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Croatia Linked to South African Chemical Weapons Plot in 1992 CAPE TOWN, May 15 (Reuters) — South Africa's apartheid government paid $1.6 million into an account in Croatia in 1992 for a sensitive substance needed for a secret chemical weapons project, a senior investigator told legislators on Wednesday. The money was part-payment for a sanctions-busting consignment needed for one of the many secret defence projects launched under apartheid and which are slowly coming to light under majority rule. Jan Swanepoel, head of the Office for Serious Economic Offences, said the paper trail had led investigators to Croatia, but he predicted it would take another 18 to 24 months to wrap up the investigation. "We expect that some of the witnesses from whom we want statements and who are overseas will not want to cooperate with us, which will mean that we will need to get court orders to compel them to talk to us," he said. The defence force said in a memorandum to parliament's watchdog committee on public spending that the project was part of "a programme for the defence against chemical weapons (which) included research into the protection against incapacitating agents." Defence Force chief General Georg Meiring declined to give the committee any details of the programme referred to in documents only as "Project B." He said he had not yet seen the text of a cabinet order lifting the veil of secrecy that has covered the project since its inception under white rule and even after its cancellation on the eve of the 1994 transition to democracy. "I might say something I am not allowed to say," said Meiring, a veteran of the white-led apartheid army that is now being merged with the former liberation army of President Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. In another memorandum, the defence department said: "Because of the nature of the chemicals, the world-wide control over these chemicals as well as the international implications that could result from knowledge of such transactions, an intricate delivery and payment structure had to be created." A justice ministry official told Reuterss that a statement about the nature of the project would be made within days. The payment was made less than a year after Yugoslav authorities seized a 19-tonne consignment of South African-made weapons headed for Croatian separatists in September 1991. ANC legislators who have been trying since they entered parliament in 1994 to unravel the web of arms trade under apartheid castigated Meiring for his refusal to give details of Project B. Former political prisoner Barbara Hogan said the chemicals could have been part of a plan to attack ANC camps in exile with chemical weapons. |
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