Churches were used as instruments of oppression by the white minority, one of four men seeking amnesty for the 1993 St James Church massacre told the Truth Commission's amnesty committee on Wednesday.
Bassie Mkhumbuzi was a member of the Azanian People's Liberation Army unit that killed 11 people and wounded 58 others in a automatic rifle and handgrenade attack on the church's congregants in Cape Town on July 25, 1993. "Whites used churches to oppress blacks. They took our country using churches and bibles. We know and we have read from books they are the ones who have taken the land from us," Mkhumbuzi said. Truth Commission lawyer Robin Brink said Mkumbuzi and his comrades perpetrated a "mindless barbarity" on defenceless people praying in a house of worship. Was it a revenge attack?" he asked Mkhumbuzi. "No," Mkhumbuzi replied, "we just wanted our land to be brought back to us, not because we were revenging the actions of the church."
Mkhumbuzi, who was 17 years old at the time of the incident, said he had not been told beforehand by unit leader Sichumiso Nonxuba that a church was the target. Nevertheless, "I felt that whites were using churches to oppress blacks". There was confusion at the start of Wednesday's amnesty hearing in Cape Town when it emerged that one of the amnesty applicants - former Apla operations director Letlapa Mphahele - had failed to turn up. The whereabouts of Mphahlele were not known, lawyer Norman Arendse told the amnesty committee chaired by Judge Hassen Mall. Arendse said he represented Mphahlele's co-applicants Mkhumbuzi, Thobela Mlambisa and Gcinikhaya Makoma. Makoma was found guilty on 11 counts of murder and 58 counts of attempted murder in March 1995 and sentenced to 23 years' imprisonment.
Mkhumbuzi, a member of the SA National Defence Force, and Mlambisa are on trial facing similar charges relating to the attack. "We don't know where he (Mphahlele) is," Arendse said. "He has not given us any instructions. We can't understand and we don't have any reasons why he is not here. We ask that his application be withdrawn at this stage." Ian Bremridge, the lawyer for two of the victims opposing the amnesty applications, said Mphahlele's absence could be problematic as the other applicants intended testifying that he ordered the attack. The applications are being opposed by Dawie Ackermann, whose wife was killed, Lorenzo Smith and Ukranian sailor Dmitry Makogon, who lost both legs and an arm in the incident. Mkhumbuzi said while he sought forgiveness from the victims, "we could not stop what was happening at the time". "We were fighting for our country and for democracy. It was difficult at the time to stop such incidents. The purpose of Apla at that time was to fight until the land was brought back to its owners." Bremridge: "Do you thing the attack achieved anything?" Mkhumbusi: "Yes. Today We are in this country. We are living together. We are not fighting together."
On the day of the attack he had remained in the getaway vehicle while Nonxuba - who was killed in a car accident last Novemmber - and Makoma entered the church armed with R4 rifles and M26 handgrenades, which he had fetched earlier from Apla high command in Umtata. "I was told that I would be the security, Mlambisa the driver. Nonxuba and Makoma were going inside. After they came out of the building, I was to use the petrol bombs to throw them inside. "I heard a grenade and gunshots and then saw a red car stopping in front of us, apparently to block us. "I got out of the car and threw a petrol bomb at the car and Mlambisa shot at the car causing it to speed away." He said it was only later that night, while watching a television broadcast by CNN, that he saw for the first time what had happened inside the church. Mlambisa testified later that he was an Apla unit commissar based in Transkei when he was ordered to travel to Cape Town to take part in the operation. He only realised the target was a church when the team drove up to the target in Kenilworth, Cape Town. "I deeply regret the loss of lives and causing so many people to be injured," he said.
Source: South African Press Association
Showing posts with label St James Church massacre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St James Church massacre. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 9, 1997
Sunday, July 25, 1993
Attack on Cape Town Church Keeps a Rattled Nation Edgy
Twelve worshipers were killed and more than 50 were wounded by gunmen during an attack on Sunday night at St. James Church near Cape Town.
Absurdly, the first notion that came to Kara-Anne Harris on Sunday night as the killers kicked in the door of St. James Church and blasted worshipers with automatic-rifle fire and grenades was that they were after the Russians. If St. James is a symbol of anything, it may be a kind of openhearted evangelical hospitality, extended to squalid black shacktowns of nearby Khayelitsha township and to homesick fishermen from visiting Russian trawlers.
