The prominent role played by the police in the South African armed forces' counter-insurgency programme and in attacks on suspected SWAPO members and supporters was highlighted in a military communique issued in March by the SWA Territory Force. Col. Nico Roets, Senior Staff Officer, announced in Windhoek on 12 March that 58 SWAPO combatants had been killed by security forces over the preceding two weeks, 43 of them in 13 separate contacts over a single weekend. The South African Police had accounted for 60% of the deaths, he said.
There is evidence that boys as young as 16 years are being recruited into the police. A recent interview of the Windhoek Observer carried an interview with a 16 year old black boy who, "on his father's recommendation", had become a police special constable after passing standard four in 1980. He was not a soldier, he told reporters, but a policeman. A photograph taken in Windhoek City Centre showed him dressed in a camouflage shirt and forage cap, and carrying a G3 submachine gun. He used his weapon, he said, to kill "terries", because "Pastor Ndjoba says, the 'terries' dirty the land". (Pastor Ndjoba is the Chief Minister of Ovamboland). He had received two months training before being issued with his weapon.
