‘Hani’s killer merits mercy because of ubuntu’

Janusz Walus, Chris Hani’s assassin, deserves to get parole because South Africans believe in ubuntu, his lawyer said.

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Johannesburg - Janusz Walus, Chris Hani’s assassin, deserves to get parole because South Africans believe in ubuntu.

Roelof du Plessis, attorney of Walus, argued in the high court in Pretoria that South Africa was different from the US in that South Africa subscribed to ubuntu.

“We have ubuntu. We have the TRC which other countries did not have. We need love, not hate.

“We need reconciliation, not restitution,” Du Plessis said in an impassioned plea to the judge.

Du Plessis was responding to Marumo Moerane SC, who opposed the parole application.

Moerane said a few weeks ago Sirhan Sirhan - the man convicted for Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 - had been denied parole again.

“He was denied parole for the 15th time. He will only be eligible in 2021 and has spent 43 years in prison,” Moerane said.

Moerane was making a point that the 23 years Walus has already spent behind bars for Hani’s assassination was not as long as others had spent for similar crimes, and who were still not out on parole.

Walus was the man who pulled the trigger and assassinated Hani. He was under instruction of Clive Derby-Lewis, who has since been paroled for his part in the crime.

Du Plessis argued that politics influenced the case.

That was why the Minister of Justice, Michael Masutha, had denied Walus parole and was dragging his feet, he said.

“The minister has taken 18 months to decide on this man’s parole application,” Du Plessis said.

Masutha had done nothing from April last year until now to seek restorative justice which, he said, was an indication that the minister did not want to approve Walus’s parole.

Judge Nicoline Janse van Nieuwenhuizen said it looked as though Hani’s family, and those who were very close to him, were still very affected by his death, to which Du Plessis said they should not be in a position where the family had to decide who got parole or not.

“If you’re lucky they (a family) will forgive you. If you’re not lucky the family does not forgive you and then you will be in prison for as long as the family wants. That can’t be the law. This man has paid his dues more than anyone else. He has been eligible for parole from the time he had been in jail for 15 years,” Du Plessis said.

Moerane hit back at Du Plessis and referenced the judgment when Walus was sentenced in 1994.

“The murder was a deliberate, cold-blooded one. The act was cowardly in the extreme. It was preceded by weeks of planning, The deceased was felled in front of his own residence, when he was completely defenceless.”

Even when Walus appealed against his conviction the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that he deserved the harshest of punishments, which at that time was the death penalty, he said.

The judge acknowledged that Hani’s assassination was atrocious but asked at what point would the family start healing and move on.

Hani’s widow, Limpho, was in court and was visibly upset by some of Du Plessis’s arguments. “Our positionremains the same. The issue is about the legality of this case. At the moment we feel it doesn’t qualify,” Solly Mapaila, deputy general secretary of the SA Communist Party and Hani family spokesman said.

On ubuntu, Mapaila said Du Plessis’s submission was insensitive. “He believes that because this is Africa, all wrong things must happen and we must just move on without legal recourse. That is why we have law, so that people should account for their actions.”

Judgment was reserved.

The Star