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Tichaona Zindoga My Turn
One must be quite some character to earn the title of “Dr Death”. That is a sick character indeed. It is not a title for the faint-hearted. Perhaps those that hold the honour enjoy it, too. They have a word for it: enjoyment derived from exerting pain is called sadism. Those who enjoy this special kind of love are called sadists.
One man from South Africa, Wouter Basson, has been known as Doctor Death.
He, a cardiologist, earned his stripes as head of the apartheid system’s secret chemical and biological warfare project known as Project Coast.
Before we venture to explain the day’s work of Dr Death Basson, we can state that he joins the ranks of medical doctors, film stars and book characters by that title.
It is not exclusive, however, sick.
A search on the Internet will reveal Basson’s peers such as James Grigson, an American psychiatrist who testified in more than 100 trials that resulted in death sentences; Aribert Heim, an Austrian doctor and one of the world’s most wanted Nazi war criminals; Jack Kevorkian, an American physician who assisted terminally ill people to commit suicide during the 1990s; Josef Mengele, a German doctor and also an infamous Nazi war criminal, also known as the “Angel of Death”; Philip Nitschke, an Australian physician who campaigned for legal assisted suicide in the Northern Territory and subsequently assisted four people in doing so; Maxim Petrov, a Russian doctor and serial killer.
Others, listed by one journal, include Pornthip Rojanasunand, a Thai forensic pathologist; Harold Shipman, a British general practitioner and most prolific serial killer in British history among them sports people, a comic book character and at least one book by that title.
Our Basson headed apartheid machinery’s chemical warfare against black liberators of South Africa.
Project Coast was such a heartless programme that killed people from Namibia and Zimbabwe.
According to the online Frontline, the apartheid regime’s Chemical and Biological Warfare programme developed a sterility vaccine to use on black South Africans, employed toxic and chemical poison weapons for political assassination, and in the late 1970s, provided anthrax and cholera to Rhodesian troops for use against guerrillas in their war to overthrow Rhodesia’s white minority rule.
Basson, a former Special Forces Army brigadier and personal heart specialist to former President P.W. Botha, ran the CBW programme during the 1980s and early 1990s and developed lethal chemical and biological weapons that targeted ANC political leaders and their supporters as well as populations living in the black townships.
“These weapons included an infertility toxin to secretly sterilise the black population; skin-absorbing poisons that could be applied to the clothing of targets; and poison concealed in products such as chocolates and cigarettes,” says the publication.
It says Basson released cholera strains into water sources of certain South African villages and provided anthrax and cholera to government troops of Rhodesia during the late 1970s to use against guerillas.
It is said he also supplied suicide cyanide capsules to operational officers, tranquillising substances for kidnappings, and for producing sedatives, ecstasy and tear-gas.
Basson oversaw plans to poison Namibian fighters with muscle relaxants and infect water with cholera.
He could be cheeky, too.
He once delivered a baboon foetus to intimidate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.
An anthrax scourge hit Zimbabwe in 1979, killing 82 people while thousands were taken ill in what was dubbed the largest anthrax outbreak.
The attack could be linked to Basson and his apartheid SA.
That sounds scary, does it not?
Yet here is the scariest part: this guy, who reportedly refused to testify and apply for pardon at the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission when his peers did, has not been held to account for his atrocities.
That is if one values the sanctity of black life and universal justice: white justice in his country could not pin him down.
And just last week, he was found “guilty of unprofessional conduct” by South Africa’s health council.
That should be an insult.
It has to be wondered how this would have turned out were this to happen elsewhere, and a black doctor was the perpetrator!
It truly beats one how a whole head of a chemical and biological warfare programme can be found not guilty of such atrocities and crimes against humanity with lesser charges being preferred.
But then this is Dr White Justice of South Africa!
When one examines how South Africa’s vaunted justice delivery system works, which the white courts there even try to project onto Zimbabwe, the whole matter becomes farcical.
In May last year, a South African court ruled that it had the jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute Zimbabwe military bosses over alleged torture perpetrated by the securocrats on political rivals.
Judge Hans Fabricius compelled South African government to investigate senior Zanu-PF officials who were accused of torture and human rights abuses during the 2008 and claimed that the South African legal system could be used to investigate and prosecute Zimbabwean citizens suspected of having committed crimes against humanity.
Of course the ruling was received with due contempt by Zimbabwean authorities.
Then Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa dismissed the ruling saying it brought “the South African justice system into disrepute.”
When South Africa brags about its wonderful constitution and legal system and its (assumed) super power status, it will also be useful to rightly deploy such superiority in cases like that of Dr Death Basson.
Sadly, it does not.
Which is quite a tragedy and farce.
Unless and until the old apartheid machinery is disbanded, black people in that country, as well as neighbours like Zimbabwe, will not sit easily.
One is bound to agree with Julius Malema’s proposal that those who committed crimes against black people in South Africa must show that they have reformed and be accountable for their actions.
The subsistence of this concept of white justice must simply come to an end and bring Dr Death to book.
Online Reporter