Amnesty Hearings — Durban — UNKNOWN

MR BOTHA: Yes.   I was born on the 24th of September 1944. I was raised in an Afrikaans Christian home. When I was four years old, the National Party Government came to power, and I grew up under a National Party Government which looked after White interests in the country or the Boer nation's interests. For a long period after the Anglo Boer War, there was a lot of discrimination against the Boers. If you spoke your own language you were discriminated against. We were humiliated.
The Afrikaner, or the Boer could not obtain good positions of employment and as a result of the policy which was followed by the British in those years and also Louis Botha and the Jan Smuts Government, my grandfather who fought in the Anglo-Boer War came to the realisation that if you cannot speak both languages that you would not be able to obtain any significant post. As a result of this, my grandfather sent his children, namely my father and his brothers and sisters, they were sent to English schools for their academic education in a foreign language, in other words, not their mother tongue, and that meant that I was also sent to an English school. 
And as I grew up I realised that it was not right that I was forced to speak a different language to my home language to be able to become something in this world, and for that reason I was very proud of the National Party Government who espoused the cause of the Boer Nation. 
In my years in an English school I had to endure lots of taunting, for instance when people called me a hairy-back and a rock-spider. That just strengthened my Boer pride. In the early 1980's I realised that the then National Party Government were following a policy with which I couldn't associate myself.
When the CP was founded in 1982 I became a supporter of the Conservative Party. I could identify with the ideals and policy of this party. In the 1983 referendum, when the issue to be voted on was whether there should be a change in the then political dispensation, I voted against it. I was not in favour of the change. I could see that the Boer in his own country would be alienated once again, and that everything which he had thus far brought about and established would be taken away from him. Everything which the Boer nation has established and achieved in the history of this country it achieved through struggle and humiliation, oppression and suffering. 
For that reason I aligned myself very firmly with the Conservative Party and I supported it. In 1987 elections I voted for the CP, and that was the first election that the CP took part in and they were so well supported that they became the official opposition in Parliament. In this period I also became a member of the AWB - Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging because I felt that this movement supported the ideals of the Boer nation, and wanted to protect us. All that we asked was that which any nation asks, namely to govern itself in its own territory.
During that time there were independent Black states, namely Transkei, Venda, Bophuthatswana and so on, and we did not begrudge any nation the right to govern itself in its own sovereign] territory. We did not claim for ourselves anything which we did not allow any other nation. We believed that whether Zulu, Boer or Xhosa, that you have the right to live amongst your own people in your own territory and to govern yourself.  And that is what the AWB requested from the then National Party Government but our requests were regarded with contempt. Although I was a member of the AWB at that stage, I was not an active member and with the election of 6 September 1989 election, in the period before this election, I started working for the Conservative Party. We put up posters, we registered voters, we canvassed and I became known to the Conservative Party and eventually I was elected as the chairperson of the management of the Conservative Party, that is the Empangeni branch for the Umfolozi constituency.
I devoted myself to the task at hand and I worked very hard . I was so intensely involved with the election campaign that I endured a lot of stress to the point where I actually suffered a heart-attack, and in 1990 I had to undergo a heart by-pass operation. The result of that election is now history today, and I realised that the political dispensation in this country had changed irrevocably; that the political dispensation as we had known it was something of the past, it was gone forever. I realised that the Boer nation would have to enter the fray again, to enter the struggle to regain that which had been taken away from it, namely our freedom and the right to govern ourselves in our own territory.
For that reason I contacted Mr Eugene Terreblanche, the leader of the AWB and we had a political meeting in Richards Bay, and due to the fact that I was very well known in right-wing circles in the Umfolozi area, I within a very short period of time, gained and recruited a whole group of new members for the AWB. At that stage the so-called Wenkommando of the AWB had not yet been established, but once it had been established, I got together a group, a commando group, and we started training them.  Mr Eugene Terreblanche appointed me as Kommandant of the AWB in the Northern Zululand region. Whilst I served in the AWB I was also elected to deputy-chairperson of the financial Committee of the AWB, and in this capacity, I attended various meetings throughout the Free State and the Transvaal. 
At one such meeting I was approached by members of the Orde Boerevolk.  They wanted to recruit me to establish a cell of this Orde Boerevolk in Richards Bay. They explained to me what the motives and objectives of this cell would be, and I could identify with these objectives because they believed in what I believed in. I identified with their objectives because my beliefs were the same as their beliefs, namely that we would have to struggle to regain that which had been taken away from us. I had to swear an oath. They told me that if I could not identify myself with any particular item in this oath I should tell them that and then that meeting would be regarded as never having taken place and not be held against me and I could just leave.
	I read through the oath and I agreed with each and every point contained in the oath. I took the oath and they then told me, and I indeed believed it at the time, that there was already a civil war existing in South Africa although it might have been a very low intensity civil war, but the violence was present

MS VAN DER WALT: Mr Botha may I interrupt you at this point. You are referring here to an oath which you swore. I would like to show you a document with the permission of the Chairperson. I can then hand it in as exhibit A. I would like to show you the oath of the Orde Boerevolk and you could then just indicate whether that is the oath and then read it to us. Is that the oath?

MR BOTHA: Yes, Chairperson.

MS VAN DER WALT: The name here is Mr Eugene Marais, but that - is this a similar oath to the one you took?

MR BOTHA: It's exactly the same.

MS VAN DER WALT: Could you then please just read this into the record.

MR BOTHA: I think, Chairperson, I must just explain, that at the time that I was recruited, the Orde Boerevolk had already declared war officially against the National Party Government, and that they did by means of a video taken by the leader of the Orde Boerevolk, Piet Rudolf, after he stole weapons at the Air force headquarters in Pretoria.

MS VAN DER WALT: Excuse me, you are mentioning a video was that actually broadcast? Was it seen in South Africa?

MR BOTHA: Yes, it was broadcast on television, but selectively. The entire video wasn't seen, wasn't broadcast.

MS VAN DER WALT: But the citizens of this country took note of what Piet Rudolf had said?