\n Adriaan Vlok, a feared minister under South Africa's apartheid system and one of its few high-ranking officials to be prosecuted, died Sunday aged 85 in a hospital near Pretoria, his family said.\n<\/p>\n
\n The former law and order minister, who oversaw a brutal police crackdown on opponents of white rule, \"passed away early this morning in the Unitas Hospital in Centurion, after a short illness,\" a family spokesman said in a statement.\n<\/p>\n
\n In the late 1980s, Vlok oversaw bomb attacks on churches and trade unions seen as hostile to white-rule.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"I believed that apartheid was right,\" he told AFP in 2015. \"It was our job to make people fear us.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n In his old age he said he had changed his mindset, and sought redemption by handing out food to the poor in a township -- settlements outside cities designed to segregate non-whites.\n<\/p>\n
\n In 2007, Adriaan Vlok was given a 10-year suspended sentence for attempting to murder a prominent opposition figure.\n<\/p>\n
\n He had sought to kill Reverend Frank Chikane -- then head of a leading anti-apartheid organisation -- some 18 years earlier by rubbing poison on clothes in the priest's luggage at Johannesburg airport.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"I feel ashamed of many things I have done,\" he said at his sentencing, admitting that his commitment to the racist regime was \"a mistake.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n The former minister has publicly apologised to his victims, even symbolically washing Chikane's feet.\n<\/p>\n
\n His detractors insisted it was a crude stunt to avoid revealing the extent of the abuses committed by the police.\n<\/p>\n
\n To shed light on the atrocities committed by the regime, the government of Nelson Mandela set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.\n<\/p>\n
\n It guaranteed amnesty for those responsible for political violence in exchange for full confessions.\n<\/p>\n
\n But few took part in the exercise.\n<\/p>\n
\n Few cases of apartheid-era abuses have resulted in a trial and many critics say it is an \"unfinished mission\" to heal the wounds of the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Adriaan Vlok, a feared minister under South Africa's apartheid system and one of its few high-ranking officials to be prosecuted, died Sunday aged 85 in a hospital near Pretoria, his family said. The former law and order minister, who oversaw a brutal police crackdown on opponents of white rule, \"passed away early this morning in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-110917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n