WHAT THE TRC SAID ABOUT STRATCOM

Quote of the week

Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.

Justice Albie Sachs
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3

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19 April 2018

From 1984, following the appointment of Brigadier Gerrit Erasmus as head of the Security Branch, Stratcom actions became less random and more co-ordinated. This shift coincided with the formal adoption of Stratcom as state policy in 1984 and the establishment of a sub-committee Tak Strategiese Kommunikasie (TSK – Strategic Communications Branch) as part of the Secretariat of the State Security Council, with representatives from the Security Branch, Military Intelligence and the NIS. Former Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok testified that Stratcom was an official policy of the government and conceded that it was engaged in unlawful actions. An example of a Stratcom action, he told the Amnesty Committee, might include spreading disinformation about an individual in order to cause people to suspect him of being an agent or even attack him.

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