The voice of 'Prime Evil'

In the South African media, Eugene De Kock has been described as a mass killer, a psychopath known to the public as "Prime Evil". He's an unlikely villain. With his carefully combed hair and thick glasses, he looks more like a librarian than a ruthless assassin. And in the post-apartheid era of truth and reconciliation he has also become something of a hero, a man of integrity in a community of denial.

Truth and reconciliation has been hard to come by in South Africa. Only one former apartheid cabinet minister has sought amnesty for his role in the political crimes of the last white government. Every other minister has dodged the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and passed off the crimes of the apartheid era as the work of a few rotten apples.

De Kock is one of the foul fruits grown from the tree of apartheid. When he admitted to his crimes in front of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission he was applauded by a black audience. They were commending him for his honesty, and his willingness to identify senior politicians on whose orders he carried out his dirty work. De Kock disputes the label of psychopath, arguing that he never took pleasure in killing his victims. It was a job he said, and he was acting under orders from the very top.

Eugene De Kock is on a crusade to finger his old bosses who let him fall for his crimes once he had outgrown his usefulness as an apartheid killing machine. He still gives them sleepless nights with his clarity and vision in recalling that dark era when a white government was prepared to cling to power by any means necessary.

The flaw within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be that such brutal honesty will not be put to good use. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission chose only the last three decades of the apartheid era for its frame of reference. It's a small period of South African history in which an awful lot of crimes were committed under the name of apartheid. But almost two and a half years on from the first investigative hearing, this Commission of Truth has been left with a huge lie: that it was not the apartheid leaders who were responsible for the heinous crimes of that era, but the foot soldiers like Eugene De Kock.

The ministers who guided and co-ordinated the evil strategy of apartheid have used the Truth Commission like a Catholic confession box. They have taken their pew and spoken softly only of the crimes they want to confess - and the Commission has absolved them of their sins, blessing them as they leave to forget about that awful past.

Source: BBC