“Controversial.” “Military Doctor.” Are you out of your mind? He was the head of the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme, Project Coast. One of its aims was reducing Black population growth, so insidious he investigated a biological agent intended to selectively kill Black people. Project Coast scientists testified that the programme provided the drugs and poisons developed for use in murders of anti-apartheid activists. Frank Chikane, then Secretary-General of the South African Council of Churches, was poisoned through his clothing using a lethal poison. He suffered organ failure and nearly died twice. A Project Coast scientist testified that he had supplied the poison to security police operatives and instructed them how to apply it to clothing. Clandestine SANDF units testified that SWAPO prisoners of war were given overdoses of muscle relaxants Basson provided before being thrown from helicopters into the sea. One Special Forces officer testified that Basson personally and regularly supplied him with these drugs, which he used on the majority of the more than 200 people he killed and disposed of at sea. Controversial? Nay. Monstrous. War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity per the Rome Statute. The only reason he was not hauled before the ICC to answer for his crimes is because its rules did not exist during the commission of his crimes. The only reason he isn’t behind bars in South Africa is because of a botched criminal prosecution in 1999. He faced 67 charges, including murder, conspiracy to murder, drug offences and fraud. The court did not adjudicate the substance of some of the most serious allegations, including those concerning the alleged killing of hundreds of SWAPO detainees in Namibia. The State appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal, which declined to hear the matter because the papers from the State were lodged late. The Constitutional Court found that the SCA had failed to give proper weight to the extreme gravity of the charges and held that the SCA should have accepted the State’s late filing and allowed the appeal. The Court reinstated six charges that had been quashed, expressly leaving questions of double jeopardy and unreasonable delay to a trial court if the State proceeded with the prosecution. The NPA nevertheless declined to re-prosecute Basson. A court therefore never got to test those questions. The programme was only wound down in 1993. 1993. One year before South Africa’s first democratic election. Three years after Nelson Mandela and others were released. A man who headed apartheid South Africa’s secret chemical and biological warfare programme, involving the development of lethal agents and the investigation of their use against human beings? He is a deeply disturbing figure in South Africa’s history. He is a symbol of the machinery of apartheid at its most depraved. That is why his moniker is “Dr Death.” He was the Apartheid regime’s Josef Mengele. And that is the history that must never be sanitised or sugar-coated. Bfr.