Vlakplaas: Apartheid Death Squads, 1979–1994

Faced with the total onslaught by its enemies, in 1979, Apartheid South Africa established Vlakplaas lit. shallow farm, a 100-hectare farm nestling in the hills outside Pretoria on the Hennops River as a secret operation under the arm of C1, a counter-terrorism division of the South African Police headed by Brigadier Schoon.

The first phase of Vlakplaas operations, up until 1989, was aimed at fighting the enemy: the armed wings of the liberation movements, the African National Congresss Umkhonto we Sizwe (or MK), the Pan Africanist Congresss Azanian Peoples Liberation Army (or APLA) and the South African Communist Party. The second phase was fighting organized crime in which Vlakplaas itself seamlessly adopted the mantle of organized crime in the notorious downtown area of Johannesburgs Hillbrow.

The final phase, the most destructive, was as the murky Third Force that destabilized the country in an orgy of violence in the run-up to its first democratic elections, in 1994. Operating within South Africa as well as beyond the countrys borders, it will never been known how many victims can be attributed to the Vlakplaas agenda with much of the execution taking place on the farm itself but a conservative figure of 1,000 murders and assassinations has been mooted.

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