MOEGAMAT ANEEZ SALIE
Yes, Your Honour, we did and it is correct that Vanessa in particular was very young, but you will know that it is a feature of our lives under apartheid that we grew up very, very quickly, so a Standard 8 girl in Bontheuwel High, with all due respect, Your Honour, is far more advanced than a Standard 8 girl from Sea Point High or Bishops or something like that, so our children were forced to take on responsibilities way beyond their years, Your Honour.  We didn't go to seek out Standard 8 children.  Vanessa was somebody who had presented herself first and foremost as a very disciplined person who could keep a secret, if I could put it so crudely, Your Honour.  That was the first criteria.  How suited was this person to underground work?  Now we didn't, once we recruited them, we didn't just place weapons and explosives in their hands.  Vanessa testified that her role in this blast was supplementary really.  Her job was to go along, to gain experience, to go through the threshold of carrying out an operation.  That's how our operators worked, Your Honour, that they went through different stages, they went through different thresholds.  When Sidney went with Colleen Williams on previous operations, Colleen had detonated the mine.  Colleen would previously have played the role that Vanessa did and so it was a very gradual, it was a very staged approach, so it wasn't a question of us giving Vanessa limpet grenade and AKs and stuff like that.  They went through a stage  Your Honour and as I have testified before, our emphasis was on avoiding civilian targets, casualties at all times, so the reply to your question, Your Honour is, yes, it does seem quite shocking and startling and irresponsible to have recruited the Standard 8 school girl to be part of an MK unit, but Your Honour, the planting of a bomb, or the firing of an AK is 5% of the work, there is an enormous amount of work that went into this operation at the Bontheuwel Rent Office and we needed all sorts of people to do that.  There are some places where only schoolgirls could enter.  There are some places where schoolboys would ask them no questions and let me just assure this Hearing that there were no other Standard 8 school children in this part of our Detachment, but really Your Honour, there was a multitude of tasks to be performed in an operation, we shouldn't just think of MK or military work as bomb blasts or armed attacks.  That really was 5 or even less percent of the work and that's where people like Vanessa came in.  Vanessa was somebody whom we could trust and we did trust her with our lives.  Vanessa was somebody who grew up in Bontheuwel, who was passionate about justice, but who wasn't somebody who shouted from the rooftops Your Honour and she was very, very far advanced for her age.