Former Minister of Public Order, he is one of the rare senior officials of the racist regime to have been the subject of prosecution and had been sentenced in 2007 for attempted murder on an opponent. He died at 85 years old.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
He was one of the dreaded figures of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Adriaan Vlok, former Minister of Public Order of the country, died Sunday at 85 years in a hospital near Pretoria.
At the end of the 1980s, Mr. Vlok supervised bomb attacks against churches and unions. “I thought apartheid was right,” he told AFP during a meeting in 2015. “It was our job to inspire people.”
Having become an old man with a stripping skull plagued by remorse, he then distributed pies, sandwiches and cakes to the deprived population of a township, example of these apartheid creations installed on the outskirts of big cities for Separate the black population from the white population.
“I am ashamed of many things that I have done”
Adriaan Vlok, one of the rare senior officials of the South African racist regime to have been the subject of prosecution, was sentenced in 2007 to ten years in prison suspended for attempted murder on a notorious opponent. He had tried to poison, eighteen years earlier, the Reverend Frank Chikane then at the head of a point organization in the fight against apartheid, by distilling poison in the latter’s underwear.
“I am ashamed of many things I have done,” he said to his conviction, admitting that his commitment to the segregationist regime was “a mistake”. The former minister asked his victims publicly, going so far as to wash the feet of the Reverend Chikane. This is seen as an attempt to obtain a redemption or, for its detractors, like a coarse tactic to avoid revealing the extent of the abuses committed by the police.
To shed light on the regime’s abuses, the government of Nelson Mandela from the first multiracial elections, in 1994, had set up a truth and reconciliation commission, which guaranteed amnesty to political violence in exchange for ‘Complete confessions.
There are few, however, of having lent themselves to exercise. A tiny proportion of cases led to a trial and many voices criticize an “unfinished mission” to heal the wounds of apartheid.