by James Tweedie

COMMUNISTS and trade unions condemned the release on parole yesterday of the man behind the 1993 assassination of South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Chris Hani.

Clive Derby-Lewis was granted parole on compassionate grounds by Judge Selby Baqwa at the High Court in Pretoria.

But the Young Communist League of South Africa (YCLSA) said it was “utterly dismayed” by the decision to free the “cold-hearted murderer.” Mr Derby-Lewis’s lawyers argued that he should be released because he is suffering from inoperable lung cancer.

SACP general secretary and Umkhonto we Sizwe chief of staff Mr Hani was shot dead outside his house on April 10 1993, three years after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and a year before South Africa’s first democratic elections.

The killing sparked riots and almost derailed negotiations between the ANC and the apartheid regime. Mr Derby-Lewis, a senior MP from the Conservative Party of South Africa — a right-wing split from the apartheid National Party — lent his own handgun to the communist leader’s assassin, far-right Polish immigrant Janusz Walus.

Both men were sentenced to death for the killing, but the sentences were later commuted to life when judicial execution was abolished in 1995. They unsuccessfully claimed amnesty before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), claiming that they were acting on orders from the Conservative Party.

The SACP has repeatedly demanded to know whether internal security forces or foreign powers ordered the assassination and its acting spokesman Mhlekwa Nxumalo stressed that the party had never opposed parole for the two convicted murderers. “Full disclosure should be the unconditional requirement,” he said.

“It was the TRC that refused amnesty to Derby-Lewis and Walus precisely on the grounds that they had manifestly failed to make a full disclosure on the conspiracy behind the assassination.”

And YCLSA spokesman Khaya Xaba said Mr Derby-Lewis “continuously fails to show remorse. “We are of the view that he is still shielding and protecting those who he collaborated with in the dastardly assassination of comrade Chris Hani.”