Invictus - Carlin [61]
The Boer Warriors stormed the World Trade Centre on the morning of Friday, June 25, 1993. Inside the two-story glass and concrete building prominent officials had gathered, including Joe Slovo, legendary head of the Communist Party, and Foreign Minister Pik Botha. Before the attack, some three thousand armed Volksfront loyalists found themselves facing down riot police who formed a protective perimeter around the building. One side wore brown, the other gray-blue, but otherwise they were the mirror image of each other. They spoke the same language, they had the same surnames, they had been taught the same white supremacist propaganda all their lives, they had learned to hate and fear the ANC. These policemen belonged to the riot squad, apartheid enforcers programmed to crush “black unrest.” Today, here at the World Trade Centre, they confronted something new and bewildering. This was white unrest. Their training—their upbringing—hadn’t prepared them for this. What were they supposed to do? Would one among their ranks imitate the example of the soldier guarding the Bastille who refused to fire on his own people, and turned his gun on his officer instead? And if so, then what?
The standoff lasted four hours, the two sides a hundred yards apart, neither daring to make the first move. The government understood that if people died here, if Boer martyrs were created, the consequences were potentially catastrophic. The ANC’s supporters were numerous, but few were armed. These people were armed to the teeth and in Constand Viljoen they had a leader now capable of tearing the country apart. So the police were ordered to behave with the utmost restraint, not to respond with the force customary in the more familiar environment of a crowd of stone-throwing black youths. Also, the authorities’ respect for Viljoen led them to hope that restraint might yield a reasonable response from their opponents and avoid a bloodbath.
Whether Viljoen actually supported the order to attack was not clear. But it began when Terreblanche ordered his storm troopers, the “elite” unit of the AWB, to advance. Known as the “Iron Guard,” they stood out from the rest on account of their black, SS-style uniforms. There were about thirty of them. The police stepped gingerly aside and let them pass. Eddie von Maltitz, in his camouflage uniform, joined in with them, trotting alongside a tank-sized four-wheeled “bakkie” headed for the building’s main entrance. It smashed through the glass, creating a breach through which Von Maltitz charged. “I led the first group in,” he recalled, triumphant. “We had flak jacket and were ready to shoot. I had an R1 machine gun.”
In no time, four hundred warrior-farmers were marauding inside the building, brushing past heavily armed policemen who didn’t know how to react. At one point a group of four Volksfronters surrounded a black journalist from the Reuters news agency. He was wearing a jacket and tie, which seemed to make them especially angry. “Uppity kaffir,” muttered one. As they pondered whether to do him some damage, a white journalist intervened. “You’re a disgrace to the white race,” one of the armed invaders told him. Eddie von Maltitz suddenly appeared. “Leave this man alone,” he shouted. “We have no quarrel with the black man. The problem’s our white government. Let’s shoot those traitors. Let’s shoot Pik Botha.”
Von Maltitz boasted afterward that he had “stopped a bloodbath.” Viljoen stopped a bigger one. The general stepped in through the broken glass and went upstairs, flanked by a solemn guard of AWBers, to confer with the ANC and government delegates, and the police officers in charge. He had made his point. Like a terrorist who places a bomb but then warns the police in time to defuse it, he had shown his people’s potential to cause harm. All he wanted for now was safe passage out and agreement that none of his men would be arrested on their way home. Agreement was granted and, save for some rude graffiti on the walls, some urinating on the carpets, and much broken glass, no harm