- WELKOM, South Africa - The
chanting of "Kill the Boer, kill the farmer" at the funeral of
the ANC member who coined the phrase is adding more fuel to the political
fire here, as the attacks on white farmers continue unabated.
-
- The ethnic cleansing of Southern Africa's commercial
farm communities has taken the lives of 1,334 farmers, farm workers and
their kin since 1994, the year the ANC took power. The farmers were killed
most often in violent, organized attacks, always by young African males.
Add to the death toll 12 farmers killed in Zimbabwe and four in Namibia.
In 85 percent of the killings, not one item was stolen from the farms and
farmhouses.
-
- South African President Thabo Mbeki has called the farm
murders of whites "the final stage of the revolution."
-
- Said Dutch journalist Adriana Stuijt, a former anti-apartheid
activist based in Holland, "If South Africa's vicious farm murders
had occurred in Zimbabwe, these would have been world news. But these 'only'
occurred in South Africa, and so the rest of the world remains oddly silent.
Post-apartheid South Africa is apparently immune from the usual investigative
journalism being conducted in the rest of the Western world."
-
- "Why has the South African farmer become the world's
most endangered species?" Stuijt asked. "Why are South Africa's
few remaining commercial farmers now most at risk of being murdered in
the whole world? They are being murdered at 264 per 100,000 population
group. It is the highest in the world! A Nedbank probe recently described
these farm attacks as 'deliberately targeting specific homesteads to kill
the Afrikaner victims.'"
-
- Stuijt noted that with more than half of South Africa's
commercial farmers now already having vacated the sector permanently since
1994, "more than 1 million hectares less maize is also being harvested
this year. The entire region with its 120 million people is also plunging
headlong into widespread famine. And all these facts are not unrelated."
-
- Protected speech?
-
- In the week after the death of ANC member of Parliament
Peter Mokaba, 43--the man who coined the ANC slogan "Kill the Boer,
kill the farmer"-- there were at least six known farm attacks in South
Africa. The Dent farming couple in KwaZulu-Natal was killed at point-blank
range in front of their teen-age son, who then was kidnapped to drive the
getaway vehicle. At least five other farms were violently attacked; one
attacker was killed, one injured.
-
- Also, a shot was fired at an elderly Afrikaner farmer,
and a Tswana farm foreman was tied up, threatened with a crossbow and his
firearm stolen.
-
- Cassie Aucamp of the Afrikaner Unity Movement told WorldNetDaily
that the Afrikaners never politicized funerals. He asked the ANC to "imagine
the uproar if Afrikaners were to start chanting, 'Kill the Xhosas, kill
the blacks'" at the next funeral of a murdered farmer.
-
- In response to Aucamp's complaint to the office of the
president, Mbeki issued a statement a full five days after the Mokaba funeral,
which he had attended, finally condemning the slogan's use as "unacceptable"
hate speech.
-
- The South African Human Rights Commission, however, recently
ruled that the ANC slogan was not hate speech, but merely an expression
of "the constitutional rights to free speech."
-
- South African Policewoman Karen Allen told WorldNetDaily
she is concerned about the plight of the farmers.
-
- "The situation is out of control. Where are these
farmers going to run to?" she asked.
-
- A South African farming activist with the Transvaal Agricultural
Union told WND, "It might indeed be a good idea for the U.S. Congress
to hold hearings on the farm killings and extend visas to the Boers to
go live in the United States."
|