There were 140 of the seamen sitting with the multiracial congregation at the 7 P.M. service, listening happily to a duet of the gospel tune "More Than Wonderful," when the gore and splinters of pews began to fly. "I wonder if it's because we have Russians in our church," Miss Harris remembered thinking for a moment, before recalling the end of the cold war and chiding herself, "Oh goodness, that would be old." This war, she realized, is against her, people like her, and their half-realized dream of South Africa's future.
The attack, which left 12 worshipers dead (including 3 of the hapless Russians) and more than 50 wounded in the cozy Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth, was the most horrific in the eight months since the opening of a mysterious terrorist war on white suburbia. Except that the killers were black and very efficient, little is known for certain about their identities or motives, leaving white South Africa to its fearful speculations: black militants, hired guns, rogue police or perhaps, as the Rev. Ross Anderson surmised, some diabolical "blood lust" beyond politics.
The killing of people at prayer stunned South African whites with a fresh premonition of the carnage they expect en route to the country's first universal elections next April. But if, as many assumed, the carnage was intended to frighten South Africa off its course of negotiated change, it seemed likely to have just the opposite effect. Negotiators laboring over a constitution say each massacre is another reminder that only a credible, elected government stands a chance of restoring order.
St. James is a congregation more of the future than of the past. It has welcomed worshipers of all races for all of its 25 years, even when the mixed-race residents known as coloreds were being forcibly expelled from the neighborhood in the years of apartheid. The congregation Sunday included whites and blacks, and parishioners of mixed race and Indian heritage. Since President F. W. de Klerk renounced segregation three years ago, the neighborhood and the church have grown more diverse: Miss Harris, a 21-year-old student of English and drama, said her church youth group is two-thirds nonwhite. "It's a place where I feel at home," said Lorenzo Smith, a parishioner of mixed race whose wife died of a shrapnel shard to the heart even though he was sprawled on top of her in the aisle.
The church belongs to a breakaway Anglican denomination that split with the Church of England in the last century and now practices fervent, missionary evangelism. The onslaught Sunday night followed the pattern of other killings in attacks that have laid waste to a golf club, a family steak restaurant, commuters driving their children to school and a hotel bar. A black man in blue overalls burst through the door of the modern pentagonal church and sprayed the pews with an R-4 automatic rifle, the standard military weapon in South Africa and its black homelands.
Then a second assailant stepped up and rolled a grenade beneath the pews -- "like he was bowling," Sean Savage recalled. It exploded under a row of Russian sailors, blowing the legs off one of them and leaving a small crater in the blue carpet. Someone lofted a second grenade into the back rows. This being gun-saturated South Africa, few among the 1,300 worshipers were surprised when one of their number pulled a pistol from the holster tucked in his blue jeans and fired back. He chased the killers out and watched them peel way in an old green Mercedes Benz.
The church today looked like it had been hit by a blood storm. Blood smeared the pews and puddled on the carpet alongside a prayer book cleanly pierced by a single bullet. Outside, survivors filled the vacuum with theories. The leading candidate was the black radical fringe. Some of the earlier attacks on whites have been claimed by the guerrilla wing of the Pan Africanist Congress. Anonymous callers today both asserted and denied responsibility in the name of that organization.
This suggested, painfully, that the church might have been selected because of its outreach in the wretched township of Khayelitsha. An English missionary at St. James was shot in April while organizing a soccer game for children in the township. Others observed that the church -- English-speaking, multiracial -- would be a natural target for white Afrikaner fanatics or malcontents in the state security forces. Still others mused that the church was chosen, as terrorist targets often are, simply to announce that anyone, anywhere is vulnerable.
The images of blood-smeared Bibles may drive more whites to emigrate or seek the solace of the white separatist fringe. But among the parishioners of St. James, the fear was countered by resilience and resignation, some talk that God had ordained them to stay, and a much-discussed appreciation that this is what township blacks face routinely. Pastor Anderson, an intensely calm 35-year-old who last month turned down a minister's job in Raleigh, N.C., said he would do the same if the offer came today.
Jenny Johnston and her husband, Owen, said the subject of emigration had come up again. She said she was still haunted by "the smell of ammunition and damaged bodies," and was terrified for her three children, but was not yet willing to leave. "Even after last night's disaster, this is my country," she said.
Source: New York Times
Absurdly, the first notion that came to Kara-Anne Harris on Sunday night as the killers kicked in the door of St. James Church and blasted worshipers with automatic-rifle fire and grenades was that they were after the Russians. If St. James is a symbol of anything, it may be a kind of openhearted evangelical hospitality, extended to squalid black shacktowns of nearby Khayelitsha township and to homesick fishermen from visiting Russian trawlers.
