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latest. Israel, Britain and the USA were involved in the secret South African nuclear weapons
program, which was considered or portrayed as defensive by the involved governments
against a perceived Soviet threat against the anti-communist regime in Pretoria. After the
introduction of US sanctions on South Africa in 1986, illegal clandestine assistance with arms
deliveries and arms development came mainly from Israel, with unofficial US blessings. 211
The South African military’s secret chemical and biological weapons program,
‘Project Coast’, with a staff of around 70, produced weapons and poisons which were used to
assassinate at least hundreds of ANC members and other enemies of apartheid in South Africa
and abroad. The covert army ‘Medical Battalion’ behind the program produced lethal screw
drivers, bicycle pumps, walking sticks, umbrellas and tear gas. It also produced ‘thallium in
beer, salmonella in sugar, paraquat in whisky’ and had further programs, some of them
probably implemented, to spread poisonous drugs and chemicals, cholera, botulism, anthrax,
and HIV-tainted blood among southern African Black civilian populations to pacify, sterilize,
incapacitate or kill them. 212 According to the testimony of a former state agent, there were
also orders to spread cholera and yellow fever by contaminating drinking water at refugee
camps in neighboring Namibia in 1988, prior to that country’s first democratic elections. 213
The leader of the ‘Medical Battalion’ was Wouter Basson, nicknamed ‘Dr. Death’, who has
been compared to Nazi Germany’s infamous Josef Mengele. We shall return to Basson’s
plight a little later.
The genocidal parameters and mind-sets were certainly present in this unit. Dr. Mike
Odendaal, a microbiologist on ‘Project Coast’, was quoted by The New Yorker magazine as
saying:
[O]ne of the major tenets of chemical warfare is that you don’t use
these things on your own soil. . . .the cholera in the Eastern Cape [one
of the regions most rebellious against both British colonial
domination and apartheid] probably came from my lab, and it
probably did kill old people and kids…I only read about it in the
papers and then was confronted about it at the TRC. No details have
211 Saito (senior writer): The Road to the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, 1999: 198. The nuclear arsenal of South
Africa was scrapped on President F.W. de Klerk’s orders in 1993, a year before the introduction of democracy
and black majority rule. See also Hounam & McQuillan: The Mini-Nuke Conspiracy: Mandela’s Nuclear
Nightmare, 1995.
212 Lovell: South Africa Truth Body Opens Chemical Warfare Hearing, 1998; N.N.: Apartheid Weapons Boss
Asked for HIV-Tainted Blood, May 24, 2000; The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, 1998,
Vol. 2, Chapter 6c, Special Investigation into Project Coast: South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare
Programme. Some researchers have suggested that investigations should be carried out as to whether the plans to
spread HIV among Blacks, in South Africa and in the surrounding countries, were actually implemented by the
‘Medical Battalion’ or some other clandestine state death squad. It could help to explain the extremely high
incidence of HIV and AIDS infection in the southern African region, which is by far the highest in the world.
Africa south of the Sahara accounted for an estimated 15 million of the world’s total 21.8 million AIDS-related
deaths by 2001. Two years later, 29.4 million out of all 42 million people worldwide who were infected with
HIV were Africans. South Africa itself has more people living with HIV-AIDS than any other single country, 5
out of 45 million South Africans, i.e. one in every nine is infected. In the seven southernmost countries of Africa
at least one adult in five is now living with HIV, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on
HIV/AIDS. Southern Africa is home to about 30 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, yet the
region has less than two percent of the global population. See N.N.: Factbox: Africa Ravaged by AIDS
Epidemic, July 5, 2002; N.N.: South Africa – Economic Powerhouse Ravaged by AIDS, July 8, 2003; Reaney:
World AIDS Deaths, Infections at New Highs, 2003. On these and related issues, see also Boateng: South Africa:
‘Dr. Death’ on Trial, 2001. The Israeli apartheid regime’s secret service and international assassination squad,
the Mossad, has also been held responsible for spreading HIV/AIDS deliberately. 426 Libyan children were
infected in 1999, when Libya was one of Israel’s main enemies. At the time of writing, one Palestinian doctor
and five Bulgarian nurses stand accused of carrying out the task at a children’s hospital in Benghazi. The US
counterpart to the Mossad, the CIA, has also been accused of the crime. See Brunwasser: Bulgarian Nurses’ Case
in Libya Seems to Turn, 2006.
213 Swindells: South Africa Learns Secrets of “Dr Death”, 2000