|
 Justice Minister Michael Masutha said de Kock would be released
"in the interests of nation-building and reconciliation" and because
he had expressed remorse at his crimes and helped authorities
recover the remains of some of his victims.
The decision, which had been deferred several times over the last
year, is contentious in a country still dealing with the legacy of
repression and brutality meted out by the white-minority regime that
prevailed from 1948 to 1994.
"He is not supposed to be freed. The atrocities he did to our people
were very bad," Aniel Motlhake, 35, a financial planner, told
Reuters after the decision.
Many South Africans, however, believe forgiveness is the only way to
leave the memories of apartheid behind.
 "There are some of our black brothers that killed a lot of white
people and also white people that killed," Joseph Dlamini, a taxi
driver in Johannesburg, told Reuters. "At some point we need to
forgive one another."
The date of the 66-year-old's release from Pretoria 'C-Max' High
Security prison would be kept secret, Masutha added.
De Kock's lawyer, Julian Knight, said he had been unable to contact
his client and so could not comment on his state of mind or future
plans.
WHITE RULE
As head of an apartheid counter-insurgency unit at Vlakplaas, a farm
20 km (15 miles) west of Pretoria, de Kock is believed to have been
responsible for more atrocities than any other man in the efforts to
preserve white rule.
Arrested in 1994, the year Nelson Mandela and the African National
Congress (ANC) came to power, he was sentenced two years later to
212 years in prison on charges ranging from murder and attempted
murder to kidnapping and fraud.
However, at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in 1995 to
try to unearth - and, in some cases, forgive - crimes committed by
both sides, de Kock came clean about the killing of many ANC
activists.
Even from behind bars, the bespectacled de Kock continued to cast
his shadow over the post-apartheid South Africa.
[to top of second column] |
In a 2007 radio interview, he accused FW de Klerk, the last white
president, of having hands "soaked in blood" for ordering political
killings. De Klerk, who won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with
Mandela, has denied the allegations.
However, in 2012 he met Marcia Khoza, the daughter of ANC activist
Portia Shabangu, whom de Kock executed after an ambush in Swaziland
in 1989.
"We greeted each other and shook hands. His handshake was firm," she
said after the meeting, at which de Kock described how he shot
Khoza's mother twice in the head before pushing the vehicle in which
she was traveling down a slope.
"I thought I would cry but strangely enough had the courage to
continue to listen to him. I was not jolted because I had long
forgiven him," she said.
At the same news conference, Masutha, the justice minister, denied
medical parole to Clive Derby-Lewis, an ultra-right wing politician
who masterminded the 1993 assassination of Communist Party leader
Chris Hani in an attempt to trigger a race war.
Derby-Lewis is reported to be dying of cancer.
(Writing by Ed Cropley and Joe Brock; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)
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