OBITUARY | Adriaan Vlok: Apartheid-era police minister who washed others’ feet and his own hands

Adriaan Vlok, who has died in Centurion at the age of 85, was apartheid SA’s minister of law and order under whose watch human rights abuses were committed against countless anti-apartheid activists, including kidnappings, torture, assassinations by police hit squads and bombings.

In spite of widely publicised acts of redemption after 1994 when, shattered by the suicide of his wife Corrie, he became a born-again Christian and his thoughts turned increasingly to the Day of Judgment, he consistently denied personal knowledge or involvement in atrocities.

It was a position he brazenly stuck to even after becoming the only apartheid-era cabinet minister to agree to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1997.

He applied for and received amnesty for his participation in the bombing of the Khotso House headquarters of the SA Council of Churches (SACC) in 1988.

At the time he accused pregnant activist Shirley Gunn, who had long been a thorn in the government’s side, and had her arrested and jailed with her then one-year-old son. When she complained about the appalling conditions, the child was forcibly taken from her and recordings of his crying for her were used during her interrogation to force her to confess.

After her release almost a year later it was discovered that Vlok’s police were responsible and she won a R70,000 out of court settlement from him for framing her.

After the TRC concluded that he had personally “decided to use explosives” to destroy the building, he denied in an interview that he had given any such order. He merely told his police commissioner he had to make a plan.

“And a couple of months later they blew it up,” he told US magazine The New Republic, sounding shocked.

“I went up to him and said, ‘Hey, why did you blow it up?’ He said: ‘What else were we supposed to do? Should we have painted it black so they couldn’t find it in the evenings?’.”

Vlok did not accept responsibility for much else. During questioning before the TRC he acknowledged that decisions had been made for political enemies to be “permanently removed from society, eliminated and neutralised”.

But if the foot soldiers had interpreted those as orders to torture and kill, they had seriously misunderstood him, Vlok insisted, leaving TRC panel members “rolling their eyes”, according to a report in the New York Times.

Nine years later Vlok read an article by a pastor in Pretoria about the ritual of foot-washing and its power to bring healing and reconciliation to the soul and decided to try it out on Rev Frank Chikane, who had been the troublesome leader of the SACC when Vlok had it bombed.

On August 1 2006 Vlok presented himself at the Union Buildings, where Chikane was former president Thabo Mbeki’s chief of staff, to seek penitence for trying to have him murdered, though typically, he refused to accept personal responsibility.

On being ushered into a puzzled Chikane’s office, Vlok, lost for words, handed him a Bible where he had written on the flyleaf: “I have sinned against the Lord and against you. Will you forgive me?”

Then he hauled a rag and bowl from his briefcase, got on his knees and stuttered, “Frank, please, would you allow me to wash your feet?”

In 1989 Vlok’s policemen broke into Chikane’s suitcase at Johannesburg airport, where he had checked in for a flight to Namibia, and laced his underpants with a highly toxic insecticide which almost killed him.

When Vlok’s act of repentance hit local and international headlines after Chikane suggested they make it public so that it could help the national healing process, Vlok insisted he had not been aware of the specifics of the plot and had been horrified when he found out.

“If you wanted to shoot a man, that would have been OK, but don’t put poison in his underwear.”

In 2007 Vlok received a 10-year suspended prison sentence under a plea bargain by admitting he had ordered the security police to kill Chikane.

He also, in the name of repentance, washed the feet of the mothers and widows of the “Mamelodi 10” who were murdered by police after being lured into an ambush, without explicitly admitting personal responsibility.

He admitted to signing letters of congratulation to police officers later accused of executions and using words such as “eliminate” to encourage action against political activists, but insisted he had no knowledge of the details of these operations and never ordered them to kill anyone.

He said he only gave vague guidelines, such as, “You must do something,” which they took as a licence to commit atrocities. But in 2009 he washed the feet of 13 former police officers to apologise for leading them on to “the wrong path”.

Vlakplaas death squad commander Eugene de Kock was not having any of it when Vlok came to see him in jail, hoping he had assuaged his conscience. According to Vlok’s own account, he cried out: “Eugene, did I ever tell you to kill somebody?”

“No”, De Kock replied. “But you gave me a medal when I killed them.”

Vlok was born in the Northern Cape town of Sutherland on December 11 1937 and grew up on a smallholding on the Orange River. He dreamed of going into law and becoming a judge, but after he matriculated at Keimoes High School in 1956 his parents could not afford to finance his legal studies.

He got a job in the magistrate's office in Upington. From 1959 to 1966 he worked in Pretoria as a filing clerk in the department of justice while studying for an attorney’s diploma at the University of Pretoria, which he received in 1962. He loved the discipline and order of filing and said later that he saw apartheid as “just a grand social filing system” where every group of people “had their place”.

He did his job well and eventually became assistant private secretary to then prime minister John Vorster. In 1974 he was elected MP for Verwoerdburg. Ten years later he was appointed deputy defence minister and in 1985 deputy minister of law and order, where he was responsible for the suppression and detention of about 30,000 people during the states of emergency.

Cry Freedom bombings

In 1987 he ordered the bombing of theatres showing Cry Freedom, the movie about black consciousness leader Steve Biko, assassinated by the police 10 years before.

In February 1988 he banned 17 extraparliamentary anti-apartheid organisations, including the United Democratic Front, the National Education Crisis Committee, the Release Mandela Campaign and the Soweto Civic Association.

The closest he came to apologising to Gunn for framing her for the Khotso House bombing and throwing her and her baby boy Haroon into jail was at the TRC amnesty hearing which she attended in Pretoria. He stared at the commissioners in front of her and said he was “sorry for what happened to Shirley and Haroon”.

After the great public success of his Chikane feet-washing exercise he flew to Cape Town to wash Gunn’s feet in front of a packed audience, but she said she had to wait until he had washed the feet of everybody else in the country whose lives he had destroyed.

He did not say anything, just looked stunned. And he never apologised to her.

He is survived by his wife Antoinette and three children.

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