IN preparing this dossier, APN received massive assistance from an old friend, General Tienie Groenewald, former chief of SA military intelligence, now with the Freedom Front and one of the former SADF heavyweights now advising and assisting farmers in setting up self-protection systems. Here is my interview with him:

"Teachers were necklaced. We had the hugely destructive ‘No education before liberation’ slogans. Many children were raised in terror camps. We had so much violent street theatre . . . Winnie Mandela and her boxes of matches. People were persuaded that violence was acceptable, were psyched up to kill. To make SA ‘ungovernable’ workers were motivated to destroy the economy. COSATU organised endless strikes, stayaways and ‘rolling mass action,’ all designed to cripple mining, industry and commerce. The international community was motivated to impose sanctions.

"All this was classic communist strategy, dictated by the Marxian doctrine that, to create the grand catastrophe that would bring forth utopia, capitalism had to be discredited, the economy disrupted, jobs lost, the people reduced to want, misery and anger, so ensuring popular support for the revolution. Additionally, they were taught to hate - with a fury.

"As the fallout from that ideological warfare, SA today has a lethal mix on its hands: people who used terror, crime and violence to achieve their political objectives; a crisis of expectation among millions of Blacks which has been replaced by a crisis of frustration. We suffer advanced moral decay in society; the collapse of the criminal justice system; easy access to illegal firearms; all aggravated by the government having allowed millions of illegals into the country. Further, by its "progressive" labour and social legislation - one example, Parliament’s approval of the most ‘advanced’ pornography and obscenity laws in the world - the ANC/SACP has created great moral confusion, disrupting long-established social patterns and behavioural standards.

All immensely compounded by the prodigious disintegration of the security forces? - "A disaster. At least 70% of the SA Police Service today is completely incompetent: untrained, illiterate, undisciplined, many forming part of the whole criminal establishment: a surely predictable aftermath of a sudden amalgamation of returned MK/APLA bush fighters and police units from the old TBVC and national states fused into the SAPS/SANDF, chaos further enhanced by loss of great numbers of the most skilled and experienced personnel.

"The functioning 30% must be further extensively used to control, monitor and check the 70% who can’t do their jobs, as well as re-doing all that they have done. The sequel is that even among the efficient 30%, morale is low, they have little pride in the police service and they simply cannot do all that is expected of them.

"All this impacts on other departments. A key reason for the atrophy of our courts is that case dockets are so incompetently completed that they simply don’t stand up in hearings. Another factor contributing to the police meltdown is the influence of the radical unions. No disciplinary action can be taken against the 70% because they are protected by the trade unions. Still another huge contributing factor both to the criminal climate and our undisciplined society is this Charter of Human Rights, under which the criminal is protected, the victim is not."

The ANC hierarchy insist that serious crime in SA is on a downward curve. My information is that it is stabilising at a very high rate rather than decreasing. - "I can accept that."

How does the force strength of the SAPS compare today with numbers of the private security companies? - "we now have 800 000 registered private security personnel in SA, mainly engaged in protecting property and business interests in the cities, as opposed to 135 000 members of the SAPS. The private security forces are also immeasurably better equipped than the police. In the Houghton area, for every police vehicle, you have at least ten security company vehicles, and in better shape."