Talking of monsters, rumor has it that PM Ariel Sharon has hired your friend, Dr Wouter Basson from South Africa to deal with the Palestinian problem....
Johannesburg, South Africa. October 5, 1999
The deeds of Dr Death
His career reads like a cross between a Nazi plot and a James Bond movie. He ran South Africa's chemical weapons project, is said to have butchered hundreds, dealt in drugs and laced one victim's underpants with poison. CHRIS MCGREAL on the trial of the man who has become known as the latterday Joseph Mengele.
ON Friday, Dr Wouter Basson was at his operating table in Pretoria Academic Hospital, cleaning globules of fat from the heart canals of some over-indulged South African
executive. Yesterday morning, a notably less confident Basson was marched up from the cells in
the Pretoria High Court to face the last big apartheid-era trial.
The balding, 49-year-old army brigadier and respected heart surgeon is accused of an array of
crimes so wide that it is hard to believe one man could have had the time to commit them all. He
has been called "Dr Death" and compared to Joseph Mengele of Auschwitz. The 67 charges
include the murders of at least 229 people, gruesome medical experiments on prisoners, the theft
of millions of pounds from the government and drug dealing. But the only people who turned up to
protest outside the court yesterday were anti-vivisectionists who objected to his experiments on
baboons.
The details of the charges are often bizarre. There are shades of James Bond in the
poison-tipped umbrellas; of Frankenstein in the weird experiments aimed at reducing the black
birth rate; and warped echoes of the Beatles in Basson's production of ecstasy as a "love drug"
aimed at pacifying unruly mobs.
But the most sinister aspect of Basson's work - the doomsday biological and chemical weapons
he claims to have cooked up in government laboratories for apartheid regimes - is not part of the
charge sheet. Nonetheless, it promises to be very much part of the trial.
The state has 30 trunks of evidence against the cardiologist, and about 250 witnesses. Many of
them are technical experts but a few are Basson's former colleagues who have promised to sell
him out in return for immunity from prosecution.
Among them is Dr Niel Knobel, the military's surgeon general who was his nominal boss at the
chemical and biological research station. Earlier this year, Basson participated in a heart
operation on Knobel, even though it was already known he was to be a prosecution witness.
In court yesterday, Basson was agitated. After a tea break he refused to emerge until the
photographers had been cleared. He sat, scowled and looked no more relaxed when proceedings
were adjourned for two days to allow the judge to ponder technical arguments about the evidence
and charges. The man who was once President PW Botha's cardiologist is now free on £4,000
bail. Because he still works for the government, it is paying his legal expenses and providing him
with a bodyguard.
Basson appears to have led a triple life. He ran Project Coast, the government's highly secret
chemical and biological warfare programme. He also worked with a covert group of government
assassins, codenamed Barnacle. And he was allegedly raking in a fortune by spending the
state's money on himself. But the final twist may be that the cover for it all - the chemical and
biological warfare research - was a huge sham.
Basson has portrayed himself as a foot soldier of apartheid, no different from the policemen who
banged on doors to haul off activists, or the bureaucrats who assigned racial categories. "My
defence in court will be the truth. Whatever I did, I did because it was correct at the time," he
told the Mail on Sunday earlier this year. "I'm not going to say I did it because I was told to.
Some of it I wasn't. I am not going to hide. It was my job and whatever I did was not wrong. I am
surprised and amazed at the hysteria surrounding my case."
The covert military unit called Barnacle was formed in the early 80s to eliminate enemies of
South Africa's white government. Mostly Basson supplied the poisons. Many of those who
carried out the killings had served the former Rhodesia's embattled white regime.
According to the 270-page indictment, Basson had more than a passing interest in the effects of
the toxins. Particular favourites of his were muscle relaxants which, when given to victims in
large doses, caused their lungs to collapse and induced suffocation. The charge sheet alleges
that around 1980, Basson provided the toxins to kill 200 Namibian Swapo guerrillas fighting for
independence from South Africa. "An aircraft was purchased for the purpose of disposing the
bodies in the sea."
Basson supplied quantities of Tuberine and Scoline, muscle relaxants which in overdose would
cause suffocation. "Basson requested feedback about the affectivity of the substances," the
indictment reads.
Dr Jack Bothma, an orthopaedic surgeon who fled to Canada, is expected to testify that he
handcuffed five men to trees and rubbed a poisoned gel into their bodies on the orders of Basson,
who was allegedly experimenting with a new means of killing people. When it failed to have the
desired result, the men were murdered with muscle relaxants. Bothma has turned states
evidence in return for immunity from prosecution for the murders. His licence to practice
medicine in Canada was recently revoked after he failed the qualification exam.
In many cases, the naked bodies of the victims were dumped at sea from a plane. Basson is
alleged to have sometimes gone along for the ride. On other occasions the corpses were
disposed of in blast furnaces or shallow graves.
Among the more elaborate murder plots was an attempt to kill the former head of the South
African Council of Churches, Frank Chikane, by lacing his underpants with poison. Basson
provided a powder that was sprinkled on the garment after his luggage was opened at
Johannesburg airport. The Rev Chikane survived and is now a key aide to President Thabo Mbeki.
Basson is also accused of attempting to murder two ANC activists, Ronnie Kasrils and Dullah
Omar, in London. They survived and are now cabinet ministers in South Africa. They were to
have been injected with poison from a syringe disguised as a screwdriver, but the scientist
assigned to do it almost stabbed himself instead and then lost his nerve and threw the syringe in
the Thames.
Last year, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard that Basson was part of a thwarted
plan to poison Nelson Mandela when he was a prisoner. Despite the bungled murder attempts,
the government awarded Basson the Order of the Southern Cross .
[snip]
mg.co.za
Now Sharon's campaign slogan makes sense: Only Sharon can bring Peace!.... peace of the graveyard, that is LOL! |
