Bullets tore into the gang pastor's body... but the will to live gave him the strength to somehow continue driving.
|||Cape Town - Seven or eight bullets tore into the maverick gang pastor and peace preacher’s body… but the will to live gave Pastor Ivan Waldeck the strength to somehow continue driving – until he arrived at hospital and collapsed at the forecourt.
He is the second gangster-turned-pastor after Albern Martins to be targeted in the past few months.
Martins, 55, was shot dead outside the Blue Down’s Magistrate’s Court on March 1 as he arrived to appear on charges of abalone smuggling. In 1990, Waldeck and Martins were key in forming Core (Community Outreach Forum), the initial negotiating forum among gang leaders.
On Sunday, in dramatic scenes in Belville South, Waldeck survived an attempted killing.
He and his wife had just left the Holy Nation of God church, where he had given his Sunday morning sermon, a fellow church elder said.
He had been driving near Sacks Circle industrial area when a motorist pulled up next to the car.
“I stared straight into the barrel of a gun,” Waldeck told Community Safety MEC Dan Plato later. “I can only thank God that I am still alive.”
Seven or eight bullets ripped into his arm and torso, while some hit his wife next to him in her face.
With blood splattered in the car, Waldeck managed to drive to the Melomed Hospital in Belville, on the corner of AJ West and Voortrekker roads, “where he collapsed”, Plato told the Cape Argus.
Plato said he had been alerted by fellow pastors about Waldeck being shot and had visited him a while later.
“He’s stable, but still in a critical condition,” he said. “His wife is also stable but critical.”
Plato’s report to the Cape Argus was corroborated by a church elder.
“With all those bullets in his body… one bullet to one of his vital organs and he would have been dead,” Plato said.
He said the attempted assassination was “an outrage”.
“I’m very upset,” he said.
“The communities on the Cape Flats are in a state of war.
“This may sound like criticism of the SAPS but it seems as if SAPS cannot stop this war. Week after week, people are killed and wounded, yet it seems there is no end in sight.”
Waldeck is best known for being involved in the founding of Core, formed after the lynching of Hard Livings gang boss Rashaad Staggie in 1996.
More recently, Waldeck has worked with the Community Safety Department as a peace facilitator in Hanover Park, Lavender Hill, Belhar, Atlantis and many other parts of greater Cape Town.
The University of the Western Cape’s Department of Political Studies, described the type of intervention favoured by Waldeck as “controversial”, insofar as it involved “negotiating with gang members to resolve conflict between hostile gangs and ensure periods of peace”.
“The opinion was raised that such negotiations legitimise gangs and consolidate them as institutions in the communities where they operate.
“An institution that engages with gangs by employing rehabilitated gang members, with their knowledge of gang structures, to negotiate cease-fires, for example, argues that this is a legitimate and productive way to address gang violence,” the Dialogue on Gang Violence report read.
But Plato warned: “What is happening on the Cape Flats is that people involved in any way with peace processes, with getting rid of gangsterism and with fighting drugs… all of those people are getting targeted nowadays.”
Regarding Waldeck’s potential vulnerability, in November he promoted a “Back to God Crusade” on Facebook, featuring “powerful testimonies of ex-drugaddicts (sic), ex-gangsters, ex-drug lords and prisoners”.
Another feature was a talk titled “Stop the Blood”, detailing “the realities of gangsterism”.
Plato said he would take up the alleged targeting of peacemakers with the police hierarchy at his weekly report-back tomorrow.
The MEC recently called for calm, warning that a full-scale gang war would have a devastating effect on the public.
Waldeck, who was at the Blue Down’s Magistrate’s Court when Martins was shot, told the Weekend Argus at the time of the shooting: “This is a sad day for me. I’m giving up one of my mentors.
“I see him lying there on the ground and I see a symbol of his life. It is evil, it is unacceptable.”
Cape Argus