MK commander Anton Fransch remembered

CAPE TOWN - It’s been 32 years since fallen hero, Umkhonto we Sizwe commander Anton Fransch was killed in the ‘Battle of Athlone’ where he fought apartheid police in a gun fight alone for seven hours, and still none of the officers involved in the attack have applied for amnesty, the Apartheid Era Victims’ Family Group (AVFG) said.

Fransch, who was only 20 at the time, stood his ground against a reported 40 police officers and soldiers, who surrounded the Church Street home he was in and continuously fired shots his way.

Refusing to surrender, he kept them at bay until he was eventually killed on November 17, 1989, when they tossed a grenade through a window.

Several family members of Apartheid martyrs, Lukhanyo Calata (Fort Calata) and Cassiem Khan (Imam Abdullah Haron), met at the grave site of Fransch in Maitland yesterday, where they stood alongside his brothers Marc and Brian Fransch to honour and remember his life and sacrifice.

Now at the age of 70, eye-witness Basil Snayer still remembers the day vividly.

“I was just back from practising with my band, my wife was in the kitchen baking because it was my daughter’s birthday and all of a sudden we heard gun fire and fell down on the floor.

“The firing continued, it went on and on and on almost to boredom.

“By 3am we heard a bang on the front door, police said we must stay out of the way, they have a job to do,” he recalled.

There they took position in his kitchen and bathroom and eventually on the roof attacking Fransch.

The AVFG added “no one from the police involved in the attack applied for amnesty”, and it called on the Hawks to investigate the crime.

“The AVFG note that no one from the police involved in the attack applied for amnesty.

“The fact that no evidence existed that Anton had harmed anyone or sought to do so and that no attempt was made to arrest Anton, provides sufficient reason that the Hawks should find, arrest and charge all 40 security force members with murder. To add insult to the memory of Anton, the South African government chose yesterday as the day from which they will lower the flag to half mast honouring the last Apartheid era President, with no reference to Anton Fransch – a young man who fought courageously to liberate South Africa.”

The AVFG said they believed that perpetrators of Apartheid era crimes “are emboldened by the so called De Klerk apology and his earlier reference to a secret amnesty”.

Earlier in this year the AVFG approached the NPA and the Hawks to appoint investigators into the killing of Anton.

Witnesses are alive and ready to support the investigation, they said.

Meanwhile, Murder in Paris, a documentary which traces the motives for the assassination of anti-apartheid Struggle icon and political activist, Dulcie September who was assassinated in France in 1988, bagged two more awards at Africa Human Rights Film Festival and the Rustenburg Film Festival, respectively, this past weekend.

To date nobody has been found guilty of her murder.

The case in France was closed after four years and the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were unresolved as the evidence received from the French investigation was insufficient.

Cape Times