A Just Defiance: The Bombmakers, the Insurgents and a Legendary Treason Trial

Description

1987, Pretoria. Four young black men have just been arrested for a horrific string of political murders. There's no doubt that they're guilty of everything they're accused of - and more. But in a society riven by brutal repression and racial tensions, are they assassins or freedom fighters? Peter Harris is the lawyer called upon to defend them and, as he constructs his case to save them from the death penalty, he comes to understand the violence they encountered growing up in the townships and the chain of events that led them to join the ANC, undergo training at Zuma's camps in Angola, and return to their homeland to execute some of the apartheid regime's most notorious figures. Harris intercuts the story of their trial with flashbacks to the squad's operations and a deadly counterplot to reveal a campaign carried out with ruthless efficiency.

Peter Harris was born in Durban. After practising law for many years in South Africa, he was seconded to the National Peace Accord in the early 1990s, after which he headed the Monitoring Directorate of the Independent Electoral Commission for the 1994 election. Since then he has acted as a UN consultant in numerous countries and currently heads a large management consultancy in South Africa. This is his first book.