Die Ossewa-Brandwag Vanwaar en Waarheen.
“The Ossewa-Brandwag from where and where to”
Ex-Libris Lappe Laubscher on the inside cover.
Lappe Laubscher was the Lawyer and advocate for former state president PW Botha, who was on trial in 1998. Botha refused to testify at the new government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), set up to expose apartheid-era crimes and chaired by his cultural and political nemesis, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The TRC found that he had ordered the 1988 bombing of the South African Council of Churches headquarters in Johannesburg. In August 1998, he was fined and given a suspended jail sentence for his refusal to testify on human rights violations and violence sanctioned by the State Security Council (SSC) which he, as president until 1989, had directed. Laubscher argued on behalf of Botha that the former National Party Government never authorized any illegal acts that had been committed and that it was the work of a "few bad apples.” TRC chairman Archbishop Demond Tutu said he refused to accept the proposition that human rights violations committed under the apartheid government were carried out by a small group in the security forces.
The Ossewa-Brandwag or “Oxwagon Sentinel” was a Afrikaner Nationalist Movement during the Second World War which opposed South Africa’s participation in the war. Afrikaners formed the Ossewabrandwag in Bloemfontein on 4 February 1939. At the end of the war, the OB was absorbed into the National Party and ceased to exist as a separate body.