There were 140 of the seamen sitting with the multiracial congregation at the 7 P.M. service, listening happily to a duet of the gospel tune "More Than Wonderful," when the gore and splinters of pews began to fly. "I wonder if it's because we have Russians in our church," Miss Harris remembered thinking for a moment, before recalling the end of the cold war and chiding herself, "Oh goodness, that would be old." This war, she realized, is against her, people like her, and their half-realized dream of South Africa's future.
The attack, which left 12 worshipers dead (including 3 of the hapless Russians) and more than 50 wounded in the cozy Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth, was the most horrific in the eight months since the opening of a mysterious terrorist war on white suburbia. Except that the killers were black and very efficient, little is known for certain about their identities or motives, leaving white South Africa to its fearful speculations: black militants, hired guns, rogue police or perhaps, as the Rev. Ross Anderson surmised, some diabolical "blood lust" beyond politics.
The killing of people at prayer stunned South African whites with a fresh premonition of the carnage they expect en route to the country's first universal elections next April. But if, as many assumed, the carnage was intended to frighten South Africa off its course of negotiated change, it seemed likely to have just the opposite effect. Negotiators laboring over a constitution say each massacre is another reminder that only a credible, elected government stands a chance of restoring order.
St. James is a congregation more of the future than of the past. It has welcomed worshipers of all races for all of its 25 years, even when the mixed-race residents known as coloreds were being forcibly expelled from the neighborhood in the years of apartheid. The congregation Sunday included whites and blacks, and parishioners of mixed race and Indian heritage. Since President F. W. de Klerk renounced segregation three years ago, the neighborhood and the church have grown more diverse: Miss Harris, a 21-year-old student of English and drama, said her church youth group is two-thirds nonwhite. "It's a place where I feel at home," said Lorenzo Smith, a parishioner of mixed race whose wife died of a shrapnel shard to the heart even though he was sprawled on top of her in the aisle.
The church belongs to a breakaway Anglican denomination that split with the Church of England in the last century and now practices fervent, missionary evangelism. The onslaught Sunday night followed the pattern of other killings in attacks that have laid waste to a golf club, a family steak restaurant, commuters driving their children to school and a hotel bar. A black man in blue overalls burst through the door of the modern pentagonal church and sprayed the pews with an R-4 automatic rifle, the standard military weapon in South Africa and its black homelands.
Then a second assailant stepped up and rolled a grenade beneath the pews -- "like he was bowling," Sean Savage recalled. It exploded under a row of Russian sailors, blowing the legs off one of them and leaving a small crater in the blue carpet. Someone lofted a second grenade into the back rows. This being gun-saturated South Africa, few among the 1,300 worshipers were surprised when one of their number pulled a pistol from the holster tucked in his blue jeans and fired back. He chased the killers out and watched them peel way in an old green Mercedes Benz.
The church today looked like it had been hit by a blood storm. Blood smeared the pews and puddled on the carpet alongside a prayer book cleanly pierced by a single bullet. Outside, survivors filled the vacuum with theories. The leading candidate was the black radical fringe. Some of the earlier attacks on whites have been claimed by the guerrilla wing of the Pan Africanist Congress. Anonymous callers today both asserted and denied responsibility in the name of that organization.
This suggested, painfully, that the church might have been selected because of its outreach in the wretched township of Khayelitsha. An English missionary at St. James was shot in April while organizing a soccer game for children in the township. Others observed that the church -- English-speaking, multiracial -- would be a natural target for white Afrikaner fanatics or malcontents in the state security forces. Still others mused that the church was chosen, as terrorist targets often are, simply to announce that anyone, anywhere is vulnerable.
The images of blood-smeared Bibles may drive more whites to emigrate or seek the solace of the white separatist fringe. But among the parishioners of St. James, the fear was countered by resilience and resignation, some talk that God had ordained them to stay, and a much-discussed appreciation that this is what township blacks face routinely. Pastor Anderson, an intensely calm 35-year-old who last month turned down a minister's job in Raleigh, N.C., said he would do the same if the offer came today.
Jenny Johnston and her husband, Owen, said the subject of emigration had come up again. She said she was still haunted by "the smell of ammunition and damaged bodies," and was terrified for her three children, but was not yet willing to leave. "Even after last night's disaster, this is my country," she said.
Source: New York Times
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