A French court has dismissed a request to reopen an investigation into the assassination of Dulcie September. The former member of the African National Congress was shot to death in 1998 in Paris. The family had sued the state for gross negligence.
Exiled to France in 1984, Dulcie September was the South African representative of Nelson Mandela's ANC party in France, Switzerland and Luxembourg.
She was killed by six bullets to the head on 29 March, 1988, in front of her Paris office. The killers were never caught.
The South African apartheid regime immediately denied any responsibility and the affair has remained a mystery.
The judicial inquiry in France led to a dismissal of the case in July 1992, fuelling suspicions of the involvement of the French secret services, systematically denied by the authorities.
In the hope of reopening the investigation, the family filed a complaint in April 2019, insisting that the murder of Dulcie September was a crime of apartheid and therefore a crime against humanity with no prescriptive period.
'Gross negligence'
In April 2019 and at the end of 2020, the public prosecutor's office dismissed the case.
September’s family said the decision constituted "gross negligence" and a "denial of justice" by the State.
The Paris court on Wednesday rejected their latest request, saying the family had not exhausted all legal options open to them, including appealing the 1992 decision and filing a civil law suit.
It also said that the crime fell outside the statute of limitations. The prosecutor said that crimes against humanity, which was the basis of the 2019 complaint, was based on a 2013 French law and therefore couldn't be invoked for a crime committed before this date.
During the hearing in mid-November, the family’s lawyer Yves Laurin denounced a "state affair" and "thirty-four years of denial of justice".
According to Laurin, the judicial authorities should have relaunched the investigations into a crime which he said "undermined the sovereignty of France".
Lack of resources
The request to reopen the case was brought up with French President Emmanuel Macron during a visit to the Nelson Mandela Foundation in 2021.
"We wrote to ask for the reopening of the file of his assassination but we have not been answered," the president of the foundation told him. "We are going to look at that," Macron replied.
In June 2021, Jacqueline Derens, a friend of Dulcie September, herself a former anti-apartheid activist, told RFI's Laurent Correau that the case had been closed too quickly in 1992 and that not enough resources had been dedicated to it.
When asked about recent developments that could convince French authorities to reopen the case, she spoke of a book written by Hennie Van Vuuren.
Sensitive issues
"It puts the finger on the relations between France and South Africa of apartheid, about the sales of weapons. France has violated all embargoes," explained Derens.
According to the book, "France always sold weapons to the apartheid regime and helped South Africa master nuclear energy".
"Obviously, Dulcie had put her finger on a hyper-sensitive subject and it was becoming embarrassing for France, and was becoming embarrassing for the apartheid regime. So the conclusion is simple: someone who gets in your way, you get rid of them!" she said.
She also referred to the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which began in 1996.
In his testimony, Eugene De Kock, who was in charge of the death squads in South Africa at the time, said "It was not my men who did this. They are French mercenaries, the people of Bob Denard".
