From: Boyle, Francis > fboyle@law.uiuc.edu                                                        Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 1:53 PM

To: 'AALS Section on Minority Grps. mailing list' (E-mail)                                  Subject: FW: Biowar in Apartheid South Africa

Dear Colleagues: I am circulating this not only to further document the international crimes of apartheid, but also because of the U.S. Government's involvement therein. (See my Defending Civil Resistance under International Law, at Amazon.com for $10). Basson rarely presented himself as a military man. At times, he was a medical researcher - that worked well enough, in 1984, to persuade the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, to send eight shipments of Ebola, Marburg, and Rift Valley viruses to South Africa (and, thus, to Roodeplaat), according to "Plague Wars," a recent book by Tom Mangold......

Francis A. Boyle  Law Building,  504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.  Champaign, IL 61820 USA

217-333-7954(voice)       217-244-1478(fax)

South Africans call him Dr. Death. He is regularly compared by the local press, never very persuasively, to Josef Mengele. His name is Wouter Basson. He's a decorated former Army brigadier and, in civilian life, an eminent cardiologist, and he was the founder and leader of Project Coast, a top-secret chemical and biological-warfare program that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called "the most diabolical aspect of apartheid." This theological metaphor gets closer to the truth about Wouter Basson, who, in his smooth impenitence and incorrigibility, seems at times like an Afrikaner Mephistopheles.

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which Tutu chairs, and which has been giving victims and perpetrators of violence under apartheid an opportunity to speak publicly - seeking acknowledgment and forgiveness, respectively - held a special round of hearings on Project Coast in 1998. Some of the project's top scientists testified. Some applied for amnesty from prosecution in exchange for describing their activities. Tutu later wrote that he found their stories "devastating" and "shattering." There were revelations of research into a race-specific bacterial weapon; a project to find ways to sterilize the country's black population; discussions of deliberate spreading of cholera through the water supply; large-scale production of dangerous drugs; the fatal poisoning of anti-apartheid leaders, captured guerrillas, and suspected security risks; even a plot to slip thallium, a toxic heavy metal that can permanently impair brain function, into Nelson Mandela's medication before his release from prison in 1990.

Wouter Basson appeared before the commission, but he rejected with contempt its offers of amnesty. And so, in October, 1999, Basson went on trial in Pretoria High Court, charged with sixty-seven counts of murder, conspiracy to murder, drug offenses, and fraud. A Johannesburg newspaper recently called the Basson trial "the most sensational showcase of apartheid-era atrocities in South African legal history." The trial is expected to last two years. Since Mandela's election and the end of white-minority rule, in 1990, there have been a few successful prosecutions of members of the state-backed death squads that savaged the democracy movement during the last decade of apartheid - men whose crimes were too horrendous to be amnestied. But these were all policemen. The South African military, which was involved in countless extrajudicial killings both in the country's dirty war and in massive campaigns to destabilize its neighbors, has proved a

And so Project Coast, because it employed civilian scientists who do not feel bound by the military's code of silence, is now the post-apartheid state's best hope of exposing some of the South African Army's war against its own people. Basson relied on a global network of spies, ex-soldiers, sanctions busters, smugglers, and biowarriors to obtain the chemicals, toxins, viral cultures, specialized equipment, and expertise necessary to develop his program - and then, according to witnesses, on a string of assassins to deliver the goods - and some of the main figures in that network have also proved willing (or have been compelled) to testify against him.

At the trial, Basson sits alone at the end of a long table. Dapper in a black jacket and gray slacks, he looks alert, relaxed, his back to the public gallery, taking notes, and passing messages to his advocates, whom read them carefully. He is fifty, slightly built, with erect posture, a neatly trimmed beard, an unturned nose, and a wreath of mousy hair around a big, smooth dome. It takes imagination to reconcile this distinguished-looking physician with the bloodthirsty, subhuman beast ("the evil Einstein") that snarls its way through the South African press.

Basson came to public notice in 1997, when he was arrested for allegedly selling a thousand capsules of Ecstasy to a police informant. Until then, he seemed to be enjoying a brilliant medical and military career. Raised in Cape Town in an upwardly mobile family - his father was a police colonelmand Rugby official, his mother an office secretary and opera singer - he had been drafted into the Army as a medical student. A fast-rising major at thirty, a cardiologist, and a paratrooper, Basson, in 1981, founded and commanded the Seventh Medical Battalion, a pioneering unit that gave medical and military support to special forces fighting behind enemy lines in the clandestine wars that South Africa waged in Angola, Mozambique, and Namibia.

He ingratiated himself with some of the country's most powerful men, and was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross. But his exploits as a biowarrior, spy, and alleged war criminal remained largely unknown - before and after the transition to democracy - until that unlikely Ecstasy bust in a public park across from his house in Pretoria. It was strange enough that a cardiologist of his stature should be dealing street drugs - assuming, that is, that he was not framed by the authorities, as some people believe. Stranger by far was what the police found at his house: two padlocked steel trunks (they late found a third) containing the history in documents of Project Coast. Basson had been ordered to destroy these records - after overseeing their transfer onto CD-ROMs that went into a safe to which the President of South Africa had one of only two keys. Basson had obviously double-crossed his bosses. Several investigate bodies pored over the thousands of pages of documents in the trunks. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's special hearings on Project Coast were a direct result of this discovery, as were most of the criminal charges eventually brought against Basson.

South Africans are following the Basson trial closely, and so are international agencies and nonprofit groups working to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Many foreign governments are also nervously watching, for the trial threatens to expose not only the frightening permeability of the world of doomsday science and outlawed weaponry but a maze of deeply embarrassing connections between the apartheid regime's chemical- and biological-warfare program and the intelligence services of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, Croatia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, and an unknown number of other countries. Some multinational chemical and pharmaceuticals companies are also said to be sleeping poorly.

Curiously for this quintessentially New South Africa trial, the scene in the courtroom is pure Old South Africa. Anyone with any standing or authority is white. Virtually everyone, for that matter, is Afrikaans - the judge, the prosecutors, the defense team, the defendant, the court reporter, the minor court officials, even Basson's state-supplied bodyguard. Nearly all the proceedings are conducted in Afrikaans - a language inseparable, in the minds of most South Africans , from the apartheid state. There is no jury, and yet the judge, who will decide the case alone, seems to be nothing if not a peer of Basson's. His name is Willie Hartzenberg, and he, too, was a faithful pillar of the former regime. Red-robed and white-haired, he runs his court with gruff good humor, adjourning, as he always has, at noon on Thursdays in favor of his golf game. Although the "negotiated revolution" that brought democracy to South Africa in 1994 precluded a purge of the apartheid state, Judge Hartzenberg's courtroom seems, at least, to a visitor, starkly out of place today.