The South African government has revoked the citizenship of Janusz Walus, a white supremacist responsible for the assassination of a top anti-apartheid leader in 1993.
Janusz Walus is currently serving a life sentence for shooting and killing top ANC leader Chris Hani in 1993, just as the negotiations were taking place to bring an end to the repressive apartheid regime. Recent reports in the Eyewitness News say the Home Affairs Department has confirmed that it has revoked Walus South African citizenship while also serving him with a warrant of deportation.
The details of this were made known during a Supreme Court of Appeal hearing in Bloemfontein on Monday when Justice Minister Michael Masutha brought an appeal against an earlier decision by a High Court in Pretoria to grant Walus parole after serving less than three decades in jail.
Walus’s lawyer Roelof du Plessis however says his client would not be deported for as long as he remains in prison.
Janusz Walus, 64, was born in communist Poland but moved to South Africa in 1981 to join his father and brother, who owned and operated a small glass making factory. He received South African citizenship in 1986 and held a dual Polish-South African citizenship.
After the family business went bankrupt some years later, Walus, then a truck driver, began adopting extremist white supremacy views. He joined both the National Party and the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and became involved in the politics of far right groups supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Working closely with an accomplice named Clive Derby-Lewis, who was also a white supremacist, Walus trailed Hani to his home in Johannesburg and shot him multiple times at close range.
At the time of his assassination Hani was the Chief of Staff of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) and perhaps the most influential member of the ANC after Nelson Mandela.
Waluś and Derby-Lewis were both sentenced to death for their actions, but their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment after South Africa abolished the death penalty.
