On 26 September the Health Professionals Council of South Africa (HPCSA) resumed its hearing into the conduct of Dr Wouter Basson, former head of the apartheid chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme. This is a hearing with serious implications for the ethical standards to which we should hold medical doctors, including military doctors. The outcome will determine how South Africa judges medical professionals who engage in chemical and biological weapons programmes in the future, including programmes that seek to find defences against chemical and biological weapons. It also will tell the world how Basson’s peers feel his actions should be judged and accounted for.

In his criminal trial Basson was acquitted on the many charges the state brought against him. These charges were the subject of a three-year trial conducted between 1999 and 2002. The HPCSA hearing is the only remaining forum that may hold Basson to account for his actions. Basson was head of a programme that was both offensive and defensive – in other words its purpose was both to develop defences against chemical and biological weapons, and to develop chemical crowd control agents. It was also revealed both at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Basson’s criminal trial that scientists working for the programme under Basson’s leadership developed chemical and biological assassination weapons.

So far the HPCSA hearing has proved to be dominated by legal technicalities that numb the minds of the media and the public and cause us to forget or gloss over the horror experienced by those who fell victim to the products of the programme. Basson will rely on collective amnesia to cloak his past actions. Under this mantle he will maintain that his actions have no relevance today, that they exist only in the past and are more than compensated for by his subsequent ‘good deeds’ as a private cardiologist. Basson feels comfortable to say: “I closed this chapter of my life about 20 years ago and now work as a dedicated medical practitioner helping hundreds of thousands of patients…This case is politically motivated. I just wish I could get on with my life.” The implication in his statement is that we should also just forget the past and move on. The victims of the CBW programme however remain mostly unnamed, some having lost not only their lives but also their identities. Their families are unlikely to be able to ‘move on’.

Let us remember that the combined evidence considered during the trial and during the hearing of the TRC in 1997 revealed that Basson headed a top secret military project over which he had ultimate control. None of the military leaders interviewed during the course of a five-year investigation into the programme, nor the Surgeon General who was responsible for the overall conduct of the programme, knew much about the details of the programme. This secrecy, and the fact that it made possible denial by those who had responsibility for the programme, is what has enabled Basson to re-create himself as a ‘ordinary’ doctor committed to saving lives. The programme focussed on the small-scale production of bizarre assassination weapons, large amounts of tear gas and street drugs. Basson directed it.

It is also worth remembering that when Basson was interviewed by independent film maker Bob Coen for his documentary ‘Anthrax Wars’ that was screened in South Africa in 2009 Coen put it to him that “there was some talk about an ethnic weapon, Project Coast, working on what was called the ‘black bomb’. Basson’s response was, ‘That was great ya, that was the most fun I’ve had in my life.’ After which he went on to speak about how scientists employed by one of the front companies of the CBW programme attempted to develop an anti-fertility vaccine. During the TRC hearing these scientists testified that they believed the vaccine would be administered to black women without their knowledge or consent.

The HPCSA hearing should hold Basson to account for being the head of a programme that developed assassination weapons, and sought to produce biological and chemical agents that would kill without leaving any trace. Under the programme gruesome experiments were conducted, like the one carried out by Dr Kobus Bothma, a member of a special military medical team. It is important to recall the details that emerged during Basson’s criminal trial.

The yet un-named victims of an experiment conducted by Dr Kobus Bothma and covert military agent, Johan Theron​ were in their early twenties when in 1984 they were bound hand and foot and put in the back of a vehicle in Pretoria and driven to the Dukuduku forest in KwaZulu Natal. When they arrived at the forest in the early evening Bothma and Theron tied the three young men to trees with chains and left them for the night. They would have been terrified, so terrified that one of them nearly sawed through the tree with the chain during the night. The next morning Bothma and Theron stripped the men and rubbed a jelly-like substance, which Bothma claimed had been given to him by Basson, into the softest parts of their body. When after a few hours the men were still alive they were injected with a dose of muscle relaxants that caused them to suffocate to death while remaining conscious to the end. Their bodies were later dropped into the sea from a light aircraft.

Basson was found not guilty of direct involvement in this incident. But, he was never asked how it was possible that a medical doctor could have believed that this was expected of him. Basson was responsible for creating the conditions that allowed the doctor to believe that such actions would have been acceptable. Bothma himself has never faced charges nor had to answer to his peers for his conduct.

During the trial we heard how scientists that were part of the programme had conducted animal experiments to find toxins and chemicals that were untraceable post-mortem. We also heard that items such as anthrax-coated envelopes were handed by one scientist to military and police operators to be used. Again, as head of the CBW programme Basson, at the very least allowed the perception to be created that it was acceptable and desirable for the vets and microbiologists who were part of the programme to do so.

The HPCSA’s hearing is likely to be the last chance that we have to hold Basson to account for those actions that are believed to have violated medical ethics, such as the production of large quantities of street-drugs, supposedly for use as crowd control agents. As such it is essential that the HPCSA should make the process and findings available to the public. Simply allowing journalists access to the hearings is not sufficient. The HPCSA should provide a briefing for journalists at the end of each day of the hearing, and should provide a comprehensive summary of the hearing and its findings at the end of the process.

Written by Chandré Gould, Senior researcher, Crime and Justice Programme, ISS Pretoria Office