SA Communist Party did not advocate suicide – Kasrils

South African Communist Party recruits such as the late Ahmed Timol were trained to look forward to imprisonment as part of the struggle, and were definitely not encouraged to commit suicide, former intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils has testified.

Kasrils, who was part of the ANC and SACP’s top structure in the apartheid years, testified in the reopened inquest into Timol’s death 46 years ago after he plunged out of a 10-story window at John Vorster Square while in the custody of the security police.

The first inquest into his death found that he had committed suicide, partly because he feared 20 years’ imprisonment. The finding was also based on a communist document purporting to promote suicide rather than to betray the organisation.

Kasrils, who had never met Timol, testified the young teacher would have been recruited as a member of the SACP while he was in London. He was sent back to start a small underground cell of the SACP in South Africa.

He said although Timol may have been trained in the use of bucket bombs to distribute communist propaganda pamphlets in South Africa, he was not involved in that particular successful campaign, although the security police believed they had caught a big fish responsible for it.

If Dr Salim Essop, who was caught with Timol, had been mistreated in custody, Timol’s torture would have been even greater because Essop had never been outside the country, while Timol had. They would have regarded Timol as a really important catch and a way to explain the embarrassing distribution of pamphlets, he said.

The material used in the pamphlets was smuggled into South Africa by volunteers – often as part of letters from outside and using secret forms of invisible writing – and then reproduced locally.

As part of the campaign, the SACP managed to distribute hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, which took the security police by surprise, and they had no idea who was responsible until the arrest of Timol and others in 1971.

Kasrils said although he had not trained Timol himself, recruits were trained on what to do in case they were caught, tortured and tried, and were taught to try to hold out and not divulge sensitive information for as long as possible to give their comrades a chance to escape.

They were taught about the different forms of torture they might face and the methods used by the security police. The whole aim was to strengthen the moral fibre of the individual, but they were taught not to be heroes and rather make a run for it if possible.

Escaping definitely did not include jumping from a 10-story window and committing suicide rather than betraying the organisation, or people like Nelson Mandela would have attempted something like that.

He said recruits were prepared to see a possible long-term sentence as a badge of honour and to use their time in prison among compatriots to better themselves.

Asked to look at a document, supposedly issued by the “Communist Party of South Africa”, Kasrils said parts of the document appeared to be authentic, and he had authored some of it, but it was clear that some outside hand had added paragraphs at the bottom that were definitely fake.

He said insiders knew the name of the organisation had changed to the SACP, but a security policeman might not have been aware of it. The grammatical mistakes in those paragraphs also had the appearance of translations an Afrikaans-speaking person would use.

The SACP would never have included names in documents meant to be distributed to the public, and would also never have included the name of someone who had been kicked out of the SACP as one of their struggle heroes, nor would such a document have contained a name at the bottom, he added.

He said the security police had confiscated typewriters during raids on anti-apartheid activists and would have been able to use one of those typewriters to add the fake paragraphs.

Businessman Ali Thokan testified he was putting in petrol at a filling station across from John Vorster Square on the morning of October 29, 2017, when he heard a thud and a pedestrian saying someone had fallen from John Vorster Square.

Although he could not see the body, he immediately tried to approach to see if he could help, but had not even crossed the road when he was shooed away by policemen in plainclothes, who told him to “f*** off”.

He was adamant the incident happened in the morning, although all police statements about the incident indicated that Timol had fallen at about 4pm.

The inquest continues.

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