Verwoerd’s killer a freedom fighter?

Group wants Dimitri Tsafendas hailed as struggle hero

Former justice Zak Yacoob Former minister Ronnie Kasrils A RESEARCHER based in Britain has spent most of the past decade working to rewrite part of South Africa’s history.

Harris Dousemetzis, a doctoral student at Durham University, said Dimitri Tsafendas — who assassinated prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd 50 years ago this week by stabbing him to death in parliament — faked his mental illness and should be honoured as a freedom fighter.

Dousemetzis has trawled through archives in Pretoria, Portugal, Mozambique, Canada, the US and Germany — all places Tsafendas visited. He has read more than 2 000 documents and interviewed 200 people who knew Tsafendas.

At his trial, the former parliamentary messenger was declared insane after claiming he had acted on the instructions of his talking tapeworm.

But in his first statement to police, on September 11 1966, Tsafendas said: ‘‘I did not care about the consequences, what would happen to me afterwards. I was so disgusted with the racial policy that I went through with my plans to kill the prime minister.”

He died at Sterkfontein Psychiatric Hospital in Krugersdorp in 1999. Former prisoner Alex Moumbaris Attorney Krish Govender ’INVISIBLE MAN’: Dimitri Tsafendas, who died in 1999

Dousemetzis has consulted previously classified state documents that he said showed that Tsafendas was a radical communist fighting against regimes in South Africa and his native Mozambique.

And he hopes that when he concludes his study in a few months, it will prove that South Africa’s longest-serving political prisoner should be honoured. Ad hoc judge John Dugard

Struggle activists, Tsafendas’s friends, psychologists who studied the early medical reports, former Constitutional Court justice Zak Yacoob and priests in whom Tsafendas confided support Dousemetzis’s findings.

They plan to petition the Justice Department to recognise Tsafendas posthumously as a struggle hero.

Anti-apartheid lawyer John Dugard, who sits as a judge ad hoc in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, said Dousemetzis’s research “shows — convincingly — that Tsafendas was a political revolutionary whose assassination of Verwoerd was motivated by a hatred of Verwoerd and all he stood for. He was not an insane killer but a political assassin determined to rid South Africa of the architect of apartheid. Dousemetzis has done South Africa a service by correcting the historical record.”

Dugard said it was in the apartheid regime’s interest to portray Tsafendas as insane. It “wished to suggest that no one in his right mind could kill such a wonderful leader as Hendrik Verwoerd”.

Former intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils said Dousemetzis’s work was ‘‘incredible”.

“The powers of the day sought to portray Tsafendas as a crazy man, and what we now can see and the country needs to know is that the man was motivated with good intentions and that he was a communist.”

Kasrils said Tsafendas should have been pardoned back in 1994.

“What we have is an invisible man. We have an unmarked grave at Sterkfontein . . . his name should be on the wall of Freedom Park.”

Former Durban state attorney Krish Govender, who in 1996 attempted to get amnesty for Tsafendas from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said the research would make an important contribution to the country’s history.

“Society should recognise the heroism of Tsafendas and his place in history should be in the category of a freedom fighter and he should be honoured,” said Govender.

SACP deputy general secretary Solly Mapaila said he would propose that the party induct Tsafendas as a honorary member.

Former prisoner Alex Moumbaris spent three months in the cell at Pretoria Central Prison next to Tsafendas. Moumbaris, who now lives in France, said Tsafendas was the ‘‘most heroic person” he had ever come across.

When Tsafendas died in 1999, the 10 people who attended his funeral included his best friend Patrick O’Ryan, the only man he had confided in about the tapeworm idea. O’Ryan, who died in 2006, testified at Tsafendas’s trial that he was insane. Tsafendas later told a priest that O’Ryan’s testimony saved his life.

But not all researchers agreed that Tsafendas was faking it. In a 1997 newspaper article about meeting Tsafendas, reporter David Beresford wrote: “[He] is mad. There may be argument about degrees of madness. And, more importantly, the dates of his madness. But the official record shows that he has been mad since he was defined, declared and condemned as such.”

He also wrote that if Tsafendas had not been insane before the trial, “the state did its best to make sure he became mad in the years that followed”. See Page 11