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Forging signatures and playing “dirty tricks” with the full knowledge of the government is what Paul Erasmus took part in when he served as a field worker as part of the apartheid security branch, in which he served for 17 years.
Erasmus took to the stand today in the second sitting of the reopened inquest into the death of activist and struggle icon Ahmed Timol, who was held at John Vorster Square police station and was said to have jumped to his death in October 1971.
His family, after relentless investigations into his death, approached the National Prosecuting Authority to reopen the inquest. They believe that Timol was tortured and pushed to his death from the 10th floor.
Erasmus was stationed on the ninth floor of the building, he said in the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria this morning.
Wearing a leather jacket, Erasmus sat with a head of grey-silver hair as he confessed to his role in undermining the liberation movement as an apartheid-era policeman.
“I witnessed the first ever torture on the 10th floor; a man’s testicles were being crushed,” he said.
According to Erasmus, his role was more of a “common assault” one, in which he inflicted fear into detainees by “slapping” them, but he was never at the forefront of being an investigator, which is what occurred on the 10th floor.
Sleep deprivation was one of the main methods of torture used in order to gain information from detainees.
“Meals were given to them at irregular times and this used to mess with their psyche. Then there used to be the good-guy bad-guy thing where one police officer would go in and beat up the person and then the good cop would go in and tell the detainee that ‘no man you can’t go on like this, just tell us the truth’,” he said.
Erasmus said that these torture methods worked and he had been witness to numerous torture sessions.
Under the police security unit of Stratcom, Erasmus played a significant role in trying to create ructions within the ANC and any other parties who went against the apartheid rule at the time.
Erasmus was asked to draw posters which “suspiciously appeared overnight all over South Africa”.
Forgery
“I spent many hours, much to the mirth of my commanding officers, practising Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s signature. Which was used on many occasions, one of which when my commanders came to me one day with a letter…”
Erasmus explained that all post entering and leaving South Africa at the time was channelled through Jeppe Street Post Office, which housed retired security staff policemen in its basement who sifted through letters, as they looked for any sort of threat to the apartheid-led government.
Mail men
“All the mail was examined and anything of possible security interest was taken, placed in huge wool bags, driven down the road into John Vorster Square into the basement and kept on the ground floor where there was an assembly line of old policemen with kettles steaming open envelopes,” he said.
Erasmus said that an American woman had written to Tutu, offering money to him for philanthropic purposes, for an undisclosed amount.
“That letter never went back to her, but what did go back to her was a letter that I forged, that said: Dear so and so … We resent you, white capitalist, interfering in our internal affairs. Thank you very much but we don’t need your money.”
The aim of this was to stop any funding going back into the liberation struggle.
‘Little Hitler’
As Erasmus described the various torture methods that were used at John Vorster Square, he said that the security branch was headed by Arthur Benoni Cronwright, who was “absolutely mentally unstable”.
Cronwright was known among the various police officers as “Little Hitler”, because of the torture methods he instituted, including electric shock.
“He was totally fanatical,” Erasmus said.
A first-hand witness to Timol’s death also took to the stand, saying that he had seen Timol fall from the building. Ernest Matthers told the court that he was standing a “distance from the window and I saw a person fall and then he landed in a prone position with his arm bent beyond his head and I looked up and couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t see an open window”.
Erasmus had previously testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he was granted amnesty for his role as an apartheid-era police officer.
This week’s sitting is set to shed some much-needed light into the operational conditions at John Vorster Square, which could lead to more information into the circumstances surrounding Timol’s death.
