathering of students at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg a handful of bones which I brought back from the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

“I brought back these bones as a reminder to myself and to my fellow South Africans of the evils of racism which dominates every aspect of South African life.

” . . . Now, 27 years later . . . we have come back to South Africa where racism is still firmly entrenched. . . . We, the oppressed people of South Africa, are still waiting for President F. W. de Klerk and his party . . . to acknowledge their mistakes and show genuine remorse for 40 years of misrule. . . . “

As leader of the apartheid state, De Klerk must face up to the truth about these death squads. He and his people still must learn the spiritually cleansing effects of remorse, confession and repentance. They haven’t yet come close.