De Klerk should have prosecuted Cradock Four killers, says Holomisa

DIRECT ORDERS

- BRANDON NEL

THE murders of the Cradock Four were deliberate and premeditated, carried out on the direct orders of apartheid’s top security bosses, who killed anyone they did not like.

This was the view of Deputy Defence Minister and former chair of the Transkei Defence Force, Bantu Holomisa, who testified at the reopened Cradock Four inquest in Gqeberha yesterday.

The Cradock Four — Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sicelo Mhlauli and Sparrow Mkonto — were anti-apartheid activists from the Eastern Cape town of Cradock, now known as Nxuba.

They were abducted by security police in June 1985 after leaving a political meeting in Gqeberha. Days later, their bodies were found. It emerged in the Gqeberha High Court yesterday that while serving as a senior officer in the Transkei Defence Force at the time, Holomisa came across a secret military communication known as “the signal”.

The document, circulated among apartheid security officials, instructed that three Eastern Cape activists — Goniwe, Calata and Goniwe — be “permanently removed from society”.

He decided to leak the document to the media in 1992, believing that the public deserved to know how these murders had been approved at the highest level.