2005 Volume 1
Museum Director Arrested, Exhibits Seized
By Peter Apps
14 January 2005
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 14 (Reuters) - South African troops raided the national military museum, seizing armoured vehicles and firearms and arresting its director and two staff members for possession of possibly stolen property, Defence officials said on Friday.
Acting museum director Sandi Mackenzie told Reuters truckloads of soldiers had arrived at the South African National Museum of Military History late on Thursday, telling staff they suspected a white supremacist plot.
But army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Louis Kirstein said there was no suggestion of a plot and that the issue was how vehicles and weapons recorded as destroyed in South African National Defence Force records came to be in the museum.
”The charge relates to stolen military armoured vehicles and the possession thereof,” he said. ”Firearms charges could be added as the investigation progresses.”
He confirmed museum Director James Keene, 58, and two curators -- a man and a woman -- had been taken into custody.
Minister of Arts and Culture Pallo Jordan -- who has ultimate responsibility for the museum -- and Department Director General Itumeleng Mosala visited immediately after the swoop.
Mosala told the domestic news agency SAPA that military officers said some of the equipment should not have been at the museum because it was in working condition.
”According to those guys, the number of weapons being kept there could raze Soweto within two minutes,” SAPA quoted him as saying.
Mackenzie said military officers accused museum staff of belonging to the Boeremag, an extremist Afrikaner group. ”But none of us has political affiliations here,” she said.
But the army denied their investigation involved the Boeremag, which has been accused of trying to start a race war and reassert white control a decade after 1994’s democratic elections.
Mackenzie said troops took four apartheid-era armoured vehicles -- three small armoured cars the size of Land Rovers and a 28-tonne Ratel armoured vehicle, which mounts what Mackenzie said was a deactivated turret cannon.
The soldiers had also said they would return to take custody of large numbers of small arms, all of which had had their firing pins removed, she said.
”Most of our stuff is deactivated. No one can just turn up and use it.”
Reporting by Peter Apps; editing by Ross Colvin, Reuters
e-mail:peter.apps@reuters.com