Other Names: Electronic, Mechanical, Agricultural, and Chemical or EMAC (in English)
Location: At Special Forces headquarters (Speskop) in Pretoria
Subordinate to: South African Defence Force (SADF)
Size: EMLC was a small facility consisting of two rooms
Primary Function: EMLC was a small firm that supplied various types of specialized equipment to the SADF's Special Forces (SF), including items designed to provide them with some sort of CBW capability

Description:
EMLC was a small company that designed and supplied specialized equipment to the SF. It was apparently founded in the latter half of the 1970s, and consisted of an electronics section, a drafting office, a mechanical workshop, and a chemical and agricultural division. The founder of EMLC was Dr. Jan Coetzee, who had previously headed the Department of Special Equipment in the Chemical Defence Unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), where one of his tasks had been to develop special counterintelligence equipment for the Special Operations Group of the SADF, the forerunner of the SF. In November 1980, Coetzee was replaced as managing director of EMLC by Sybie van der Spuy, who held that post for twelve years until Project Officer Wouter Basson asked him to assume the Technical Director position at Delta G Scientific. The head of EMLC's chemical and agricultural division was biochemist Jan van Jaarsveld, who along with the entire division was transferred to the Delta G facility in Midrand in the mid-80s.

Due to conflicting insider testimony, it is difficult to determine precisely what role EMLC played in the South African CBW program. Van Jaarsveld seemed to indicate that the Riot Control Agent CR was researched, tested, and produced in small amounts at EMLC, but both Coetzee and Van der Spuy denied that any chemical synthesis or extraction work had ever been carried out there. Coetzee added that EMLC's chemists were mostly national servicemen with a mechanical bent who were incapable of doing advanced chemistry, and insisted that no poisons had been manufactured or used to contaminate clothing there. He did admit, however, that in August 1980 a Rhodesian special operations courier gave him a typed report listing various toxic substances and describing their effects when applied to various parts of the body, a report he claims he turned over to Army Surgeon-General Nico Nieuwoudt. Moreover, when Coetzee's successor Van der Spuy took over the direction of EMLC, he discovered a large amount of bulk chemicals and a pile of contaminated clothing on the premises. This seems to jibe with the testimony of Johan Theron, the chief assassin in the SF's "Operation Dual" program, who claimed that EMLC had supplied him with some ineffective chemical agents he had sought to use to eliminate prisoners and security threats. (It was precisely the ineffectiveness of these agents that thence caused Theron to approach Basson, who he says supplied him with the Tubarine and Scoline that he subsequently used to murder his victims.) Although Van der Spuy acknowledged that this may have happened prior to his arrival at the firm, he claims that he put an end to such activities during his own tenure as director. Finally, even though EMLC's own offices were separate from those housing the SF labs, it cannot be ruled out that EMLC may have made use of these labs to test or manufacture chemicals for certain covert EMLC CW projects.

Key Sources:
Centre for Conflict Resolution, Basson Trial: Weekly Summaries of Court Proceedings, October 1999-April 2002, especially the testimony of Coetzee, Jan Lourens, Morgan, Redlinghuys, Theron, Van der Spuy, and Van Jaarsveld; Chandré Gould and Peter Folb, Project Coast: Apartheid's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2002), pp. 35-6.

	Updated March 2004