13 February 2021
The South African Communist Party (SACP) welcomes the judgment of the North Gauteng High Court (City of Tshwane) dismissing the application for parole by Janusz Walus, the assassin of our General Secretary, Comrade Chris Hani. Walus murdered Chris Hani in cold blood on 10 April 1993 simply because Hani was a communist, as repeatedly restated by Walus himself.
The SACP also acknowledges the continuous brave fight by Hani’s family, in their continued demand for justice for the unresolved assassination case of a husband and a father. The assassination was intended to stop or at least derail our democratic breakthrough. On the brink of the 27th year of the assassination of Chris Hani, the Hani family had to face, yet again, the unrepentant assassin’s attempt at parole. Walus’s so-called remorse is nothing but a belated pretence aimed at receiving parole. The Hani family’s pain through the years is what Walus, evidently, has never cared about.
On Friday 12 February 2021, the High Court set aside the assassin’s application to set aside the Minister of Justice’s decision to deny him parole. The Court disagreed with the assassin’s assertion that the Minister’s decision was irrational, arbitrary, and unlawful. Walus’s argument that the decision by the Minister was discriminatory is an insult to the people of South Africa in light of the fact that he undertook a task to assassinate Chris Hani with the intention of reinstalling a racist, oppressive, repressive and backward apartheid system, which had overseen the torture, victimisation, killing and disappearance of many black people. Additionally, as the assassin continues to make his standpoint, he still detests communists.
As time continues to corrode valuable pieces of evidence on the assassination of anti-apartheid activists due to attrition, among other realities, there is an urgent need for the reopening of thoroughgoing investigations and inquests into unresolved political crimes committed by apartheid agents and their collaborators. Our government must therefore undertake the urgent task of opening the inquest into the assassination of Chris Hani to unearth the entire truth that has not been disclosed or exposed for all in our country and the world to know.
Full disclosure or exposure of the truth could pave the way for closure and education about the sacrifices that were made in the liberation struggle. The struggle is not over, until the legacy of colonial oppression and apartheid has been wiped off in its entirety, until all the goals of the Freedom Charter have been achieved and capitalist exploitation, imperialist domination and all forms of oppression have been eliminated, and until a socialist transition that Chris Hani stood for is secured.
ISSUED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY | SACP
EST. 1921 AS THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF SOUTH AFRICA | CPSA
Dr Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo
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