[DEBATE] : (Fwd) RW Johnson's claims

[Patrick Bond]

Cutting it

David Beresford finds a troubling reliance on gossip in this chronicle 
of the Rainbow Nation
The Guardian, Saturday 16 May 2009

Johnson is an ace at "the cuttings job". There are a couple of 
principles of which a good cuttings writer should be aware. One is to 
beware of plagiarism. Johnson is obviously alert to this, devoting more 
than 1,500 footnotes - mostly references to newspapers - to defences 
against any such charge.

A second principle is that dead men cannot sue and may therefore be 
vilified to one's heart's content. An example is the murder in 1977 of 
Dr Robert Smit and his wife at their Pretoria home. The killing of this 
National Party parliamentary candidate and former South African 
representative to the IMF is one of South Africa's most baffling 
unsolved crimes, but Johnson manages to solve it in a single paragraph. 
The assassin, he announces, was a "legendary special forces agent", one 
Tai Minaar. "It seems clear that he (Smit) was murdered at the behest of 
the state president, Nico Diederichs, who as finance minister had 
creamed off millions into a Swiss bank account which Smit was about to 
expose," he adds. Needless to say, both Diederichs and Minaar are dead 
and cannot sue.

Another who suffers criticism is Joe Modise, South Africa's former 
minister of defence and one-time commander in chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe 
(MK), the military wing of the ANC, who is also dead. Modise always 
struck me as a bit of a fool. Johnson, however, paints him as a rough, 
tough killer who, among other things, had been "primarily responsible 
for the brutal torture inflicted on MK dissidents in camps such as 
Quatro" (though control of the detention camps fell under the department 
of security and intelligence of which - so far as I am aware - Modise 
was not a member).

Johnson also accuses Modise of the murder of Chris Hani, the likeable 
leader of the South African Communist Party shot dead by a Polish 
immigrant with anti-communist leanings. "Everything points to Modise," 
says Johnson. "He alone had a compelling motive to kill Hani, the 
seniority as MK commander to represent his decisions as those of the ANC 
and the necessary acess to MK intelligence to play a role from the 
shadows," he adds. "He was, moreover, a man who had frequently had 
people killed and who had already once tried to kill Hani."

Johnson makes the allegation on the basis that in 1968 a group of MK 
commanders, including Hani, publicly denounced the army leadership for 
corruption, and Modise later voted for Hani's death. Hani was 
assassinated in 1993.

But the dead are not the only people Johnson attacks. He writes: "not 
only was (Robert) Mugabe one of the few people given a fore-warning of 
the events of 9/11, but he had actually allowed al-Qaeda militants to 
fly into Zimbabwe in the week following 9/11 to get fitted out with 
false Zimbabwean passports", thus suggesting that Mugabe was an 
accomplice before and after the fact in the destruction of the twin 
towers. Turning to the relevant footnote for the source of this 
mind-boggling claim, I read:
"See RW Johnson".